Dubai or Die
The Planet Heats Up as the World Fiddles, Al-Jaber Gets Prickly & Trump Froths
Observing COP28, it seems like the climate world is running a script from a Monty Python movie. Or a Blumhouse horror movie. There’s a mix of crazy and scary wafting over the Jetstream as the planet continues to heat.
Summing Up the Week’s Absurdities--
First, using NPR’s headline: “Al-Jaber Gets Prickly”
Sultan Al-Jaber, who is both head of COP28 and of the UAE’s $12 B market cap oil company, rolled into the conference with an outed November quote from a testy exchange with the former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson. “There is no science out there,” Al-Jaber told Robinson, “or no scenario out there, that says that the phaseout of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”
“Please help me,” he added, “show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
He then backtracked faster than the presidents of Harvard, MIT and U Penn.
But the theme was echoed later by Saudi Arabian Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman who insisted his country, the world’s top oil exporter, won’t agree to any wording that calls for the phase down of fossil fuels, either, as reported in The Guardian. “Absolutely not.”
Wording is a big deal at the COPs, and you can readily understand the difference between “phase-down” and “phase-out.” For which the next questions would be: “by how much?” and “when?”
Da Debate over "Abate":
Enter a slicker term: “abate.” As Bill McKibben has written in these Substack pages, “It’s abundantly clear that coal, oil and gas are breaking the climate system; it’s also abundantly clear that the people who own coal, oil and gas reserves don’t care. In an effort to keep burning them, so they can continue to collect the returns, they propose building vast engineering projects alongside fossil-fuel generating plants, to capture the carbon dioxide from the exhaust stream. That is, they want to “abate” the damage of their product.”
If “abate” is chosen in the final language, then, the UAE, the Saudi’s, and hardly least, the US, can keep producing and polluting so long as they can all keep the fiction going and the subsidies flowing that carbon capture and storage works. Otherwise, the world would just rise up and cap the wells and move to cheaper alternate energy sources—with a smart transition that would last only long enough to keep us out of Al-Jaber’s caves, to be sure. Such a transition is already accelerating, of course, to the consternation of the UAE, the Saudis and anyone else whose money and power comes from fossil fuels.
Trump Fiddles
Not least of which is a former President and first denier of his own election loss.
It is hard, in fact, to beat the naked greed-head insanity of America’s own lead Arabist, Donald J. Trump. When Foxy Sean Hannity asked him last week, “You’re not going to be a dictator, are you?” (should he ever be re-elected,) Trump replied, “No, no, no, other than Day One. We’re closing the border and we’re drilling, drilling, drilling. After that, I’m not a dictator.”
The problem with “drilling-drilling-drilling,” besides ratcheting up climate change, inflicting old people with cancers and bringing asthma to the young, is that drilling-drilling-drilling will not bring down prices at the pump any time soon. It takes 5-10 years to develop an oil field, capture the gooey stuff, pipe it, refine it, and haul it to your neighborhood Chevron station. But drill-drill-drill sounds good—“Freakin’ tuff, man!”—and also brings instant political contributions to Trump’s war chest, which may be the point.
(I say, “Arabist” because after Donald J. gifted a mammoth weapons package--financed by US taxpayers—to Saudi Arabia, his son-in-law received a highly controversial $2 billion family kickback pushed through by Mohammed "Bone Saw" Salman, Saudi Arabia’s kingly dictator. But that’s show business.)
COPping a COP28
“And don’t forget,” as Alex Simon pointed out today in the New York Times, “the United States is the only country pumping more oil than Saudi Arabia, and production is expanding fast: A president [Biden] who promised “no new drilling” on the campaign trail in 2020 has approved so much new drilling that some experts warn it will cancel out the emissions reductions from the hundreds of billions of dollars his administration has funneled into clean infrastructure investment.”
This brings us to more bad news from the COPsters, that the US, Britain, Ukraine et al, have pledged to triple nuclear power; that fossil fuel pollution has been found to kill two million people a year; and to some good news as well, that the US, China, et al have pledged to triple alternate energy (which would have happened with good old market capitalism anyway) and also that the first--insanely tall—800 feet-- offshore windmill is now swinging away off New England. That’s tall. That’s futuristic. I want to see it. #
