Measurable Numerical Targets — Not Word Salad!

One of the late announcements from the COP26 conference comes from China and the United States who jointly announced an agreement to “enhance ambition”.

Huh? Enhance Ambition. Anyone know what that means?

Let’s go to the dictionary, the first place to go when one is not sure of the meaning of words:

Enhance: “to raise to a higher degree” or “to raise the value or price of”

Ambition: “an earnest desire for some type of achievement or distinction” and “the object, state or result desired or sought after”

So, to make a sentence of these definitions from dictionary.com:

The United States and China agree to raise to a higher degree, an earnest desire for some type of achievement in the area of lower the use of fossil fuels sometime.

This is the big announcement after 26 years of conferences that have, as their fundamental purpose, to end dependance on fossil fuels?

Straight out of the Onion, or those with a longer memory, MAD Magazine.

To translate this word salad of a “major announcement”:

“After 26 years of impending doom, we are proud to announce that we are earnest about working together, sometime in the future, to find ways to lower carbon emissions.”