Anger at fossil fuel lobbyist numbers: what happened on fourth day of Cop27
And so we are edging towards the end of the first week. Friday is decarbonisation and industry day, with events themed around that topic.
The US president, Joe Biden, is heading to Egypt and Asia. He is expected to drop in on Cop27 on Friday before going on to the East Asia Summit in Cambodia and then the annual G20 in Indonesia. It will be interesting to see how that galvanises the discussions.
Significant developments on Thursday included:
Khaled Ali, the lawyer of the imprisoned hunger striker Alaa Abd elFattah, has said he went to the prison where his client was being held but was denied access to visit him.
More than 50 of the poorest developing countries are in danger of defaulting on their debt and becoming effectively bankrupt unless the rich world offers urgent assistance, the head of the UN development programme has said.
There are a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop this year. There are 600 of them, an increase of more than 25% on last year, and they outnumber any one frontline community affected by the climate crisis.
Obviously, protesters are not happy about this and have called for the “criminal” fossil fuel representatives to be booted out of Cop.
Some UK politicians made the rounds, with the net zero tsar Chris Skidmore fitting in no fewer than six events. The business secretary, Grant Shapps, was there too, answering questions about UK oil and gas exploration, and the Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, addressed a couple of panels.
Our colleague Damian Carrington brought us two pieces of good news: first, that Israel, Lebanon and Iraq have teamed up to reduce emissions, and that Norway is shutting down plans for a large oilfield.
The US House speaker, Nancy Pelosi, made some rather extraordinary comments in which she said Republican politicians believe climate breakdown is a “hoax”.
Slovenia is the latest in a long line of European countries to quit the energy charter treaty, which gives energy companies the right to sue governments.
The Guardian reporter Nina Lakhani spent much of the day with protesters who were wearing white in solidarity with murdered and jailed environment defenders around the world. Egypt is responsible for a few of those imprisonments, notably Abd el-Fattah.