G20: PUMPING CO2 AND VERY LITTLE ELSE

ANOTHER global talkfest – utterly useless other than to generate even more global-greening plant food and millions of pages of unread words in languages galore – gets underway in a very nice part of the world tomorrow, and will waffle and gibber and burble and prattle its way, all so pompously portentously, through Saturday as well.

The attendees will be a collation of alpha (mostly) males – one, Alpha with a capital A, and Arrogance, also with a capital A to match, in particular; dead (mostly) women walking – one, Dead with a capital D in particular; and a mixed assortment of odds and sods – with one down under (very) happy clapper in particular.

I refer to the so-called G20 conference, which each year brings together the heads of the 19 supposedly biggest and most important countries in the world – this year in Osaka, just down the road from historic Kyoto, Japan of course.

G20, but 19 countries? The 20th is the European Union which, in a further bureaucratic, seat-warming, status-asserting, armwrestle actually gets two “heads of state” seats. So it’s really G20, 19 countries and 21 flatulent egos.

The EU duo are the imposingly titled and utterly powerless president of the European Council and the person who actually controls everything, the president of the European Commission – the vast bureaucracy that is the Belgian economy’s lifesupport system.

You want power? This is a person that can and has decreed that sausages across the EU have to be straight and bananas bent.

And has decreed it, in well more than a dozen

COULD you really nominate a more humiliating finale than that she will almost certainly be replaced by an utterly cynical believe-in-nothing buffoon who is even more egocentric than President Trump?

Then there’s Germany’s Angela Merkel, on a similar glide path to oblivion – like May, about to no longer be leader of her party which she’s managed to all but destroy.

At the last election, her once-dominant party got just 33 per cent of the vote, down a thumping 9 per cent.

There’ll also be the usual collection of political pygmies, like France’s boyPresident Emmanuel Macron, who keeps turning up at these big talkfests with his mother. I guess that provides a sort of weird counter to “The Donald”.

Also there of course will be Macron’s transatlantic “cousin” – the similarly boyPM of Canada, Justin Trudeau. Both of whom are on their own pathways to oblivion.

I guess you have to say that in this context of dead men and women walking, our own ScoMo can hold his head high, along with Joko Widodo, the President of our close neighbour, Indonesia.

They’ve both just won reelection; they’ll be going to more of these (useless) talkfests for a couple of years yet; they will have very different company even as soon as next year.

Is there anyone out there stupid or naive enough – and you probably need to be both – to think that anything of the slightest value will come out of it all, after Saturday?

That, to take the most obvious example, the Trump Xi will hold hands and sing Kumbaya? With simultaneous translations into Mandarin and English, of course.

There’ll be worthy statement of utter fatuity about any manner of topics.

Maybe they’ll have to politely agree to disagree – let me guess, 20:1? – about, ahem, the Climate EMERGENCY! Run for the foothills; the sky is falling and the seas are rising!

Ah well, if we insist on closing down our coal-fired power stations and – literally – turning off the lights, somebody’s got to keep pumping that CO2 to keep the plants happy.

Why not a collection of airheads?