Opinion: COP’s colossal failure

bobby banerjee

It’s a lovely afternoon at a luxury resort in Egypt with six swimming pools opening onto a lovely little beach on the Red Sea. A salsa class at one of the pools had several enthusiastic participants. Elsewhere, guests were reclining on loungers sipping chilled cocktails. Cheerful waiters are refilling glasses and serving snacks.

Welcome to Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt’s popular holiday destination, home to the 27th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (COP27). Or, as some critics put it, the Congress of Polluters.

My first impression upon arrival was that I entered a huge theme park. The road leading to the resort is lined with brightly lit green and yellow palm trees, and the lampposts are festooned with colorful lights. The night sky criss-crossed, and bright searchlights were beamed from the venue to draw attention to the climate emergency facing humanity.

This is my fourth COP and I don’t plan to do it again. Given how little these conferences have done since they started in 1995 — not to mention their massive carbon footprint — I believe it’s time for them to stop.

After 27 years of negotiations, conflicts and ruptures, the world’s nations largely agree: climate change is a serious problem; something must be done to fix it; rich countries should do more; based on the 2015 Paris Agreement, every country All should set their own emissions targets and do their best to meet them.

The UN claims the Paris Agreement is “legally binding”, but there are no enforcement mechanisms or penalties for countries that violate it. Even current pledges are not enough to meet the Paris-agreed goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C.

How COPs work

There are three worlds in the COP meeting, but they carefully avoid each other. Official state representatives attend meetings and draft policy. Then there are businesses and trade associations, which are by far the most important and influential.

More than 600 fossil fuel industry lobbyists attended the meeting. That was more delegations than the ten countries most affected by climate combined, and the second-largest after the United Arab Emirates, itself an oil powerhouse. Some of the 600 lobbyists were even invited to join delegations from 30 countries.

The third group of the COP consists of civil society organizations from a wide range of countries, but mainly non-governmental organizations (NGOs) from developed countries. A growing number of non-governmental organizations (BINGOs) representing business interests are taking up the civil society space at COP meetings to promote specific resource and energy use agendas. Funders include big oil companies like Shell and ExxonMobil, nuclear giants like Areva, and big mining companies like Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton.

Both business and civil society representatives are involved in the climate negotiations and host side events to showcase their climate action. These seem to take place in parallel realities. A conference on “Mining Governance for a Just Energy Transition” follows a conference organized by the international NGO Global Witness on the killings and disappearances of protesters opposed to mining projects in Africa, Asia and Latin America. “s meeting.

At the latter session, participants from the government of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the International Council on Mining and Metals described inequality, environmental impact, tax avoidance and corruption as challenges facing mining in Africa. There was no mention of the violence and killings recorded in the same area at the previous session.

the police arrived

These opposing narratives are a feature of the COP, but only during protest marches. It is worth noting, however, that COP27 was the first conference to be held in a “police state”. Before arriving at the venue, I stayed for a few days in a hotel near Tahrir Square, the birthplace of Cairo’s 2011 revolution. Every corner of the square has heavily armed police in armored vehicles. I photographed the obelisk in the square, with an armored police car in the foreground, and was immediately reprimanded by an angry soldier.

However, there was almost no police at the venue in Sharm el-Sheikh. That’s because organizers took an insanely long time to stop the protests.

This has included pre-emptive arrests of local activists, complex registration procedures confining the wider public to “green zones”, and unprecedented surveillance, including the installation of police surveillance cameras on 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.

Hosting the COP at a luxury resort has also discouraged activists. Hotel rates average $250-$300 per night, with no “budget” option. Sandwiches at the venue cost $15 but halved the price after a complaint. There are also no streets where people can congregate, only roads connecting various resorts.

So while more than 100,000 people marched through the streets of Glasgow at COP26, and previous COPs such as Copenhagen, Durban and Paris saw clashes between protesters and police, dissent was effectively suppressed here. On November 12th, over 1,000 protesters marched through the venue, and I couldn’t even find them.

COP and oil

So what else has changed since I first came to Durban for the COP in 2011? Notably, corporate and NGO marketing is much more flexible. Companies are getting smarter – I don’t see a BP, Shell or Exxon logo anywhere. The corporatization of the COP was completed when BP’s chief executive and four other senior employees joined an official delegation from Mauritania, a country in which BP has made significant investments.

To further consolidate the power of the fossil fuel industry, COP27 launched the Middle East Green Initiative, led by Saudi Arabia, which promises to inevitably achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. Saudi Arabia also had one of the largest booths at the venue. It is no coincidence that the next COP will be hosted by the United Arab Emirates.

Not once in the 27 years of the COP has a call been made to phase out fossil fuels. The only reference is the agreement at COP26, which called for “a gradual reduction of unabated coal power and the phasing out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”.

At the same time, COP27 is undergoing a massive rebranding exercise, with natural gas no longer being positioned as a fossil fuel, but as a “transition fuel”. Once the restructuring is complete, the major fossil fuel players will monopolize all subsidies to natural gas.

elephant in the room

When COP1 was held in Berlin in 1995, global carbon emissions were 23.45 billion metric tons. By 2021, they will produce 36.4 billion metric tons. Emissions are increasing every year, with two exceptions: the 2007-09 financial crisis and during COVID-19. In both cases, it was because of an economic contraction, not efforts to combat climate change.

No one at the COP is in the room talking about this particular elephant: decoupling economic growth from carbon emissions is probably impossible. Emissions rebounded on both occasions and are expected to reach record highs in 2022.

Let’s look at three other quantifiable COP measures: climate finance, which is seen as key to helping poor countries reduce emissions; climate compensation for damage caused by historical carbon emissions from rich to poor countries; and the success of mitigation technologies , especially carbon capture and storage.

In terms of climate finance, richer countries pledged at the 2009 Copenhagen Conference to mobilize $100 billion a year for poorer countries. However, they never achieved this goal.

Meanwhile, the world’s 60 largest banks have invested $3.8 trillion in fossil fuels since the Paris Agreement. In December 2019, investors paid nearly $26 billion for the initial public offering of Saudi state oil company Aramco. Of course, the associated fossil fuel companies and banks have committed to fictitious net-zero emission commitments for 2050.

For the first time, climate compensation is on the official agenda of COP27, and it is certainly a step forward. However, it is difficult to be optimistic. The United States will vigorously challenge any loss and damage fund for poor countries, as it has consistently done in past COP meetings.

As for carbon capture, it stores just 0.02% of fossil fuel CO2 in 2021. It makes a mockery of the bedrock of climate change mitigation.

alternative

COP stands for Gathering of the Elite. A recent study found that this is a major obstacle to mitigating climate change. Excluded are the poor, the disenfranchised, and those who bear the brunt of climate impacts but contribute the least to the problem (and will suffer the impact of the energy transition in rich countries as essential minerals and metals will be extracted from their land ). Dissent is increasingly criminalized, not only in “police states” but also in Western liberal democracies.

It’s time to end this spectacle of private jets carrying dignitaries and delegates to discuss the climate emergency. Real civil society organizations should boycott future COPs and focus on direct action at national and local levels. They need to hold governments accountable to emissions targets and target the fossil fuel companies and the banks that fund them.

There is no accountability in COP, only the proliferation of (non-)accountability that legitimizes corporate power. COP27 will repeat the mistakes of past COPs: empty promises, rousing speeches and flashy corporate pitches. Next year’s carbon emissions will be even higher.

So let COP be another Davos, a rich man’s conference. There are plenty of luxurious seaside and ski resorts in countries eager to host the next few COPs. Just don’t go there.

(The author is a professor at City Management School, University of London. theconversation.com)