Irish Examiner view: Inclination is flattening for Cop 30

An infrastructure project underway in the Amazonian city of Belem, Brazil, ahead of the UN Cop30 climate conference. Picture: Carlos Fabal/AFP/Getty

The annual climate conference — this year’s event, Cop 30 opens in 10 days — has more and more come to resemble one of those events inexorably governed by the law of diminishing returns.

Many countries will be sending their great and their good to the 18-day event — the pre-sessions begin on Monday before the plenary commences on November 10. Ireland has yet to announce its delegate list for the 9,000 air miles round trip to the Brazilian city of Belém, known as the “gateway to the Amazon”. Among the ambassadors, diplomatic staff, advisors, trade officials, and politicians we can reasonably expect our climate minister, Darragh O’Brien, to be there alongside the minister for foreign affairs and international development, Neale Richmond.

The attendance of Taoiseach Micheál Martin, outgoing president Michael D Higgins, and incoming successor Catherine Connolly, is more problematic given that her inauguration is scheduled for November 11 at Dublin Castle.

A curtain-raising meeting of world leaders will take place in South America on Thursday and Friday of next week.

On the tailwinds of the devastating Hurricane Melissa, which tore through the Caribbean, the initial signals for progress in Belém do not augur well. To hijack the sinister phrase which opens A House of Dynamite, Katherine Bigelow’s nuclear thriller on Netflix, “inclination is flattening”. One of the great warning voices about the dangers of climate change has muffled his tone in recent weeks by pushing back against what he has described as a “doomsday outlook”.

Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates has spent billions of his fortune to sound the tocsin about global warming, but in a deliberately timed memo, he has argued against the alarmism which now accompanies the debate about rising temperatures.

Mr Gates, 70, has regularly attended previous conferences but will not be participating at Cop 30. However, he has called for a redirection of efforts towards improving lives in the developing world.

In recent decades, he has pushed for policies that would reduce the greenhouse gases which are dangerously heating the planet. He has invested large sums in companies working on clean energy, including nuclear projects.

Mr Gates is correct that unremitting gloom can overwhelm the efforts of ordinary people to perceive any contribution they can make as meaningful. This has been a major failing of a green movement which can appear simultaneously self-righteous and unrealistic.

However, the apparent dilution of his stance has been met morosely by campaigners who sense its potential for reinforcing the views of climate sceptics.

In the exit polls for last November’s general election, only 4% declared that climate change was an important issue, just behind a hardly greater level of 6% for immigration.

There is a reason for this. It is a belief shared by successive generations that it is possible to kick the can down the road, that we will “work it out”.

At the end of the Royal Shakespeare Company play Kyoto, the premier oil industry lobbyist of the past 30 years, Donald Pearman, is asked how he would justify himself to future generations.

“I won’t” he replies. “I’ll be dead.”

Last year was the hottest on record. An estimated 62,775 people died from heat in Europe. Fewer than a third of the world’s nations (62 out of 197) have delivered climate action plans, known as nationally determined contributions.

Cop 30 in a city on the edge, for now, of the rain forest may produce some solutions. But that is not the way to bet.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Farage as British prime minister? 

Michael McDowell this week made an interesting observation, when he suggested the election of Catherine Connolly was one more example of the phenomenon of KTOLO — Keep The Other Lot Out — in Irish politics.

Reform UK leader Nigel Farage delivers a speech at Blockworks' Digital Asset Summit in London. Picture: James Manning/PA

Whatever the justification for that assertion, it is worth looking across the border as matters develop which may come to have an enormous impact on the future of Ireland, alongside which Brexit will be seen as a little local difficulty.

It is clear that some nations are, to lean upon that late 70s XTC rocker, “making plans for Nigel”. The New York Times commissioned an expansive essay on Monday which appeared under the headline ‘Could this Mischievous, Unserious, Frightening Man be Britain’s Next Prime Minister?’

It appears in a week where opinion polls placed Farage ahead of Keir Starmer, the current incumbent of Number 10. His success, the article says, is both a symptom and a cause of the febrile mood in a Britain stripped of its reputation for stable and competent government.

There is a long way to go, but we should note that our stars align. General elections are due in Britain and Ireland in 2029. A Reform victory will almost certainly accelerate demands for withdrawal from the European Convention on Human Rights.

Such constitutional change will profoundly affect Ireland. For one thing, it will mean renegotiating the Belfast Agreement.

What's your view on this issue?

You can tell us here

Gambling finds a new role to play

The convergence between gambling and the huge expansion in online gaming is no surprise.

As restrictions on traditional betting have tightened, new outlets for money and risk have been found in hitherto unsuspected areas.

In the financial world, crypto currencies, little understood by most ordinary people, have been with us for over 15 years. 

It is not difficult to find someone claiming to be a student of the market or a trader.

Shadow banking, another arcane area of activity, has undergone massive growth, to the point where some institutions say it has a value of €72tn in the world economy, and with it carries the unregulated seeds of the next financial crisis.

There was a time when video gaming was the province of prepubescent children, usually boys. No longer. More than 50% of Irish adults are active participants with a roughly equal gender split among casual gamers. It is no longer confined to the younger demographics, with adults in their 50s and 60s regularly playing.

Such is its popularity that video gaming is being established as a separate and distinct Olympics with the first event scheduled in Saudi Arabia for 2027. It will include medals for Rocket League — where opponents attempt to hit a ball into each other’s goal using their rocket-powered vehicles — and League of Legends, a multiplayer online battle which is the world’s largest e-sport. The venerable Street Fighter, developed for arcades in 1987, will also be on show with Ryu, Chun-Li, and Balrog taking on all comers. Missing from the programme will be shoot-em-up games because they do not align with the Olympic ideals of promoting peace.

Ireland is a booming market with a strong domestic player base and high levels of Government incentive — the Digital Games Tax Credit — for developers. The industry generated over €600m in 2024 and is expected to reach €810m by 2027. It is anticipated to grow by nearly 7% annually. So enjoyable can be the experience that it’s timely for health experts to warn that the increasing use of gambling-like features in gaming risks fuelling financial harm, addiction, and even serious mental issues.

Gambling-type activities common in gaming include the creation of hyper-realistic worlds with participation in virtual casinos using in-game currency. There is a particular concern around ‘microtransactions’, an umbrella term for various low-cost, in-game payments made with real money.

The mainstream industry was subject to new constraints last year under the Gambling Regulatory Authority of Ireland. The 2024 act set out the watchdog’s role in licensing businesses, supervising and controlling activities, establishing a national exclusion register, controlling advertising and inducements, and raising public awareness of harm. But mental health experts believe that concentration on traditional forms of gambling could overlook the emergence of new, and often subliminal, attractions within the gaming experience.

Writing in the Irish Journal of Psychological Medicine, Carlos Sanchez Belmar and Narayanan Subramanian said these features exploit the “same psychological triggers that fuel gambling addiction, often with a disturbing focus on underage players who may lack understanding of the consequences.”

Just as vapes took over from cigarettes, we need to be conscious of substitution technologies which can produce a new generation of problems.