Whatever happened to COP 27?
The festival of hypocrisy in Sharm El-Sheikh is a threat to climate solidarity
“We’re on a highway to hell” declared the UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, opening the COP 27 climate talks in Egypt, echoing AC DC's heavy metal anthem. But the apocalyptic rhetoric is in inverse proportion to global interest in this COP . It was always going to be a struggle getting the world's attention during an energy crisis when people in Europe are struggling to pay their fuel bills.
It didn't help holding the talks in a profoundly authoritarian country, with 60,000 political prisoners including a British national, Alaa Abdel Fattah, who is currently on hunger strike. Extinction Rebellion should try gluing themselves one of Cairo's many new expressways, or throwing paint at the Tutankhamun exhibition, if they want to see what real oppression feels like.
Fewer private jets are stacked at Sharm El Sheikh airport than in Glasgow’s COP 26 last year, but the energy lobbyists, green and black and rainbow-hued, are as dominant as ever. The UN Conference of the Parties has often been criticised as a corporate bean feast, and even Greta Thunberg has stopped going. But the real problem with this COP, is that the world's largest emitters of greenhouse gases, and the nations upon whom the fate of the world arguably depends, are not present.
China, India and Russia have boycotted COP27 and even the American President, Joe Biden, was otherwise engaged for the leader's summit, though he's promising to make it to Sharm El-Sheikh soon. China produces more carbon emissions than the United States and all the developed world combined. India is rapidly catching up. As is much of South East Asia. And there is another developing region seeking to join them.
Africa has vast reserves of natural gas and countries like Senegal have been lobbying for special treatment in Egypt with the enthusiastic backing of corporate energy giants. The influential former UN Climate Envoy, Mary Robinson, has said that African states should be permitted to develop their gas fields. And she is right. Nearly a billion Africans still use wood or oil for cooking, with immeasurable damage to the climate.
Why should African countries like Mozambique leave their citizens in poverty when they are sitting on vast natural wealth. It's a powerful argument. However only last year, Ms Robinson, attacked the UK government for agreeing with it and supporting gas development there.
She also condemned the UK’s award of oil and gas licences in the North Sea as “madness”. But one of the top lines at this COP has been the UK sealing a deal to import huge quantities of Liquified Natural Gas, from America. Most of this is derived from shale fracking, which environmentalists loathe and is banned here. That also seems a kind of madness.
The good news is that the war in Ukraine has also forced the pace of transition to renewable energy across the world. The EU is now aiming for 50% renewables by 2030 and reducing energy consumption by up to a fifth. It would be ironic indeed if Vladimir Putin helped save the planet by invading Ukraine.
The renewable revolution is real and, with backups like nuclear, has made Net Zero a practical possibility, even if the 1.5 degree warming target is a busted flush. Claims that Net Zero is technologically unachievable or that the transition from fossil fuels is incompatible with economic growth, are baseless. But it may be that COP, as it is presently constituted, has become part of the problem instead of the solution
It is turning into a megaphone for what is misleadingly called the Global South to demand reparations for greenhouse gases emitted by countries like the UK since the industrial revolution. They have a case, of course. Most of the carbon currently in the atmosphere was put there by industrialised countries, though when James Watt watched his kettle boil he didn't know anything about climate change. Yet the UK is actually one of the good guys here, according to the International Energy Agency, since we have cut emissions by nearly 50% since 1990 levels and have made Net Zero a legal obligation.
But the campaign for “loss and damage” will kill climate talks stone dead if it is taken literally. There is no way that US and European electorates, impoverished by fuel bills, are going to agree unrestricted transfers of wealth to the biggest emitters on the planet like India and China, or many of their dependencies in South East Asia. Nor indeed is it feasible simply to bankroll authoritarian regimes on the African content. Reparations arguments, if taken seriously, will destroy climate solidarity.
Anyway, according to the Global Carbon Atlas, the top three countries that have produced the most CO2 since 1750 are the United States, China and Russia. And even if these countries did pay the theoretical cost of climate emissions, the deal would presumably be that he developing countries now could not follow the same industrial path. This they are clearly not prepared to do.
Nicola Sturgeon's headline-grabbing offer of £5 million in “loss and damage” to the global south is an risible drop in the proverbial bucket – a sum that would be lost in rounding errors in the UK's existing £11 billion foreign aid budget. We send ten times the First Minister's offer in bilateral aid each year to China: the worst polluter on the planet.
The West has offered $100 billion a year to help the poorest countries develop clean energy and it would certainly help matters if it delivered on that promise. But even that is a minuscule sum compared to the expected $4 trillion a year that the International Energy Agency says will be needed to secure the world's transition from fossil fuels. Which is where Boris Johnson is on message.
He said again this week that the next industrial revolution will be green and led, like the last one, by capitalism - by private finance in concert with the state. Green is Good he said last year, in one of the few environmental jokes on record.
Capitalism is of course anathema to climate campaigners who believe, like Greta Thunberg, that it is a system of “racist, oppressive extractionism”. Economic growth itself is seen by environmentalists like the Scottish Green Party as inherently evil and destroying the world. In which case the entire developing world is now implicated in climate catastrophe since they are all seeking to grow their way out of poverty through various forms of capitalism.
We may find private enterprise morally repugnant, but it is not going away any time soon. We saw its power three weeks ago when the financial markets wrecked even a free-market Tory government in a matter of days. We all depend on it - even the climate protesters wearing the plasticised products of the petroleum industry and using sophisticated communications devices like smart phones, that are often produced by militarised work forces in developing countries.
Glasgow's COP was a good one, full of enthusiasm and practical ideas; Egypt's is a bad COP reeking of cynicism and self-interest. Instead of uniting the planet it has exposed the many divisions over how to tackle humanity's greatest environmental challenge. We will get there in the end, through technological innovation. We have to. But it may not be through festivals of hypocrisy. The road to hell is paved with bad intentions.