Well, here we go again. The twenty-eighth United Nations “Conference of the Parties” (COP28) began last week in Dubai, the oil-rich city in the nation of the United Arab Emirates, led, believe it or not, by Sultan al Jaber, first CEO to ever serve as COP President. Dr. al Jaber directs Adnoc, the national oil company of the United Arab Emirates, which produces millions of barrels of oil per day. Adnoc plans to spend at least $150 billion over the next five years to increase its production of petroleum. The sultan pretends to be a renewable energy advocate while ramping up his own oil and gas production.
Or, as the New York Times writer Max Bearak put it, “Meet the Oil Man in Charge of Leading the World Away From Oil.” One might conclude that al Jabar’s appointment is a tribute to the long-term hypocrisy and indolence of global ‘leaders.’ From the very beginning, critics have objected to the dominance of the each of the various COPs by corporate, especially oil interests over the proceedings and outcomes of the conferences. As the The Intercept reported on October 25, “…the oil company’s staff has played a critical role in shaping the summit. At least a dozen Adnoc employees have been appointed to roles on the hosting team, including two staffers designated as negotiators for the UAE. The fossil fuel industry has been deeply involved in the annual COPs since they began in the 1990s, sending hundreds of lobbyists each year,” and that has steadily increased. Reality is looking more absurd every day. You could not make this stuff up.
Conversations Leading Nowhere
The COP28 website touts al Jaber as a seasoned businessman with important expertise, proclaiming him as a leader in clean energy. That mask wears thin. Al Jabar heads a miniscule renewable energy program as Chairman of Masdar, his renewable energy initiative, which I would characterize as primarily a ‘clean energy’ window dressing or a cover story for their deeper commitment to the riches the UAE derives from oil and gas production.
But even if Masdar were not a miniscule ‘demonstration project,’ dwarfed by the expanding giant oil and gas extraction enterprise he oversees, the sultan is doing everything he can to expand extraction and sale of petroleum to the world—the most important source of carbon emissions. Remember the concept, “conflict of interest”?
Let’s face it, the industrial-consumer societies of the world are run on fossil fuels and if every ‘advanced’ country does not start taking actions to drastically cut their dependence on oil and gas now, the tipping points toward climate collapse and ecological catastrophe will arrive very soon—some are here now. After twenty-eight COPs, the conversations have led nowhere. Promises are not actions.
Conference of the Parties? What Parties?
Here is a really bizarre thing that reflects how really lost the whole enterprise is. The other night I listened to Former White House national climate adviser to the Obama administration, Gina McCarthy argue that it is important to have representatives of the oil and gas industry ‘at the table,’ in order to forge a viable clean energy policy going forward. She seemed no more realistic than Biden’s energy envoy John Kerry.
I hate to bring up the old metaphor of the fox in the hen house, but not only the conflict of interest is obvious. The history of the COP’s as well as that of the IPPC reports has clearly demonstrated the major influence of the petro-corporations in holding back any climate action that might mess with their bottom lines. The political subservience of governments to the oil giants is as bad as their obeisance to the ‘Davos Men,’ the richest most powerful men in the world who shape global finance and therefore the global political economy, and meet in the alpine resort of Davos every year to praise their self-serving global leadership via the World Economic Forum. Lots of overlap between finance and government here.
I never really liked the term “stakeholder,” because it usually refers to someone who had an interest in keeping the status quo stable and unchanged, and more importantly the right to sustain his or her interest in the status quo. The context is usually a situation where the most important issue is the need for change and for how to go about making change in the interests of everyone, which often conflicts with the interests of the stakeholder. Well, so far, twenty-eight UN “Conferences of the Parties” have repeatedly reflected the interests of the world’s most powerful stakeholders—that is, the holders of most of the wealth and political-economic power in the world—against the interests of humanity in surviving. They continue to put the Earth System that supports our existence, at severe risk of collapse. They should be constrained, not given a seat at the head of the table.
The Wording of False Deeds
Just the other day, COP28 President and United Arab Emirates climate chief Sultan Al-Jaber suggested that a fossil fuel phase out would not allow sustainable development “unless you want to take the world back into caves.” The sultan claimed in an online forum that there is no science behind demands to phase out fossil fuels. And his presidency of COP28 is tolerated? How hollow can an enterprise be?
One must ask, why then is he allowed for one minute more to be president of the very conference supposedly intended to figure out how to phase out fossil fuels to stave off extreme heating of the planet to uninhabitable levels of global climate chaos and ecological collapse? Because, of course, he is a major stakeholder. It is also because, the apparently incredibly naïve, or just corrupt, ‘parties’ to the conference, keep claiming that we need the fossil-fuel giants ‘at the table.’ The stakeholders who would have us believe that we can transform the global political economy while retaining the status quo of fossil-fueled business as usual are engaged in nothing more complicated than a fight to retain their power. The world’s political-economic elites are faking it.
We might remember that fossil fuel development still receives billions of dollars in subsidies from the very same governments that need to transform their economies from fossil-fueled to clean-energy driven. False words as well as false deeds abound. The sultan is not the only guilty party; his appointment to president of COP28 is just the most symbolically blatant offensive.
All this leads unequivocally to the conclusion that the ‘parties’ that are members of COP28, just like all twenty-seven previous ‘conferences of the parties’ are engaging in deceitful wordsmithing to appear to be ‘committed’ to taking action on the climate emergency while holding on to their ‘stakes’ in the status quo. That leaves those who are willing to face the truth and to take action accordingly, with only one choice: global social mobilization of a ‘climate action movement’ big enough to demand radical change now. Only we the people remain to force the ‘stakeholders’ of the status quo to give up their illusions of a ‘green’ business as usual, and relinquish control to those who would act in the human interest, which is inherently against the interests of the ‘stakeholders’ of the status quo.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 