Hav­ing deliv­ered lines of brave words, glow­ing promis­es and sweep­ing com­mit­ments to cur­tail cli­mate change, the prin­ci­pal actors have left the stage of COP 26, the ‘last, best chance’ to save the world. Their resumés don’t bode well for the play’s cli­max, how­ev­er. We the audi­ence can only hope Shake­speare got it wrong when he wrote: “An over­flow of good con­verts to bad.”

The delib­er­ate­ly dishev­elled lead­ing man, British Prime Min­is­ter Boris John­son, was reviewed as hav­ing “claimed the role of the wealthy world’s chief cli­mate war­rior.” Only last year, how­ev­er, John­son assert­ed that there is no evi­dence the plan­et “is suf­fer­ing from the extreme weath­er pat­terns asso­ci­at­ed with cli­mate change”, and sug­gest­ed we should be more wor­ried about “a mini-ice age”.

Pres­i­dent Joe Biden put the U.S. cen­ter stage. His career has been spent as the polar oppo­site to politi­cians like Bump­tious Boris, but Biden’s cli­mate change script is being re-writ­ten by Joe Manchin, Chair­man of the Sen­ate Ener­gy and Nat­ur­al Resources Com­mit­tee, whose atti­tude toward ini­tia­tives like COP 26 is clos­er to no-shows Rus­sia and Chi­na, and for good rea­sons. Last year alone Manchin, a Demo­c­rat, “received half a mil­lion dol­lars in div­i­dends from Ener­sys­tems, a coal com­pa­ny he start­ed in the late eight­ies, which is now run by his son. He is also the U.S. sen­a­tor who’s received the most mon­ey in polit­i­cal dona­tions from the oil, gas, and coal industries.”

                                     GAS AND HOT AIR

The will­ing­ness of the sup­port­ing cast of fos­sil fuel extrac­tors to curb methane emis­sions that are 80 per­cent more dan­ger­ous for glob­al warm­ing than CO2 is wel­come. But they deserve nei­ther cred­it nor sym­pa­thet­ic reviews.
It beg­gars the imag­i­na­tion that oil com­pa­nies can build and deploy off­shore oil rigs weigh­ing as much as 200,000 tonnes (Berkut in the Russ­ian Pacif­ic) to extract oil from as deep as 2,450 meters (Per­di­do in the Gulf of Mex­i­co), but couldn’t, or nev­er both­ered to devel­op the tech­nol­o­gy to stop methane leak­ing from pipes and wells, or put it to “green” use.
Their belat­ed com­mit­ment is straight out of Mac­beth: “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, / Sig­ni­fy­ing nothing.”
Accord­ing to Jef­frey Berman, direc­tor of ener­gy tran­si­tion analy­sis at the Rap­i­dan Ener­gy Group: “There is a gen­er­al sense that at least when it comes to the oil and gas sec­tor, a lot of the tech­nolo­gies and tools are avail­able, so it is pos­si­ble to cost effec­tive­ly reduce methane.”
As T.S. Eliot wrote in Mur­der in the Cathe­dral: “The last temp­ta­tion is the great­est trea­son: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.”

                                        THE DAMAGE DONE

A recent report esti­mates the world-wide eco­nom­ic cost of air pol­lu­tion from fos­sil fuels at $2.9 tril­lion, 3.3 per­cent of the world’s GDP. In 2018 it was linked to 4.5 mil­lion deaths, 1.8 bil­lion days of work absence, four mil­lion new cas­es of child asth­ma and two mil­lion preterm births.
Pay­ing no heed to such evi­dence gives the fos­sil fuel indus­try some­thing in com­mon with Iran­ian Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards.

In 1987 we filmed burn­ing oil tankers they attacked in the Per­sian Gulf, will­ful­ly obliv­i­ous to the fact that if they man­aged to blow one apart, the resul­tant oil spill could seri­ous­ly dam­age if not ruin their own coast­line as well as those of their ene­mies. But the Rev­o­lu­tion­ary Guards tear­ing about in makeshift gun­boats at least had the excuse of fight­ing a war with zeal based in the 7th century.
The cre­do of the guardians of fos­sil fuel pro­duc­tion has been based sole­ly on prof­it. For decades, researchers work­ing for automak­ers, oil com­pa­nies and chem­i­cal giants said low lev­els of expo­sure to lead­ed gaso­line would not harm the gen­er­al pub­lic. That was dis­as­trous­ly false, and they knew it. Lead­ed gaso­line has been linked to low­er IQs and high­er rates of vio­lent crime. Expo­sure to lead caus­es heart dis­ease, can­cer, and oth­er diseases.

                                           NO CHOICE

The cues for “big oil” to come on stage with lines about curb­ing cli­mate-alter­ing emis­sions are both polit­i­cal and eco­nom­ic. In the past decade the cost of solar pan­els and wind tur­bines has plum­met­ed faster than pre­dict­ed, mak­ing them viable for mass use.
A mere six years ago, elec­tric vehi­cles were an odd­i­ty in the U.S. Today, car mak­ers are bet­ting their future on them.
Cost-com­pet­i­tive clean ener­gy alter­na­tives and inten­si­fy­ing polit­i­cal pres­sure are push­ing coun­tries to start — albeit slow­ly — phas­ing out coal power.
The ‘Final COP 26 Plan’, or what­ev­er they choose to call it — no doubt some­thing far more grand and less apoc­a­lyp­tic-sound­ing — will be script-doc­tored by tech­nocrats and diplo­mats. As such doc­u­ments invari­ably are, it will be rid­dled with com­pro­mis­es, fudges, obfus­ca­tions and com­mit­ments unlike­ly to be met.
Those who sign the doc­u­ment into his­to­ry would do well to heed the famous phrase from Shakespeare’s ‘The Tragedy of Julius Cae­sar’:
“Men at some time are mas­ters of their fates.
The fault, dear Bru­tus, is not in our stars,
But in our­selves, that we are underlings.”

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