March 2023:
En route to Kathmandu, Nepal, I flew in a plane to Dubai. This was a night-flight: from the window, through scattered cloud, city lights made visible the sprawling extent of human civilisation on Earth. Later, the plane’s flight-path took it over the gulf states. Looking down, I began to see red-gold flares in the night. As we passed over Southern Iraq, these became constellations, burning in darkness.
The flares come from burning gas and chemicals on the top of oil wells. The practise is known as flaring, and is very wasteful. A 2020 article reported that the amount of gas flared in Iraq would be enough to power 3 million homes. The flaring wells are also causing a significant amount of pollution and blighting the lives of nearby villages and towns.
November 2023:
COP28 is upon us. Nominally, this is when nation-states get together and decide what action to take on climate breakdown. COP28, the United Nations Climate Change Conference, is advertised as a “milestone moment when the world will take stock of its progress on the Paris Agreement.” The UN page announces a global stocktake of progress since the 2015 Paris climate accords. We’re informed that “The COP28 UAE presidency will work to ensure that the world responds…with a clear action plan.” The citizens of the world can therefore rest easy in their beds in the knowledge that their leaders have climate breakdown covered.
Or can they?
Vested interests rule
On the 16th January 2023, Bill McGuire, professor emeritus of geophysical and climate hazards at UCL, claimed that fossil-fuel interests had ‘destroyed’ the COP process. McGuire saw “a battle raging over the heart and soul of the UN Cop conferences,” a battle that was being won by the fossil-fuel interests. He drew attention to the “fossil fuel invasion” at COP26 in Glasgow, an infiltration process that continued with COP27 in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. At the latter conference, the fossil-fuel sector sent 636 delegates; The Guardian reported this as an ‘explosion’ in numbers.
This infiltration culminated in the nomination of a petrostate, the United Arab Emirates, to host COP28. It’s become ever more clear what this means. On 27th November 2023, the BBC revealed that the UAE planned to use the climate talks to make oil deals. A day later, climate campaigner Bill McKibben wrote of a ‘corrupted’ COP. Both the BBC and McKibben were referring to leaked briefing documents prepared by the UAE's COP28 team. These documents included talks with other nations on oil and natural gas opportunities. COP28 President Sultan Al Jaber swiftly denied these allegations, claiming that the report was intended to undermine his presidency.
The Guardian (29 November) did attempt to put a positive spin on the situation in a review article entitled ‘Enough of endless delays’: will Cop28 force a course change for the world?’ The article pointed to the potential for greenhouse gas emissions to peak next year, and to the proposed ‘global decarbonisation alliance.’ This ‘alliance’ would bring together dozens of oil and gas producers, who would work together to reduce emissions. Al Jaber justified this by claiming that
“Never in history has a Cop president confronted the oil industry, let alone the fact that he’s a CEO of an oil company. Not having oil and gas and high-emitting industries on the same table is not the right thing to do. You need to bring them all. We need to re-imagine this relationship between producers and consumers. We need this integrated approach.” Quoted here.
This idea apparently received cautious support from Greenpeace. Unfortunately, I do not find it very credible as a robust solution to climate breakdown. Al Gore’s TED talk earlier this year highlighted fossil fuel companies’ long-standing policy of paying lip service to decarbonisation, whilst actually ramping up production. I see no reason why this should change, even with a ‘global decarbonisation alliance.’
One example: The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) is planning what the Guardian called the ‘world’s biggest climate-busting oil plans.’ (This claim is based upon data from the Global Oil and Gas Exit list.) The Guardian article noted that “almost all companies are ignoring warnings from climate scientists that new oil and gas fields cannot be developed if global temperature rise is to be kept to the internationally agreed 1.5C limit.” These are the same companies that are supposed to come together in a ‘global decarbonisation alliance.’ Sultan Al Jaber, it should be noted, is Adnoc’s chief executive.
Two degrees celsius breached
Friday, 17th November 2023: the world temporarily breached the 2°C threshold. This was, significantly, the limiting threshold agreed by the Paris agreement. The Independent, Monday 20th November 2023, discussed a new UN report that the world was “speeding” to a 2.5 to 2.9° Celsius (4.5° to 5.2° Fahrenheit) of global heating since pre-industrial times. A couple of posts back, I discussed a new paper published by scientists that stated that “Life on planet Earth is under siege.” And that the researchers were:
increasingly being asked to tell the public the truth about the crises we face in simple and direct terms. The truth is that we are shocked by the ferocity of the extreme weather events in 2023. We are afraid of the uncharted territory that we have now entered. (Ripple et al., 2023.)
I must admit that I have a very hard time squaring the deception, self-deception and naked self-interest of global leadership with the ongoing reports of an escalating ecological catastrophe. I find myself wondering whether, for example, British politicians will still be brokering oil deals and issuing drilling licenses when the Houses of Parliment are being drowned by the sea. The closest I can come to such thinking is the scene in Terry Gilliam’s 1989 movie Eric the Viking. In the movie, the island of Hy Brasil is sinking, a fact the members of the ruling council continue to deny as the water closes over their heads.
One problem is that the framing of the issues at COP28 have not shifted to reflect a rapid deterioration of the climate. For example, the UN Secretary General insisted that the goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees was not ‘dead.’ However, in 2022, a UN report itself admitted that there was no credible pathway to keep the 1.5° C goal in place. The record-smashing average temperatures of 2023 have shredded the credibility of the 1.5 C target. The temporary 2°C breach was only one part of this. In 2023, 1.5° C was breached for a record number of days. This has been admitted: Christiana Figueres, the former UN climate chief, stated that “The global stocktake will confirm that we are not on track [to stay within 1.5°C].”
The League of Nations
Such catastrophic failures of global leadership unfortunately have a long history. One example: the League of Nations. The League of Nations was formed in the aftermath of the globally traumatising World War I. Founded at the Paris Peace conference, on the 10th January 2020, it was the first global intergovernmental organisation with a primary mission to maintain world peace.
The covenant of the league was full of good intentions. One of the articles of the covenant committed member states to disarmament, stating the “maintenance of peace requires the reduction of national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations.” Another stated that “the manufacture by private enterprise of munitions and implements of war is open to grave objections.” The League also undertook to “respect and preserve as against external aggression the territorial integrity and existing political independence of all Members of the League.”
The League could boast some success, especially in its early years. It helped resolve a number of territorial disputes, and by the mid 1920s had become a centre of international activity. It had limited success with arms limitation. It also drew attention to a number of pressing global social issues like refugees, health, slavery and child welfare.
However, the League had a number of inherent weaknesses which lead to its ultimate failure. Its neutrality meant that it was often perceived as weak. Many nations never joined the league at all, most notably the United States. The Conservatives in the UK tended to ignore it when in power. Other nations left when it became politically inconvenient, notably Italy, Japan and Germany. The League also lacked teeth, and could not enforce its resolutions. Ultimately, the League failed to prevent the aggression of emergent fascism, and then World War II, and it was dissolved in 1946. The League is today remembered as a well-intentioned failure.
I think it quite likely that the COP meetings will be remembered in the same way. Despite the deep infiltration of fossil fuel interests, there seems no lack of good intentions at COP28. It is even possible that some lasting good will come of them. For example, on the first day agreement was reached on a loss and damage fund to help the poorest countries afflicted by climate breakdown. However, in broader terms these seems no way for the COP process to work to prevent climate breakdown.
George Monbiot, in a pub discussion with ‘Jonathon Pie’ about COP26, pointed to one fundamental problem: that there had been 26 meetings, and not once had they discussed the only thing that really counted, which was leaving fossil fuels in the ground (13:00 minutes in). Real change is being stifled at a fundamental level.
So good intentions, yes, but the path to hell is paved with those.
Carbon Politics
The deep entanglement of political power with fossil-fuel power cannot be understated. The power of global leadership in the 21st century is as dependent upon fossil fuels as lungs are upon air. This point is too often neglected in discussions about decarbonisation. Roy Scranton, an environmental writer, wrote of ‘carbon politics’ in the 20th and 21st century. He observed that social energetics were dependent upon energy production. That the forms of governance that we observe today are utterly tied to their fossil-fuel base. Scranton:
“How bodies harvest, produce, organize, and distribute energy determines how power flows, shaping the political arrangements of a given collective organism behind whatever ideologies the ruling classes may use to manufacture consent, obscure the mechanisms of control, or convince themselves of their infallible omniscience.” (Scranton, 2015).
With COP28, we are seeing ‘carbon politics’ in action. The aim, it seems to me, is to enforce business as usual whilst maintaining a front of affirmative action. In the light of an extreme summer, and with 2024 looking to be worse, the citizens of the world deserve better. They deserve not only greater honesty from their leaders, but also substantial action.
I must admit that I’m not holding my breath.
References
Ripple, W. J., Wolf, C., Gregg, J. W., Johan Rockström, Newsome, T. M., Law, B. E., Marques, L., Lenton, T. M., Xu, C., Huq, S., Simons, L. A., & Anthony, D. (2023). The 2023 state of the climate report: Entering uncharted territory. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad080
Scranton, R. (2015). Learning to die in the Anthropocene: Reflections on the end of a civilisation. City Lights Books.