By Bobby Banerjee*
It’s a glorious afternoon at a luxury resort in Egypt, with six swimming pools leading to a lovely little stretch of beach on the Red Sea. A salsa aquatic class in one of the pools has several enthusiastic participants. Elsewhere, guests are lounging on deck chairs sipping ice cold cocktails. Cheerful waiters are refilling glasses and serving snacks.
Welcome to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt’s popular resort and host to the 27th meeting of the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP27. Or, as some critics would put it, the Conference of the Polluters.
My first impression on arriving was that I had entered a gigantic theme park. The roads leading to the resorts were lined with brilliantly lit palm trees in green and yellow, and lamp posts draped in dazzling coloured lights. The night sky was criss-crossed with bright searchlights from the venue to draw attention to the climate emergency facing humanity.
This is my fourth COP, and I don’t intend to come again. Given how little these conferences have achieved since they began in 1995 – not to mention their gigantic carbon footprints – I am convinced it’s time for them to stop.
After 27 years of negotiations, conflicts and breakdowns, the world’s nations have basically agreed: (1) climate change is a serious problem; (2) something must be done to fix it; (3) rich nations should do more; and (4) based on the Paris agreement of 2015, every country should set their own emissions goals and do their best to meet them.
The UN claims that the Paris agreement is “legally binding”, but there are no enforcement mechanisms or penalties for countries in breach. Even current pledges will not be enough to meet the target to restrict global warming to the 1.5℃ target agreed in Paris.
How COP works
There are three worlds that inhabit COP meetings but carefully evade each other. Official country delegates attend meetings and draft policies. Then there are the corporates and industry associations, who are by far the most significant and powerful presence here.
Over 600 fossil-fuel industry lobbyists are attending. This is more than the combined delegations from the ten most climate-impacted countries, and the second largest delegation after the United Arab Emirates, itself a petroleum power. Among those 600 lobbyists, some have even been invited as part of 30 country delegations.
The third group at COP consists of civil society organisations from a wide range of countries, but dominated by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) from developed countries. Growing numbers of NGOs representing the interests of business and industry (BINGOs) occupy the civil society space in COP meetings to promote particular resource and energy use agendas. Funders include major oil corporations like Shell and Exxon, nuclear giants like Areva, and big miners like Rio Tinto and BHP.
Business and civil society delegates both participate in climate negotiations and host side events showcasing their climate actions. These can seem to take place in parallel realities. Directly after one session organised by international NGO Global Witness about the killings and disappearances of protesters against mining projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America was a session on “mining governance for a just energy transition”.
In this latter session participants from the Democratic Republic of Congo government and the International Council for Mining and Metals described inequalities, environmental impacts, tax avoidance and corruption as challenges facing mining in Africa. There was no mention of the violence and killings documented in the same region in the previous session.
The police presence
These opposing narratives are a feature of COP, but only become visible during protest marches. Notably, however, COP27 is the first to be held in a “police state”. Before getting to the venue, I spent a few days in Cairo at a hotel near Tahrir Square, home of the 2011 revolution. The square had heavily armed police in armoured vehicles at every corner. I photographed the obelisk in the square with an armoured police vehicle in the foreground and was immediately reprimanded by an angry soldier.
There are remarkably few police at the venue in Sharm el-Sheikh, however. This is because of the extraordinary lengths taken by the organisers to prevent protests.
This has included pre-emptive arrests of local activists, a complicated registration process restricting the wider public to a “green zone”, and unprecedented surveillance including police-monitored cameras in all Sharm el-Sheikh taxis. There is also a “designated area” for protesters away from the venue to avoid the kind of mass protests that have hampered previous COP meetings.
Staging COP in a luxury resort has also priced out activists. Hotel rates average US$250 to US$300 (£213 to £255) a night and there are no “budget” options. A sandwich at the venue cost US$15, though this was halved after complaints. There are also no streets where people can gather, just roads linking the various resorts.
So while over 100,000 people marched the streets of Glasgow at COP26, and previous COPs like Copenhagen, Durban and Paris also saw clashes between protesters and police, dissent is effectively neutralised here. Over 1,000 protesters marched inside the venue on November 12, and I couldn’t even find them.
COP and petroleum
So what else has changed since I first came to a COP in Durban in 2011? Notably, the marketing of both corporates and NGOs is much slicker. And corporates have become much smarter – I can’t see a BP or Shell or Exxon-Mobil logo anywhere. The corporatisation of COP is complete when BP’s chief executive and four other senior employees are in the official delegation of Mauritania, a country where BP has major investments.
To further consolidate the power of the fossil fuel industry, COP27 has a “Middle East Green Initiative” led by Saudi Arabia with the inevitable net zero pledge by 2050. Saudi also has one of the largest booths inside the conference venue. And it is no accident that the next COP will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates.
In 27 years of COP meetings there has not been a single call to phase out fossil fuels. The only reference was the agreement at COP26 which called for “the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.
Meanwhile, a massive rebranding exercise is underway at COP27 where natural gas is being positioned not as a fossil fuel but as a “transition fuel”. Once this reframing is complete, the major fossil fuel players will corner all subsidies for natural gas.
COP’s great failure
In 1995, when COP1 was convened in Berlin, global carbon emissions were 23.45 billion metric tons. By 2021 they were 36.4 billion metric tons. Emissions have increased every year with two exceptions: the 2007-09 financial crisis and during COVID-19. In both cases this was because of economic contraction, not efforts to tackle climate change.
No one at COP will speak of this particular elephant in the room: that it may well be impossible to decouple economic growth from carbon emissions. Emissions rebounded on both occasions and are expected to reach their highest recorded level in 2022.
Let’s look at three other quantifiable COP measures: climate finance, which is seen as key to helping poor countries to reduce emissions; climate reparations from rich to poor countries for damage caused by historical carbon emissions; and the success of technologies to mitigate emissions, particularly carbon capture and storage.
On climate finance, wealthier nations committed at Copenhagen 2009 to mobilise US$100 billion per year for poorer countries. However, they have never achieved this goal.
Meanwhile, the 60 largest banks in the world have invested US$3.8 trillion in fossil fuels since the Paris agreement. In December 2019 investors paid nearly US$26 billion for Saudi state oil company Aramco’s initial public offering. Of course, both fossil fuel companies and banks involved have pledged fictional net zero commitments for 2050.
Climate reparations are on the official agenda at COP27 for the first time, which is certainly a step forward. It’s hard to be optimistic, however. The US will vigorously challenge creating any loss and damage fund for poor countries, as it has consistently done at past COPs.
As for carbon capture, it only stored 0.02% of fossil-fuel CO₂ in 2021. That makes a mockery of this cornerstone of climate change mitigation.
Alternatives
COP represents a gathering of elites. A recent study found that this was a major obstacle to climate mitigation. Excluded are the poor, disenfranchised, and those who bear the brunt of climate impacts but contributed least to the problem (and will bear the impact of rich nations’ energy transitions because the necessary minerals and metals will be extracted from their lands). Increasingly dissent is becoming criminalised, not only in “police states” but in western liberal democracies too.
It is time to end this spectacle of private jets flying in dignitaries and delegates to discuss the climate emergency. Genuine civil society organisations should boycott future COPs and focus on direct action at national and local levels. They need to make their governments accountable for emissions targets, and target fossil fuel corporations and the banks that finance them.
There is no accountability in COP, only a diffusion of (ir)responsibility that legitimises corporate power. COP27 will go the way of previous COPs: empty promises, stirring speeches and slick corporate campaigns. And higher carbon emissions next year.
So let COP become another Davos, a conference of and for the rich. There are plenty of luxury seaside and ski resorts in countries eager to host the next few COPs. Just don’t go there.
* Bobby Banerjee, Professor of Management, City, University of London. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.
94 Comments
How many private jets at COP27 ? at least a 100
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/63544995
It's not about denying climate change, it's just not buying their hypocrisy
Oh, yes they are.
Their getting out of the oil, requires a trading system which has trust in repayment. That system, increasingly since 2005, has been a ponzi, and a reconciliation is beginning. When the punters realise the scale of the divergence between collective forward bets (investments, pension expectations, profit expectations, growth expectations, even held cash) and the amount of physical underwrite remaining - well, it nearly jammed up in 2008, and nobody is going to believe the fairy-dust stories this time. They can only be credulous so far - and no further. And when belief in repayment evaporates, that is the end of the system.
Given that energy was required for growth, I reckon that less than half (obviously) will remain when the penny drops (on many levels!). Equally, we won't be able to pretend growth is still happening when we're down to, say, 1/4 of the fossil energy left. So I plump for about 30% being left in the ground, after a financial collapse. The only alternative might be war - where belief in debt-repayment gets overridden by the need to survive. The winner/s could wipe debt, then construct a non-growth accounting system.
But they'd be in trouble if they attempted to keep as much infrastructure going, as we are (or were - anyone seen SH1 lately?). Whether such a low-impact societal construct can keep the FF-extraction infrastructure is an interesting question: Some of the easier, but not much - if any - of the harder, is my guess.
It would take around 250,000 square kilometers worth of solar panels to produce the current electricity consumption of the entire planet.
If you put them all in one place thats a square 500km on each side. The Sahara desert is 5000km wide for perspective.
There's an awful lot of wind power out there and factories are going to be pumping out small modular reactors by the end of this decade.
We are going to rapidly transition away fossil fuels and there is no shortage of energy available on the planet. The trick is simply developing the right infrastructure to use it.
Your DGM schtick is getting tedious.
I went there 20 years ago. More. Planted a forest before CC was a regular topic. Live on solar (and a wee bit micro-hydro) and have done for 20 years. . And I co-chaired Solar Action - which aimed to push renewables.
But I didn't stop thinking, reading, learning (there we differ, I suspect) and eventually I realised we were up against real limits.
Siemens had that dream of the Sahara powering Europe, a long time ago (no Empire can exist without external acreage, note). They even got to the point where it was noted that an east/west collection-separation could extend the sunlit day. But they never solved - or attempted to, as far as I recall - the storage problem.
I attended a lecture a decade ago, by a fellow from the Helmholtz Institute, talking about their re-configuration of their grid. They have 4 Transpowers, and an east-and-west supply (coal and gas, from memory). They needed to convert that to north and south, collecting solar and wind respectively. Typically thorough, they had the grid-shifts sequenced through to 2050. At which point Germany would be 35% renewable. Which is where New Zealand is now.
And we have to realise that 66% (2/3) of global electricity, is fossil-fuel-generated. Now. So all that has to be displaced. And the carbon pulse required in the manufacture and integration? (Because it's fossil energy doing all that; no PV panel ever powered the production of another one).
Are you advocating that fossil energy - 80% of global energy, currently - is to be replaced with renewables too? Even if you solve the slave-child problem, are there enough mineral resources?
And we have to remember that the planet is creaking at the seams NOW. All we've done with renewables, is to add them to the fossil burn. We've displaced nothing; it's a myth.
I'm reasonably comfortable that I went ahead and found out what could be done (a) renewably, and (b) efficiently - not many folk run as efficiently as I do; almost none. But it doesn't stop me looking around and watching what is happening; the mental dyslexia you can find precised in many a RNZ news bulletin - where CC concerns share a 5-minute slot with the welcoming of cruise-ships (or aeroplanes, or, or, or).
Ultimately, techno-optimism is no replacement for pragmatic fact-searching. Good luck to you.
It's going to need to be a mix of solar, wind, hydro, SMR nuclear, carbon capture and better energy usage.
We will get there, over time. 66% is good news. Lots of fat to trim.
France gets S.F.A of its energy from fossil fuels. There is nothing stopping the rest of us from doing the same.
Bollocks.
France gets 50% of its energy - directly - from fossil fuels (and no reactor built another reactor, did it?).. As does every First-World nation - there isn't the punch in anything else, enough to drive our level of consumption.
Get your facts right, please.
Methinks you wilfully change from percentage of electricity production, to overall, without signalling the shift. Do you fool yourself by doing this, or are you out to fool others?
Correct. I was referencing electricity production.
What kind of asinine statement is "no reactor built another reactor"?
A reactor is not a reactor factory. But a reactor sure as shit can supply the electricity a reactor factory will use.
You might want to consider speaking to your doctor about tuning your antidepressants.
Brock,
PDK can speak for himself, but yout ad hominem attack on him undermines the points you wished to make.
From my perspective, pdk is overly pessimistic, while you are over-optimistic. One thing pdk fails to account for is additional resources coming on line and this is a good example.
Industry analysts estimate that Guyana will be pumping at least one million barrels of crude oil daily by 2027, while some believe that figure could be higher, reaching 1.2 million barrels. When that occurs, Guyana will overtake Colombia to become the third largest oil producer in Latin America and the Caribbean. Recent discoveries in the basin, along with estimates of their hydrocarbon potential, point to the combined recoverable oil resources of offshore Guyana and Suriname being more than 18 billion barrels of oil equivalent. That number is significantly higher than the mean 13.6 billion barrels of undiscovered oil resources estimated by the U.S. Geological Survey in 2012.
This oil is light, sweet crude; easier and cheaper to produce and refine, with a lower carbon footprint. Exxon and other companies are throwing money at this. You on the other hand, fail to account for the pervasive issue of EROI. I'll let you dig into what that means.
Unreliable intermittent generation like wind and solar cannot provide the baseload of any electricity grid. Your calculation of 500km x 500km of required solar panels at say a nominal 15kg weight per 1m2 of solar panel is equivalent to 3.75 billion tonnes of solar panels. The metal ore mining required to refine that many solar panels will require maybe fifty or one hundred times that much rock to be dug up and processed just to manufacture the first set of panels. Diesel and coal will provide most of the energy to do that.
After just a few years 5% to 10% of those 3.75 billion tonnes of solar panels will have to be replaced annually due to damage, faults and performance degradation.
In academic theory it looks like just 500km x 500km of solar panels can generate all the electricity the planet needs. Once you examine the practical reality, it's a non-starter other than for a small proportion of total power generation. This is the green delusion in a nut shell.
My "climate warrior" family member who has some kind of nebulous taxpayer-funded climate policy job is back from her umpteenth all-expenses paid overseas junket of the year to COP-Out 27.
Needless to say, it's another episode of publicly lecturing on her LinkedIn profile and to everyone who is forced to listen anywhere else about how we all need to do better and make hard changes, while privately sharing to all her friends and family - myself included - endless Instagram stories of the business class cabin of a Singapore Airlines jet (not to mention the lovely looking hotel and fancy, probably-not-very-low-carbon-footprint meals). She did say that Emirates First Class was better last time though, so a bit of a PSA there for those booking flights.
Perhaps I'm a slightly bitter because when I fly it's some tedious regional Air NZ turboprop (where you're lucky to get a coffee let alone a glass of bubbles) ... but it really does grate as she seems not to have the faintest inkling that her actions could be seen as hypocritical. I must admit I am, however, looking forward to the eco-conscious destination wedding next year though, where all of the 100+ guests have to fly to get there!
I know someone will come along to say "how can we expect decision makers to get it done without meeting up in person? Do you really expect world leaders to zoom each other to tackle the climate crisis?" to which I'd say:
- These are the same people who'd have us plebs attending a loved one's funeral via zoom, or being priced out of all but the most infrequent of travel to see friends and family overseas.
- Just because you're rich enough to absolve yourself of sin (by paying for offset credits) that doesn't make it ok.
- At the very least, cancel the private jets, and try to make these supposedly critical events less outrageously lavish. Actually try to appear like you're not doing this just to flex on the peasants. If you want buy in from those who have good reason to perceive you as a hypocrite, you should practice what you preach.
Rant over, I'm off to ride my bike to pick up a piece of recycled computer equipment for my Zoom-heavy home office.
Agree. TBH we actually eat very little meat and I do actually walk to the supermarket when possible.
The best way to eat less meat is to just eat less meat, most meals are pretty much the same with half the meat or less, spag bol with less mince and more tomatoes and pasta for example, or even steak and eggs with half the steak and double the eggs!
The next person that flies up to their villa in Bali on a whim thanks you for your negligible contributions from watering down your mince.
We are not going to save the planet with veganism. It's actually better to eat the cows than let them live on to make more (short lived) emissions.
Here is coal consumption by country. It is one of the easiest things to replace. Coal power plants produce a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions.
https://www.worldometers.info/coal/coal-consumption-by-country/
Per-capita can bugger off. Stop breeding like rabbits.
I don't always agree with that commenter, but here he has already stated the case.
Australia manufactures 0 solar panels.
As far as I can see, it manufactures 0 wind turbines.
The fuel to do that manufacturing (and much else it consumes), Australia sells to China, and others.
The comment is absolutely correct.
I do what I do, so I can look my grandchildren in the face, and say: I did my best to stop you being shafted.
I make no excuses for that - they won't thank us for resource draw-down. They won't thank us for a stuffed planet.
And they'll shake their heads at flawed thinking.
https://www.aftoleksi.gr/2022/10/19/from-pseudo-rationalism-to-rational…
More so with recycling which is an absolute failure. Look what happened when china stopped taking all the worlds old plastic bottles etc, it went to Malaysia and ended up in excess so it was getting burned on the side of the road, while the exports piled up here to capacity. The problem with emissions is that the biggest players, being the fossil fuel conglomerates, are the ones pushing the rhetoric that it is our personal responsibility to solve a problem that they themselves create.
Although there will always be personal responsibility to vote with our wallets, the rate of plastic production is still increasing year on year worldwide. Capitalism will ultimately over time have consolidation of power and as we are currently seeing, industry has more influence and power in parliament around many developed countries that the people themselves. Development of new materials to replace long-lasting plastics as well as less carbon intensive building materials will make a big difference moving forward. Perhaps we can stop shipping our wool to Chinas to be processed and shipped back, and crank up the wool insulation industry in NZ as food for thought
Putin already remarked on the west's obsession with an unworkable, premature ideology of green renewable energy replacing fossil fuels. It's going to lead the west in ever increasing economic and energy crises.
As for telling people to stop breeding - are you aware that every western country has a fertility rate under replacement levels? Several countries in Africa have the highest birth rates in the world and I would guess that they aren't particularly interested in your opinion on their reproductive habits.
@Brock Landers, the true warming impact of aviation is around 5% when you add in the effect of contrails and other gases pumped into the atmosphere.
Only 10% of the population of the globe has ever flown in a plane - on an individual basis it's the most damaging action an person can do for the climate.
No, actually.
It depends if they are indulging in resource draw-down, or not.
So it makes more sense for a member of the First-World - even more if they're 'elite' - to top themselves, than it does for those at the lower end.
Ultimately, Nature is impartial; it's draw-down she notices; the reduction of natural capital, the filling of sinks too fast. Those issues are easier addressed with less population; the more so the more you wish to consume..
per head.....
You can save 0.8 tonne per year by eating vegan, 0.5 tonne by being vegetarian. You can save nearly as much by cooking seasonal ingredients at home from scratch and not wasting any food.
Driving a car for a year is over 2 tonnes on average, flying to the UK and back is well over 2 tonnes (and you have to multiply the figure by 1.9 to get the true warming impact).
Any sort of consumption has embedded carbon - clothing, electronics and throwaway junk. Living frugally minimises your impact.
The hotel rates have been jacked up for all the rich douchebags turning up for the talkfest. Sharm is usually quite affordable. It was infested with Russians when I was last there. Might be a bit different now with them now being persona non grata.
You are going to convince almost nobody to reduce their standard of living or change their habits much to "save the climate". That means there is urgency to triple down on developing and deploying tech for emissions reduction, energy efficiency and zero emissions power generation.
There is also going to be a role for direct capture technology for things that are impossible to decarbonise such as long haul aviation.
The sanctimonious loonies that spent the last five decades demonising nuclear energy have a lot to answer for. They have brought us to this point.
Uranium is a finite resource.
Use the known reserves to displace global energy, and it's all over in 40 years, last I checked. Of course, won't happen that way - the capex projections will cross the end-of-resource graph prior to depletion. As is happening with refineries and such-like, nowabouts.
Rubbish. It's simply cheaper to mine uranium at the moment. If we need more, we can use breeder reactors to generate it from U-238, or extract limitless amounts of it from seawater.
That's not even getting started on reactor designs using stupidly abundant Thorium as an alternative.
When it becomes economically attractive or a neccessity, humans are very very good at getting it done.
Is it possible to extract fissile uranium from seawater. Yes.
Is it possible to breed fissile uranium from U-238. Yes.
Is it possible to build a reactor that runs on Thorium. Yes.
Could these things be commercialized and economically viable. Strong maybe.
Why hasn't it been done yet. No need, plenty of cheap uranium available for now.
You have a nasty habit of ignoring anything that don't fit your grim world narrative.
I'm aware of the ratio: Energy Return on Energy Invested.
Indeed, it directly impacts the off-grid way I live. I have to consider it daily.
And I know the energy required to sieve thorium from seawater, exceeds the energy it would return.
Why else haven't we done it? If it was cost-effective, the fossil-energy companies would have gone there long before fracking. Usually, if you search something and you get artists impressions, it isn't happening. Carbon sequestration is a classic example.
You are one of the mob who claimed we shouldn't address carbon, aren't you?
The only thing that will save the environment is tax. Tax the crap out of pollution, no exceptions or offsets. Yes that will affect the poor / farmers / builders / etc (which the rich all of a sudden seem to care about when there is a new tax), but it is the only way.
How about a massive decrease in PAYE paid for by a massive CO2 tax in NZ? Yes some will be worse off, others will be better off, but it will definitely cause the desired outcome.
The whole thing is laughable really. The extreme left are too stupid to realise that the solution is to hit people in their pockets, the middle are happy coming up with pretend solutions, and the right are happy leaving the middle to come up with pretend solutions.
No - because the tax then gets spent on? Other bits of the planet, and energy to extract/process/deliver/remove them.
You actually have to pay everyone less. A s-load less. So less is extracted, less energy is required.
But the GND types are yet to get their heads around this - although I sense a shift in that direction.
Once again where does this lack of real action since 1995 leave us as a country? We must not cut off our noses to spite our face. In the face of obfuscation from the biggest polluters we should hold where we are in terms of reduction in herd sizes until the big dogs have demonstrated their true reductions. We are already covered by the Paris agreement saying CO2 reductions must come at the cost of food production.
I think this guy is right
CO2 is a wonderful gas. Humans have inadvertently terraformed the earth to grow more food than would have otherwise been possible. Ever wondered why the most hysterical climate activists, the ones gluing themselves to Rembrandts, are invariably children or teenagers? It's the same reason that the New Zealand covid19 disinformation project director Kate Hanna has absolutely zero expertise in the relevant fields of epidemiology, virology, chemistry, pharmacology, or cellular biology. These people are useful for enforcing false narratives because they don’t think for themselves.
Bollocks.
We evolved, as a species, with fossil carbon locked away ex our environment. All other currently-present species have optimised to the same ex-fossil-carbon state.
But you - self-reinforcingly and I can guess a lot more from that - argue for something which supports/maintains your current status.
The trick is to think dispassionately, wide-perspectively, and long-term.
Good luck with that.
I’d say that the driving force for evolution in the broadest sense the exploitation of Gibbs free energy. ~300 million years ago mushrooms came into existence. They evolved to exploit the tremendous energy of lignin in trees, and so ended the carboniferous period. Energy reservoirs build up as unstable equilibriums like a tower of cards waiting to be toppled. The evolution of human intelligence has enabled the exploitation of fossil, nuclear, and perhaps yet to be discovered energy types. It's all beautifully intricate. It's thermodynamics masquerading as evolution. Those reserves will be exploited.
All lifeforms strive for good-quality energy, competing with others, and each other for it.
But real-time energy has to be differentiated from historic energy; we are living on millions of years of capital, at a rate that renders the interest negligible.
EROEI, portability, ease of altering to heat (to do work); these are the limiting factors.
And in real-time terms, we are species in gross overshoot (thanks to else-whenning out energy uptake) and that will - one way or another - be reconciled.
It's not the scientists who know about the climate, it's the folk doing their own research on Facebook and harrumphing at those pointing out the need for less pollution.
There is a massive grant money mill/publication bias/academic promotion gravy train that these climate scientists, and many other kinds of scientists, are on. Scientific effort today is not neutral and objective, it is tailored to fit the political and economic goals of its funders. Bad news which doesn't fit the agenda gets buried. Positive results which fit the desired narrative are trumpeted.
Would you just as happily trust all those brilliant scientists who were being funded to work on gain of function coronavirus research. I mean they are all PhD scientists after all, while we commoners just do our research on Facebook. And try to think for ourselves.
While accusations of hypocrisy of COP delegates flying into COP in jets (including presumably the author of this piece) might ring true, the overall tone of this opinion piece sums up a lot of what puts people off certain factions of the environmental movement. His objections to COP27 are variously that it was held in a ME police state, had too many representatives of oil companies and oil producing countries in there, and there was insufficient discussion of human rights abuses in the mining industry. But isn't a good thing that a poor arab country badly exposed to climate change is getting to host such an event? Is it possible that Oil companies have read the writing on the wall and are looking to transition into greener forms of energy and might channel some of their vast profits into the decarbonization transition? Similarly, the oil producing nations, maybe their interest in COP is in transitioning their economies away from the dead end of fossil fuel production into green energy production? Basically, unless COP is held in a yurt commune in a Scandanavian country and only attended by 'activists' and academics like him (a 'Marketing' professor no less) all agreeing with each other, the author does not want to go. The most telling bit of his article was about the different genres of delegates avoiding each other - is he part of that problem? Which brings me onto his bizarre criticism of UAE being the next host of COP. UAE is a signatory of the Paris Convention and has invested more than almost any other country in low carbon technologies, in particular solar and nuclear. Much of the environmental movement is rigidly opposed to even considering nuclear technology as part of the future energy mix to address climate change and uses scientifically illiterate and scaremongering arguments to 'cancel' any rationale debate about the role of nuclear power. Fact, UAE now has three operating nuclear units at the Barakah Site in Abu Dhabi, with a fourth due for completion soon. These reactors took ten years to build at huge cost, but will pump out enormous quantities of power for 60 years (up to a 100 years with upgrades) without emitting any CO2 during operations, enough to meet 20% or more of the UAE's power supply. These plants will displace around 20 million tonnes of CO2 annually (by substituting gas for baseload generation), equivalent to taking NZ's entire vehicle fleet of 4 million cars off the road. Maybe if the author had bothered to talk to some of the UAE delegates at COP he might have learned something useful but that would not fit his agenda.
You do realise that part of the UAE business case for nuclear generation instead of gas fired generation is that the UAE gets to sell that gas to China and Europe for them to burn instead of the UAE burning it?
So no carbon is saved at all. This is all part of the green delusion.
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