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Every year, environmental czars and ministers and activists, together with a gaggle of lobbyists and politicians from around the world, mount their private jets and (leaving a haze of contrails behind them) converge on a posh Middle Eastern spa to sip champagne, nibble on caviar and talk about what a good job they are doing saving the environment. The latest United-Nations-sponsored conference called COP28 — because it is the 28th consecutive successful year of the War on Climate Change — convened in Dubai in November.
The previous 27 meetings of this group had been distinguished for producing grandiose promises of eventually reducing greenhouse gas emissions, primarily from the burning of fossil fuels, at some distant time in the future, through voluntary action. This past year as the group convened, they were learning that 2023 was, by a mind-boggling extent, the hottest year ever recorded on planet earth; that greenhouse gas emissions set a new record high, which they have done every one of those 27 years with the sole exception of 2020, the year of the pandemic; and that generation of electricity by coal-fired generators also set a new record high. Any chance of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, once the formal goal of the United Nations, was long gone. Surely this was the year for the UN group to do what climate activists had been demanding for decades: agree to severely limit and soon end the world’s reliance on fossil fuels.
The response of COP28 to this intensifying, frightening emergency? They didn’t even try to look busy.
They met in one of the world’s leading petrostates, Dubai, one of the United Arab Emirates, long an iconic embodiment of the hedonistic excesses of wealth based on the blind luck of finding oneself located atop a lake of oil. They appointed as their presiding officer the CEO of one of the world’s nastiest oil companies, Azerbaijan’s SOCAR (who quickly achieved international notoriety by proclaiming there was no scientific basis to support calls for phasing out fossil fuels). They accredited 2,500 oil-industry lobbyists, twice the number that attended the previous meet.
Predictably, when the party had raged for its allotted time, no agreement had been reached on anything. So they partied into overtime. And eventually they did accomplish two things:
- They cobbled together a hazy, vagued-out commitment to eventually, sometime, somehow, transition away from fossil fuels. It resembled nothing so much as the vows of a two-pack-a-day smoker to give up cigarettes on “Thanksgiving. No, make that Christmas. No, New Year’s. Never mind, I can’t do it right now but I will.”
- They appointed another oil-company CEO as the presiding officer of their next meeting, which will be held in another petrostate, Azerbaijan. It’s déjà vu’ all over again.
Al Gore, who rightly lambasted the conference’s choice of location and presiding officer, its dominance by oil industry lobbyists, and its failure to act in its appointed time, called the eventual outcome an “important milestone.” It was good, he said, that the delegates had finally recognized that fossil fuels were the problem. Wow. The rest of us knew that about 50 years ago.
John Kerry, the US climate “czar,” branded the outcome as “historic” because for the first time it put fossil-fuel burning “on the table.” And there it lies. On the table. Meanwhile the very petrostates that promised a transition away from fossil fuels are actively planning massive expansions that would double the budget for maximum permissible emissions by 2030. That according to the sponsor of COP28, the United Nations.
COP28 was one of the worst examples of dereliction of duty, and hypocrisy, in world history. It makes the fable of Nero playing his fiddle while Rome burned, sound like an ode to a dedicated public servant. Long live COP29.
‘Theater of the absurd’ comes to mind.
Being that we humans have for the most part about as much understanding about our own biology like all those so very useful self-organized systems such as digestive systems, white blood cells, the circulatory system our own brains, all those things that enable us to function are unconscious things that we barely understand so it’s no surprise that we have an almost zero inkling as to how all those self-organized things that make our planet run like clockwork and since we can hardly show much excitement or commitment to know much about ourselves, then what happens at climate summits should not surprise anyone. I will leave with this particular antidote, one of my friends at a gas pump recently engaged in a conversation about peak oil mentioning to a gentleman at an adjacent pump that oil would in the future grow harder to get at and become scarce the person replied confidently well god would just make some more.
And USA oil production high! Yay!