Some 70,000 people are expected to attend the meeting in Dubai. That’s twice the number that attended COP27 last year in Egypt. The surging number of attendees shows that the business of climate change, is, well, a business. As my friend, Roger Pielke Jr., observed on Sunday:
Climate is now a full-scale industry, with fortunes and careers to be made, and perhaps lost. That in itself is not necessarily good or bad — health, defense, finance and so on are also industries. It goes with the territory of being an important policy and political issue. Along with the climate industrial complex comes massive vested interests, ranging from the financial to the professional to the political.
Roger also reported on a new study by Masahiro Suzuki, Jessica Jewell, and Aleh Cherp. (If you haven’t subscribed to Roger’s Substack, you should do so now.) The study found that despite all the hoopla around climate meetings, they’ve had little discernible impact on energy policy. Here are the critical lines from the report (as with the above, emphasis is added):
Climate policies are often assumed to have significant impacts on the nature and speed of energy transitions...We find that climate policies have so far had limited impacts: while they may have influenced the choice of deployed technologies and the type of transitions, they have not accelerated the growth of low-carbon technologies or hastened the decline of fossil fuels. Instead, electricity transitions in the G7 and the EU have strongly correlated with the changes in electricity demand.
NEW - Irish government runs an advert discouraging grandparents from hugging their grandchildren without consent.
@disclosetv
🇺🇸 Teenagers are now facing charges after doing a ding-dong ditch prank with a twist. They showed up in masks, wearing tactical gear and a rifle, or what looks like a rifle.
Two #Delaware teenagers, aged 16 and 17, faced charges after knocking on doors in New Castle while wearing tactical-style vests and carrying what appeared to be a rifle, police said.
This could’ve ended so badly..
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🌆 Market News Digest
[Oct 21, 2026, 06:00–16:30 EST]
🔥 Top Stories
• Gulf tensions spike as U.S. orders Saudi embassy departures — Houthi drone attacks on Aramco/Shaybah, Iranian rhetoric, and evacuation alerts lifted oil-sensitive geopolitical risk
• Meta beats on revenue, unveils nonvoting stock plan — Q3 sales topped estimates, but a $9.9B legal charge crushed operating income as capex/AI spending stays huge
• OpenAI deepens Google Cloud partnership — Frontier models and Codex go onto Google Cloud Marketplace, a notable distribution win for Google and OpenAI
⛽ Oil & Energy
• Saudi Aramco/Shaybah attacked, but operations intact — air defenses intercepted a drone; no operational impact, yet the event kept crude elevated
• EIA crude stocks fall 3.06M barrels; gasoline drops 2.95M — bigger-than-expected draw, while diesel/distillate built
• WTI settles at $97.15; Brent at $108.82 — oil eased late despite supply fears; Kuwait says exports are at prewar levels
📊 Markets & Macro...
🌆 Market News Digest
[Oct 20, 2026 EST]
🔥 Top Stories
• US–Iran tensions swing markets — Hormuz tanker fire, Israel warns of renewed strikes, Rubio says talks are hard; oil stayed volatile even as Brent eased below $109
• Anthropic’s massive AI spend shock — WSJ says it may spend >$600B on compute, with huge cloud/Nvidia commitments and >$80B H1 loss
• Trump on Ukraine, Iran and trade — says Ukraine must make a deal, India trade is “pretty close,” and he’s weighing Iran action
⛽ Oil & Energy
• Hormuz tanker fire / mine incident — IRGC says a supertanker carrying >2M barrels caught fire after hitting a mine
• Europe gas >€90 — benchmark tops 2022 levels on supply fears; US diesel prices remain elevated
• NATO and EU security push — NATO adds Black Sea assets; EU doubles down on Arctic security and keeping fossil fuels in the ground
📊 Markets & Macro
• US housing weakens further — starts fell 5.2% and pending sales dropped 7.3% to a record low, pressuring ...