• America’s turkey pardon is a fabulously silly tribute to big agriculture

• Why Russia has made homophobia part of its anti-Ukraine propaganda 

💠 ON THE GRID

Inside America’s turkey pardon

The news

Each year, the U.S. produces more than 200 million turkeys for people to eat. Some 1 in 5 – more than 40 million – of these turkeys end up on Americans’ Thanksgiving tables, Kay Steiger and Steve Reilly report.  

But this year, two lucky turkeys, Chocolate and Chip, will be treated to a trip to the White House to see President Joe Biden – and even a luxurious stay at the Willard hotel in Washington, D.C. They’ll also avoid becoming the centerpiece of a Thanksgiving meal as the lucky beneficiaries of a presidential pardon. 

The context

Like you, I have many questions about the annual turkey pardon. When did it start? How much does it cost? And who pays for it? 

🦃 Learn more about this popular Thanksgiving tradition. 

What would you name the two pardoned turkeys? Let me know.  📩

Our Climate Reporter Dave Levitan has been on the ground at COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Missed our earlier briefings? Catch up with them here.
 
The COP27 climate talks went to overtime. Did they deliver?  

The mood was grim on Saturday afternoon. The United Nations climate talks, known as COP27, had already shot past their theoretical Friday evening deadline. The latest available draft of an agreement still contained only placeholders on some of the most pressing issues, most notably the creation of a fund for climate change loss and damage, the term for compensation to developing countries for the devastating climate impacts. Some major players, including the European Union, threatened to walk away from the negotiating table. 

“From what I ascertain, there is equal dissatisfaction in all quarters,” said Sameh Shoukry, Egypt’s minister of foreign affairs and president of COP27, during a news conference that day. “The issue now rests with the will of the parties.” 

But a late-night, overtime agreement did eventually emerge from the rubble of two weeks of negotiation. While some aspects of the final text offered cause for celebration, primarily the establishment of a loss and damage fund, others left the world much where it was before — in a spiraling climate emergency without a clear path to meeting goals set forth in the Paris Agreement seven years ago. 

Crucially, the new agreement makes no progress at all on eliminating fossil fuels from the global energy mix, an obvious imperative over the coming decades to actually achieve the world’s midcentury net-zero ambitions. 

“Though it makes some important advances, the final COP27 decision falls well short of what the science shows is needed,” said Rachel Cleetus, policy director for the climate and energy program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, in a statement. “The global emissions trajectory is dangerously off course from where it must be to keep the global average temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit] above pre-industrial levels and countries’ current emission reduction commitments are nowhere near sufficient.” 

The issue of loss and damage dominated the final week of COP27. The idea stems from the fact that the developing world has contributed very little, historically, to the emissions that are causing climate change and its attendant devastating impacts. There is now widespread consensus that they deserve what amounts to reparations from the perpetrators — rich countries. 

When the talks in Egypt started two weeks ago, loss and damage was accepted as an official agenda item for the first time. Simply getting it on the agenda, though, was not a victory — developing countries and activists made clear that only officially establishing a loss and damage fund, even if the details of money flows and other logistics come later, would constitute success at COP27. 

“If it ends without agreeing on a loss and damage fund, it will be a resounding moral failure,” said Greenpeace Southeast Asia Executive Director Yeb Saño on Friday. 

Several major countries, the U.S. chief among them, spent much of the negotiations blocking such a fund. Though American negotiators, including special climate envoy John Kerry, expressed support for the general concept of loss and damage, the obvious political difficulty the U.S. would have in actually appropriating climate reparations for other countries made it a difficult ask. But by late on Saturday night, that dam had apparently broken. 

The new agreement establishes a loss and damage fund, as well as a “transitional committee” that will meet to hammer out some of the details of the fund’s “operationalization.” That committee’s work, which includes “identifying and expanding sources of funding,” will in theory be discussed and adopted at next year’s gathering, COP28 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. 

“At the beginning of these talks loss and damage was not even on the agenda and now we are making history,” said Mohamed Adow, the director of Power Shift Africa, in a statement. “It just shows that this UN process can achieve results, and that the world can recognize the plight of the vulnerable must not be treated as a political football.” 

But the talks stagnated on the topic of fossil fuels. 

Last year’s Glasgow Climate Pact made history by calling for a “phasedown of unabated coal” as well as a phaseout of “inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” This year, there was hope from the start that such language could be expanded and strengthened; India in particular, followed by other countries including the U.S. and the European Union, began pushing for language on phasing down all fossil fuels rather than just coal. 

In the end, though, nothing changed: The paragraph on coal and fossil fuel subsidies is word-for-word the same in this year’s agreement as it was in last year’s. Meanwhile, an analysis released last week at the talks found that greenhouse gas emissions are set to rise this year, driven in part by greater use of coal and other fossil fuels. 

“Countries’ refusal to phase out all fossil fuels undermines any shot we have to limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius,” Jean Su, the Center for Biological Diversity’s energy justice director, told Grid on Sunday morning. “Science is crystal clear that any new fossil fuel development is incompatible with the 1.5 degree target, yet world leaders continue to deny science and condemn the planet to an unlivable future.”  – Dave Levitan

🌍 Read more about the close of COP27.

💠 NEWS IN CONTEXT

How FTX played both parties and almost won Washington

Before the stunningly swift collapse of the crypto exchange FTX and the fall of its founder, Sam Bankman-Fried, known as SBF, the two had become well known in Washington as being at the forefront of the push for industry-friendly crypto regulations.

Bankman-Fried was a “name-brand liberal mega donor, giving Democrats more money than anyone else besides George Soros for the 2022 midterms,” Matthew Zeitlin and Maggie Severns report. And FTX’s giving strategy was bipartisan – company executives “have poured more than $60 million in the last year not only to Democrats, but also to Republicans, in hopes of shoring up the kind of support necessary to get bills through Congress.”

🚀 Read their report on FTX’s campaign to shape crypto regulation.  

💠 MORE FROM GRID

• Russia’s war on the LGBTQ community – and Ukraine: “Today’s Russia has united around a pair of new myths: that gay people constitute an existential threat to their country; and that the war in Ukraine is also a war against that threat,” Stanislav Kucher writes. Russian politicians, public figures and media have catapulted homophobic rhetoric to take “center stage on Russian television” – and to make the fight against LGBTQ people a key part of the war against Ukraine, which has increasingly been framed in ideological, spiritual terms. Stanislav analyzes what the homophobia in Russian anti-Ukraine propaganda says about Russia and the war.

• The crisis facing kids’ hospitals: Children’s hospitals are being pushed to the brink by a combination of an overburdened, understaffed workforce and an early surge of respiratory virus cases, Jonathan Lambert reports. The result is hospitals that are quickly filling up – well ahead of the winter and anticipated upticks in flu and covid cases. He speaks with Hui-wen Sato, a pediatric ICU nurse at a southern California hospital, for an on-the-ground view into the building crisis.

• World Cup in photos: The 2022 World Cup in Qatar started yesterday – amid a lot of controversy surrounding conditions and policies in the host country. Explore our photo essay that shows the excitement of the start of the games – and some of the tensions. 

• Trump’s back on Twitter: Over the weekend, Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk posted a poll to his 116 million followers asking if the social media platform should reinstate former president Donald Trump, who’s been suspended from it since January 2021. The result of the poll? “Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he tweeted. But will Trump ever tweet again, as much as Musk is trying with tweets and NSFW memes? Benjamin Powers reports.

👋 That’s all for today. See you this time tomorrow. –Cameron

👍 If you like this newsletter, share it! It’s the best way to help us reach new readers.

💌 Did someone forward you this newsletter? Sign up here. And check out all of our newsletters, including Grid Health, our new weekly health and policy newsletter.

📲 Follow us on Telegram for news, stories and updates throughout the day.