It often feels to us like folks in the business community are damned when they do, damned when they don’t: Egypt is taking fire this morning for taking Coca-Cola on as a sponsor (pdf) of COP27 — a move the activist set is calling “greenwashing.” Per the Guardian: “Over four years, we’ve found Cola Cola to be the world’s top plastic polluter in our annual brand audits … It’s astounding that a company so tied to the fossil fuel industry is allowed to sponsor such a vital climate meeting,” the newspaper quotes an activist from Break Free From Plastic as saying.

We get it. Plastic absolutely sucks. And while you’re at it: Added sugar in drinks is horrible for human health. But if businesses can’t be part of the conversation, how do we move the discussion forward in the absence of national legislation to, say, ban plastic bottles by 20xx? And how happy would the activist set be if big businesses were not kicking in money to help make COP a reality? Don’t like plastic bottles? Push like hell to tax (or regulate) the things out of existence.

Elsewhere, police seized 54 ancient artifacts in Assiut and arrested four people suspected of smuggling them, Xinhua reports.