'A Sick Joke': Six Ways of Looking at a COP

By Thomas Neuburger

“Cohosting COP will help restore our reputation.” —Australia’s Minister for Climate Change and Energy (see video above)

“There is no science out there that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what's going to achieve 1.5 [degrees Celsius].” —Sultan Al Jabar, COP 28 President-designate and CEO, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, quoted here

“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of a cancer cell.” —Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire

The world’s most climate-interested people-with-power meet this year in Dubai, the capital city of the United Arab Emirates, a nation with the seventh largest oil reserves in the world. The Emirates are net-sellers of fossil fuels.

Interesting? Let’s consider this conference and the issue it addresses from more than one angle. With homage to Wallace Stevens, this is “Six ways of looking at a COP.”

Using the climate conference to sell oil

The first angle is pure corruption. A meeting to address global warming is being used to increase it.

Writing in Newsweek (and not The Onion), fed-up climate scientist Peter Kalmus says this:

The annual United Nations climate summit started yesterday. We're up to the 28th edition: "COP28." Past UN summits have obviously failed us, but this is a new low. Everyone on Earth needs to know that the meeting has been overrun by fossil fuel executives, making it a sick, planet-destroying joke. There's no real hope of stopping catastrophic global heating until we fix this.

Kalmus is not wrong. Why does he call it a “joke”?

In this hottest year in human history, the climate summit is being held in the United Arab Emirates and presided over by a fossil fuel chief executive named Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber. It's hard to imagine anything more cynical or more evil. And yet, things did get more cynical and more evil, with recent revelations that the U.A.E. has been abusing its host role to strike side deals to expand fossil fuels.

The president of this year’s UN climate conference is a fossil fuel CEO who plans to use the conference to … sell oil. Because why not, if your major customers are there?

[B]ehind the scenes, the Emirates has sought to use its position as host to pursue a contradictory goal: to lobby on oil and gas deals around the world, according to an internal document made public by a whistle-blower. In one example, the document offers guidance for Emirati climate officials to use meetings with Brazil’s environment minister to enlist her help with a local petrochemical deal by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the Emirates’ state-run oil and gas company, known as Adnoc. Emirati officials should also inform their Chinese counterparts that Adnoc was “willing to jointly evaluate international LNG opportunities” in Mozambique, Canada and Australia, the document indicates. LNG stands for liquefied natural gas, which is a fossil fuel and a driver of global warming.

There’s not much moral distance between this and using 12-step meetings to peddle drugs. Except that this is far worse. You could screw up, at most, a few hundreds of lives by perverting some 12-step meetings. Oil and gas dealers doom billions.

Carrots or sticks? Let corporations decide

All of this takes place in a world where the powerful struggle to decide whether to use carrots or sticks to address the climate change. In this case, the carrots are subsidies for renewable energy, and the sticks are quotas and controls.

As Yves Smith points out in this article at Naked Capitalism, the classic way to choose between quotas and subsidies is to assess the private costs of each. Since the private cost of the sticks approach — taxes on carbon, carbon credit schemes, or (my personal favorite), outright bans — is bound to be both high and painful, the powers-that-be in the West have opted for carrots. That is, they will (grudgingly) allow subsidies in order to avoid taxes and bans.

But the subsidy approach is now encountering a problem: no profit there either. From the Wall Street Journal:

In the past few years, Washington and Wall Street started fantasizing that the transition to net-zero carbon emissions could be an economic bonanza. “When I think climate change, I think jobs,” President Biden said. When Wall Street heard green energy, it saw profits.

Keep the last sentence in mind as you read the rest.

For years, the cost of wind and solar plummeted, but since 2021 they have risen, according to investment bank Lazard. Interest rates are an important factor, which Lazard estimates affect offshore wind and solar more than natural gas. Many developers can no longer economically supply power at the rates previously agreed to. Denmark’s Orsted, the world’s largest wind developer, took a $4 billion charge in early November for pulling out of two projects off New Jersey. The company today is worth 75% less than in early 2021. ClearView Energy Partners estimates about 30% of state-contracted offshore wind capacity has been canceled, and another 25% may be rebid. ClearView analyst Timothy Fox noted lawmakers often mandate increased renewables, but utility regulators must approve the contracts, and one of their primary considerations is cost to ratepayers. …

Regarding electric vehicles, “automakers are still losing money on every EV they sell.”

And of course, the private sector’s in charge. As a result, as the article says, “The green transition remains critical, but its path will be fraught until someone agrees to pay for it.” Unspoken: That won’t be us.

The cost will indeed be high

The private sector, which loves only money, is not wrong about the cost of truly addressing the crisis. Carbon taxes will extract wealth from their pockets. Even if that wealth is directly returned to the people, they’ll tout it as a tax on everyone. It’s what they do.

But the people will also suffer from the transition as well.

If Kalmus is right and “the only way out of this emergency is to end the fossil fuel industry,” given the deadlines we’re on (see "Global Warming Is Accelerating"), it’s not hard to imagine some rationing will be involved. Perhaps a lot of it. After all, declaring a World War II-style emergency for the real World War II meant a lot of rationing.

The fossil fuel industry uses “goodbye big-screen lifestyle” to scare people toward carrots for a reason — “goodbye big-screen lifestyle” may be in the cards.

Infinite growth

The final angle from which to view this year’s conference is this one, and it’s stark. Emilia Reyes, a contributor to the 2022 IPCC Working Group 2 report, Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability, writes this:

Solving the climate crisis means ending our addiction to economic growth But degrowth in the Global North will not work unless it is done alongside reparations for the Global South … [W]ith the Global North responsible for 92% of the world’s excess carbon dioxide emissions and 74% of excess material use (half of which is extracted in the Global South), it’s clear the current ecological crisis is the responsibility of the industrialised economies who will be sat around the table. The source of the problem lies in the very economic system that prioritises economic growth, profit and wealth accumulation over the wellbeing of people and the planet. The blind pursuit of exponential economic growth has propelled economic decision-making. But exponential economic growth brings about exponential extraction and exponential deepening of inequalities.

Let’s pause for a second. You’ve probably heard this before: The modern (capitalist-driven) pursuit of unlimited growth is not consistent with addressing climate change, since pursuit of unlimited growth is one of its causes.

To decide if this is right, consider: The two main causes of the coming climate crisis are 1) the growth in world population, and 2) the socially-blessed greed of those with all the power.

Which means:

• As long as population grows, consumption will increase.

• As long as greed rules our world, economic entities — companies, businesses, countries~— will be forced to grow, be taken over, or die.

Running in place is death for a major enterprise. Think of Sears, or Braniff, or any of a dozen dead or recycled enterprises you recall from youth. It’s entirely possible that the system we’re trying to fix can only be fixed by its death, our death, or both.

The details behind this argument are convincing:

Governments of industrialised economies have presented ‘green new deals’ (GNDs) as the solution. But their aims and measures are reinforcing the economic structures that rely on colonial extraction in the Global South. Building the entire infrastructure of the so-called energy transition proposed by GNDs will require a new wave of extraction of rare and critical minerals. The global demand for lithium alone would go up to 4,200% by 2040.

Imagine a world where global lithium use increases 42-fold in 15 years. That’s the world that supports our “big-screen lifestyle” into the future.

But let’s say we succeed. What happens ten years after? Increased extraction, of course. See where this goes?

The path to degrowth

Reyes lays out a process that gets us there, to a growth-free and fairer world. But it’s a big ask.

Picture Jamie Dimon agreeing to that list. “Over my dead body,” he would say. And he’d be right. We’ll never get there while the rich are in charge.

See where this goes?

Back to the caves?

Let me close with Sultan Al Jabar. In the interview in which he said what I quoted above, he also said this:

Show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.

Is he right? Does he think he’s right?

If so, he’s choosing for humans to go out with a bang, in a last grand danse macabre…

…than to re-enter caveman life while he’s still alive.

I'm not sure he's right. The caves may come sooner than that.