Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – COP30 in Belém, Brazil, has ended without an agreement by member states to reaffirm the phasing out of fossil fuels, which is the only way to avert rolling climate catastrophes. COP28 at Dubai had included such language. The vague advice to countries to cut down on their carbon dioxide emissions is useless without fingering the main culprit in those emissions. It is like urging people to cut down on their lung cancer rates without bringing up the need to reduce the use of cigarettes, or urging less drunk driving without mentioning the need to avoid imbibing alcohol before getting behind the wheel.
When corporations engage in this sort of duplicity, we call it greenwashing. And that is what the whole COP30 became, an exercise in greenwashing the world’s nations, all of which bear responsibility for a looming set of disasters that is already befalling countries like Bangladesh and Jamaica, and will inevitably strike all humanity over the coming decades. We have it in our power to reduce the severity of those calamities substantially. We have decided, on the whole, not to bother. Our children and grandchildren will quite rightly curse our memories.
All the substantial progress that has been made in the past decade toward producing electricity from renewables has still not resulted in any diminution of our annual carbon emissions, though their rate of increase has slowed. This failure is like a person needing to lose 300 pounds putting on another 10 last year, and putting on only 9 this year. That person would sill have ballooned up to 319 pounds instead of losing any weight, even if he or she didn’t put on quite as much weight this year as last.
Or by check:
Juan Cole
P. O. Box 4218,
Ann Arbor, MI 48104-2548
USA
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Over 80 countries at COP30, including most members of the European Union and climate-threatened countries such as Kenya, Colombia and Chile, had banded together to demand a roadmap to ending the burning of petroleum, coal and fossil gas. But consensus could not be reached without dozens of other countries, who blocked any such specific measures in the final conference statement. The bad guys prominently included Saudi Arabia and the entire Arab bloc, along with China, India, and other nations still in thrall to Big Carbon. The United States, the second largest carbon polluter in the world, was so opposed that it did not even bother to show up at COP30. Trump policies will cut in half the reduction in our CO2 emissions that we had planned to achieve by 2030.
Some of the decisions that COP30 states did take seem brain dead in light of the failure to pledge the end of fossil fuels. Developed nations pledged to triple the amount of money they would give the global South countries to help with climate adaptation. But you do realize that going on burning coal, gas and oil will turbocharge climate disasters? You wouldn’t have to give as many billions for climate adaptation if you decreased the need for . . . climate adaptation!
Likewise, COP30 adopted some voluntary side-deals that are praiseworthy. The UN says that the Tropical Forests Forever Fund “Raised $5.5 billion and now includes 53 participating countries; at least 20 per cent of resources go directly to Indigenous Peoples and local communities.”
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But if you go on putting 37 gigatons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, the rain forests will burn up and become carbon producers instead of carbon sinks, even if indigenous people are afforded the funds to buy them up and forestall logging. So without reducing CO2 emissions, you’re just wasting the $5.5 billion — which anyway isn’t very much to preserve the tropical forests. The World Bank notes, “Forests also play a key role in the mitigation of climate change, removing an estimated 16 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere annually, equaling about half of the annual CO2 released from burning fossil fuels.” Friends, these carbon sinks are saving our butts from even worse climate catastrophes and are worth rather more than $5 billion a year.
Photo by Ivars Utināns on Unsplash
The UN News Service reported, “Before the final plenary, Brazilian scientist Carlos Nobre issued a stark warning: fossil fuel use must fall to zero by 2040 – 2045 at the latest to avoid catastrophic temperature rises of up to 2.5°C by mid-century. That trajectory, he said, would spell the near-total loss of coral reefs, the collapse of the Amazon rainforest and an accelerated melt of the Greenland ice sheet.”
The disappointing outcome of COP30 points to the need for governance reform. There should be a formal vote on the final communique and a majority should carry the day. We have 8.2 billion people on earth. Saudi Arabia’s citizen population is on the order of 22 million (it has 14 million guest workers). We can’t allow a dinky little oil state to dictate the fate of the planet. Of course, India and China together account for a fourth of the world’s population and they were against a formal commitment to phase out fossil fuels, too. Still, that’s a fourth, not a majority. And both are actually putting in many gigawatts of wind and solar annually. Their governments apparently just don’t want to be constrained by the international consensus. Ironically, the COP closing statements are not binding on any individual country, so nobody would even have been inconvenienced if the Brazil meeting had called for a roadmap to end fossil fuels.
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