COP-27: Defend An Inhabitable Planet Or Please Sponsors? A: Keep Those Sponsors Happy!
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Fifty years, you ask? Yes, the first international summit that claimed to address the environmental crisis took place in 1972. A handful of powerful nations, including the UK and US, convened what their secret minutes called an “informal and confidential” body at that summit, whose purpose, the notes show, was to ensure poorer countries did not get what they wanted, and that no international standards would be agreed on pollution or environmental quality.
They learned an important lesson there. You make the threats to your sponsors go away by nodding and smiling, saying the right things in public, then blocking effective measures behind closed doors. When they arrived at Cop27 this year, they had no intention even of paying the money they had promised to poorer nations to help them adapt – if such a thing is possible – to climate breakdown, let alone seeking to prevent that breakdown from happening. So here we are, after 50 years of engineered failure, with not one of the 40 markers of climate action on track to meet the targets governments have agreed. In the first nine months of this year, the seven biggest private sector oil companies made around $150bn in profits. Yet governments continue to supplement this loot by granting oil and gas companies $64bn a year in public subsidies.
There are no longer any feasible means of preventing more than 1.5C of global heating if new oil and gas fields are developed. Yet fossil-fuel companies, with the encouragement of the governments that either own or license them, are planning a major investment surge between 2023 and 2025. The biggest planned expansions, by a long way, are in the US. The soft facts – the vague and unsecured promises at Sharm el-Sheikh about curbing consumption – count for nothing against the hard facts of extending production.
We no longer need to speculate about where this path might lead: we have stepped through the gates. The floods in Pakistan that displaced 33 million people and washed away 3 million acres of soil followed a crop-shrivelling heatwave. This is the whipsaw effect predicted in scientific papers: of moderate weather giving way to a violent cycle of extremes. It’s hard to see how the country will ever recover from the economic shocks of these disasters: as it starts to pick itself up, it’s likely to be knocked down by another one. China this year, though this was sparsely reported in the western media, suffered not only the greatest heatwave in its instrumental record, but the greatest heat anomaly ever recorded anywhere. The devastating drought in the Horn of Africa, now in its fifth year, offers a glimpse of what “uninhabitable” may look like.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/nov/18/leaders-climate-breakdown-fail-power-cop27
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