Send tips and thoughts to [email protected]. Follow Ryan on Twitter.

Watch out Facebook/Meta: The blue giant has entered joke territory — it’s the most punchline at Web Summit. Asked why she wasn’t on Instagram, a droll Amy Poehler answered: “I was waiting for it to change its name.” Nick Clegg, the Facebook chief lobbyist who ditched an in-person appearance, was introduced as appearing “virtually, but not from the metaverse.”

Just about everyone — including Clegg — has referred to Meta as “the company formerly known as Facebook.” (All of the non-Cleggs said it with a smirk.)

Speaking of underwhelming transformations, let’s make a pit stop in Glasgow for the COP26 climate summit, where scientists have announced that one in three people will be living with temperatures on par with the hottest parts of the Sahara by 2070. Check this map to see if your home is on the hot list.

THE COP BATTLE LINES

Heading into the fourth day of COP26, a string of mini-deals have emerged in critically overlooked areas — but there's no sign of any fundamental shift either internally in the U.S. and China, or in their joint dynamic.

“Seeking your support and understanding”: that was the subject line of a message COP26 organizers sent to registered participants Tuesday night, after repeated problems accessing the conference’s venues, both physical (due to protests) and online (tech glitches).

COP PERSPECTIVES

BIGGEST PLEDGES — METHANE REDUCTIONS AND FOREST EXPANSIONS: Some might argue that India backflipping and committing to a net zero emissions pledge by 2070 — which New Delhi argues is basically the same as rich countries getting to net zero by 2050 — is the biggest news. Global Insider points you instead to the Global Methane Pledge.

Methane is overlooked compared to carbon, because there’s less of it, but it’s a far more potent greenhouse gas that lingers in the atmosphere longer. Getting methane under control in the next 10 years — via a 30 percent reduction in those emissions from more than 100 countries — helps us sooner and for longer than India ditching coal in 2069. Important note: While the U.S. and EU joined the pledge, China, Russia and India are notable holdouts.

On forests: 114 governments, including the U.S., China, Brazil and Russia, committed to reversing deforestation by 2030, backed by $19 billion in public and private funds. It sounds good, but that sum isn’t much spread across the millions and millions of hectares of deforested lands. Consider that in Brazil alone, from August 2019 to July 2020, more than 2.7 million acres of land was newly deforested.

Reality check: Where is the damn delivery plan? Sure, it matters that all the key players are on board with this pledge, but it remains true that the world is smothered in pledges to plant millions and billions of trees: There are also at least two trillion tree-planting pledges (here and here). Given there’s also probably not enough land on the planet to plant those trees needed to offset the carbon emissions pushing us over 1.5 degrees Celsius warming, consider Global Insider a skeptic.

BIGGEST BILLIONAIRE PLEDGE: Jeff Bezos has said his Bezos Earth Fund will spend $2 billion on restoring landscapes and transforming food systems. That comes on top of the $1 billion he pledged during the U.N. General Assembly in September. Lest you think that’s totally new money, be aware this all comes out of the $10 billion Earth Fund he announced in February.

BIGGEST PARTNERSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT — RENEWABLE ENERGY PLUS JOBS: The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet aims to reach 1 billion extra people with renewable power. The alliance of philanthropies and multilateral banks said it thinks this effort could achieve “150 million jobs created, enabled, or improved.” Joko Widodo, president of Indonesia, which holds the G-20 presidency through 2022 and is the world’s largest thermal coal exporter, said his country endorsed the alliance’s efforts.

BUILD BACK BETTER WORLD: REMEMBER THAT? President Biden proposed five principles for the initiative, a commitment G-7 leaders made in June and which has hardly been heard of since. Top principles include every project being climate-resilient and transparent development, so that corruption is minimized — another of Biden’s key foreign policy priorities.

Biden also unveiled a joint effort from the G-7 to help South Africa, the continent’s biggest emitter and the G-20’s most coal-intense economy, transition to clean energy.

American allyship: The U.S. has rejoined a coalition of countries — mostly Western democracies and vulnerable island states — known as the High Ambition Alliance pushing for higher targets at the COP26 U.N. climate talks.

POSTCARD FROM WEB SUMMIT

INTERVIEW: MAYOR OF EUROPE’S “UNICORN FACTORY” — LISBON’S CARLOS MOEDAS

Moedas, a former Goldman Sachs banker and European commissioner in Brussels, wasn’t supposed to become the mayor of Lisbon. He’s center-right in a notionally leftist city in a country with a left-wing government. He was written off by Europe’s center-right political networks, and was 10 points behind in the days leading up to the summer vote.

He defied the odds once, and says he now wants to turn Lisbon into a “unicorn factory” (catch his full Web Summit pitch here). “There is a change in what people want from mayors. They want people that are moderate, but who speak directly to them, and engage them.” His goal: make Lisbon a start-to-finish platform for billion-dollar innovations, rather than merely a sunny place to hold a tech conference.

“A unicorn factory isn’t just a cheap place to rent a space. It’s a process. I'm a big believer that someone with an average idea, if they follow a process, they can get to creating a big company, and someone with a great idea sometimes without process will not get anywhere.” His next big policy: free public transport for the under 23s and over 65s.

Watch out Silicon Valley, Toronto’s coming for you: It’s not just Lisbon getting a week-long advertising platform at Web Summit. An Amy Poehler keynote session (on her Smart Girls web community) was preceded by shameless on-stage plugs for Toronto and Canada’s liberal immigration program — delivered by startup founders who moved there from the U.S.

Quotable — Frances Haugen: At her big public coming out party, Haugen called for Mark Zuckerberg to resign and delivered this zinger: "There's a meta problem at Facebook. They keep expanding in new areas without sticking the landing."

Why Facebook is more worried about European regulators than American ones.

How Microsoft has plans to go much further than the “metaverse.”

NEW PODCAST EPISODE — BELARUS OPPOSITION LEADER SVIATLANA TSIKHANOUSKAYA

Imagine having one night to decide if you’d jump from being an English teacher to being a presidential candidate, while your husband was locked-up? That was Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya's 2020. Imagine being arrested for the color of your socks: That’s why some of her followers are languishing, without convictions, in freezing jails in Belarus.

This fascinating figure — an unlikely revolutionary — is now advised by presidents and prime ministers around the world. Though exiled in Lithuania with her husband behind bars, she’s now building up the huge movement she leads aimed at dislodging Europe’s last dictator, Alexander Lukashenko. You can listen here.

Tsikhanouskaya tells Global Insider she’s annoyed that Belarus’ most famous personalities (think tennis stars Victoria Azarenka and Aryna Sabalenka) won’t risk more to support her: “They could be more vocal.” And she says she’s willing to stay in Vladimir Putin’s Eurasian Economic Union — “We don’t want to spoil the trade relationship with Russia and its people” — if that’s the price for delivering her people freedom of speech and rule of law.

Her biggest asks: more coordinated sanctions, and for the EU not to bite at “[Lukashenko] weaponizing migration” when he dumped unsuspected Middle Eastern migrants at Baltic borders: “it is a human trafficking system.”

AFRICA CORNER

ESCALATION IN ETHIOPIA — REBELS TAKE THREE CITIES: The violence in Ethiopia is intensifying drastically. The Tigray People's Liberation Front is now headed towards the capital Addis Ababa, and the Ethiopian government has declared a state of emergency, urging citizens to take up arms to defeat the rebel forces. The TPLF has captured the cities of Dessie, Kombolcha and Burk in recent days, and it’s now making a push toward the capital Addis Ababa. Per Gzero Media: “Another armed group at odds with the government, the Oromo Liberation Army, also said it had captured a key city on the same highway to the capital.”

U.N. MEETS ON SUDAN COUP: The United Nations Human Rights Council will hold an emergency session on Sudan on Friday at the request of Britain and other countries following last week's military coup.

SHOULD WE BE DEBATING CHRISTINE LAGARDE’S DESIGNER WARDROBE? John O’Donnell, chief correspondent at Reuters, says ‘yes.’ In a LinkedIn post, he wrote: “Over the weekend, Germany's Bild newspaper shone a spotlight on the boss of the European Central Bank (ECB), and her penchant for luxury, designer clothes. This was long known among her entourage but less noticed by the public. The article portrays her as aloof and far removed from the bitter reality facing the poor, as prices rocket.” The paper branded Lagarde as “Madam Inflation” — a reference to the bank’s money printing policies and Europe’s rising inflation rate — and blamed her for the effect on savers and retirees.

Many reacted to O’Donnell on LinkedIn (in a post since deleted) saying his comments were thinly veiled sexism, including by pointing out that most bankers wear expensive clothes. While Lagarde has been debated as a style icon since at least 2013, O’Donnell was defiant: “Angela Merkel's plain blazers would be a better look as a public servant,” he said, noting that the ECB was targeted by rioters less than a decade ago when they perceived the bank as out-of-touch with ordinary Europeans.

REPUBLICAN RAISE CONCERNS OVER BIDEN’S AMBASSADOR NOMINEE TO BERLIN: A group of senators, led by Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio, said they had “serious questions, both substantively and ethically,” about the nomination of Amy Gutmann as ambassador to Germany. “We are deeply concerned that our allies will view Dr. Gutmann’s nomination as a quid pro quo. It appears that President Biden could be rewarding a friend who previously provided him with more than $900,000 for what seems to have been a no-show job as the Benjamin Franklin Presidential Practice Professor at the University of Pennsylvania.” Full letter text here. The White House, UPenn and Gutmann adamantly deny these rumors.

Reality check: While Global Insider cannot speak to the substance of the allegations, your author knows a thing or two about Berlin elites. After enduring the abrasive Trump appointee Ric Grenell, most of those elites would be happy to accept just about anyone for the chance to sip on champagne with that ambassador, free from the risk of insult.

ONE FUN THING

SWISS POLICE USE CONCRETE TO BLOCK ACCESS TO COVID SCEPTIC RESTAURANT: I guess it wasn’t fun if you were the arrested and gun-wielding restaurant owner.

Catching the Last ‘Last Flight' Out of Afghanistan

Thanks to editor Ben Pauker