I’d like noth­ing bet­ter than for the answer to the head­line on this blog to turn out to be a resound­ing “no”. But noth­ing in the cast of lead­ing char­ac­ters, atten­dees and  past his­to­ry gives rea­son to believe the cli­mate sum­mit known as COP28 will, to man­gle a Rolling Stones lyric, get us any­thing like what we want, let alone come close to what we need.

In their ear­li­est incar­na­tions, the annu­al cli­mate change gath­er­ings man­aged to con­jure up – usu­al­ly at the last pos­si­ble minute – at least a speed bump to slow down humanity’s race to “Hell on Earth”.
The chances of that improv­ing to a road­block now seem more like­ly to go the way of the excess nat­ur­al gas from the host country’s oil wells; flared off, the casu­al name for an unnec­es­sary and  envi­ron­men­tal­ly harm­ful prac­tice that releas­es a cock­tail of car­bon diox­ide, methane, and black soot into the atmosphere.
A  BBC inves­ti­ga­tion that includ­ed satel­lite images, showed that in spite of hav­ing offi­cial­ly banned the prac­tice 20 years ago, the oil-soaked Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates (UAE) is still a ser­i­al flar­er, with poten­tial  health haz­ards to both its own inhab­i­tants and those in neigh­bour­ing coun­tries. In 2022,“fos­sil fuel com­bus­tion and indus­tri­al pur­pos­es in the Unit­ed Arab Emi­rates gen­er­at­ed 218.8 mil­lion met­ric tons of car­bon diox­ide (MtCO₂) emission…some of the high­est CO2 emis­sions per capi­ta world­wide, at more than 20 met­ric tons per person.”

                           THEY ARE NOT ALONE

The world’s most influ­en­tial nation isn’t going to COP28 with an envi­able record, either. Under the avowed “renew­able ener­gy cham­pi­on”  Pres­i­dent  Joe Biden, U.S. oil pro­duc­tion is cur­rent­ly 13.2 mil­lion bar­rels of crude per day, high­er than it was under Don­ald Trump’s admin­is­tra­tion, which set a record to become the world’s lead­ing crude oil producer.
On a less­er car­bon foot­print lev­el, but one that still flies in the face of what the sum­mit is sup­posed to be cur­tail­ing, COP28 will host up to 100,000 par­tic­i­pants. As far as is known, none of them walked to the con­fer­ence and a good pro­por­tion will have arrived on pri­vate or cor­po­rate jets. Nor are any of them like­ly to eschew air con­di­tion­ing and sweat it out instead over the next two weeks.
Inex­plic­a­bly, but per­haps also inevitably, their num­ber includes a ver­i­ta­ble army of rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the fos­sil fuel indus­try.  Accord­ing to the “Kick Big Pol­luters Out” coali­tion; “…lob­by­ists and oth­er rep­re­sen­ta­tives of oil and gas inter­ests have attend­ed Unit­ed Nations-led cli­mate talks more than 7,000 times in an effort to pre­vent world lead­ers from chal­leng­ing their destruc­tive busi­ness model.”
To put it in the acronym-lard­ed way such con­fer­ences seem to com­mu­ni­cate, with that many BS experts to hand, it’s a fair bet that COP 28 will pro­duce more “PR” in the form of Press Releas­es than Prob­ing Report­ing. And that won’t nec­es­sar­i­ly be the fault of the many very good jour­nal­ists cov­er­ing it.
Oil com­pa­nies spend tens of mil­lions defend­ing their cov­er-ups and lack of con­science. The Gulf states are past mas­ters at restrict­ing report­ing, cur­tail­ing and refus­ing to answer ques­tions and deny­ing facts even when they’re in plain sight.
Try­ing to work as a jour­nal­ist in a Gulf state dur­ing the Arab Spring, for exam­ple, often felt a lot like report­ing in Iraq under Sad­dam Hus­sein; con­trolled, long on restric­tions, short of co-oper­a­tion and secu­ri­ty goons lurk­ing in both shad­ows and plain sight.
The Emi­ratis don’t mind sto­ries on grandiose schemes like Dubai’s “Palm” and “World” man-made islands, as long as you don’ t want to delve into the fact that they are envi­ron­men­tal dis­as­ters in the mak­ing, or dig too deep  into the fam­i­ly busi­ness, the busi­ness mod­el of which is to exploit some of the largest petro­le­um reserves known to sup­ply the rest of the world with oil for as long as there’s demand.
Nonethe­less, Sul­tan al-Jaber, the urbane UAE oil exec­u­tive host­ing COP28,  boast­ed that his was “the first coun­try in the Mid­dle East and North Africa to announce a 2050 net-zero strate­gic ini­tia­tive.”    Mean­while, when they’re not enjoy­ing indoor ski slopes, what’s billed as “the world’s biggest foun­tain” and oth­er extrav­a­gances, COP28  par­tic­i­pants are, as the Wash­ing­ton Post put it;“…expect­ed to hag­gle over whether to phase out fos­sil fuels, the pri­ma­ry dri­ver of glob­al warming…”
Hag­gling is both expect­ed and enter­tain­ing – if you’re in a Mid­dle East­ern bazaar.
What both cli­mate activists and pol­luters have to under­stand is that the option of walk­ing away with­out a deal is out of the ques­tion. Argu­ing about how much to cut back on fos­sil fuels has a lot in com­mon with the war in Gaza: “win­ner takes all” is not a work­able solution.
Nor is in effect “kick­ing the can down the road, which is what with a few minor actions, suc­ces­sive COPS have done.
And as pret­ty much every sen­tient being in the world knows from the past year alone,  there’s not much road left to kick down before “Hell on” is a fit­ting addi­tion to the name “Earth”.
So please, COP28, put the lie to the headline.

Com­ments are wel­comed. Click CONTACT on the site header.
To receive e‑mail alerts to new posts, Click SIGN-UP on the header.