In what is being seen as an indication that the United Nations may be about to set aside its posture of diplomatic avoidance of what it regards as an ever worsening climate crisis, driven in part by unrelenting fossil fuel recovery and continued pushback by influential oil industry officials, United Nations’ Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, now appears to have ‘called time’ on the ‘softly, softly’ position with which the body has been taking on unchecked fossil fuel recovery.
Two weeks ago, addressing representatives of more than two hundred countries in an address preparatory to the COP 28 forum, which is scheduled to be staged in Dubai, Guterres declared that fossil fuels are “incompatible with human survival.” What is bound to be regarded in sections of the global energy sector as a significant diplomatic ‘shocker,’ comes even as the international community may have been hoping that COP 28 would have paved the way for the closing of what remains the still yawning gap between an increasingly assertive climate change ‘family’ and a powerhouse oil and gas industry that very much appears to be holding its own in the ongoing climate change ‘confrontation.’ Conceivably, what the UN Secretary General has had to say about oil and the environment places an altogether different complexion on the COP 28 forum, in circumstances where his declaration on fossil fuels and its impact on the environment leaves little if any ‘wiggle room’ for the kind of ‘negotiations’ that might have been expected to ensue in Dubai.
With COP 28 scheduled to be staged in the Middle East, to wit in one of the ‘heavy hitters’ in the fossil fuel industry, and which (to make matters decidedly worse) will be chaired by the country’s Oil Minister, the chances of a standoff would appear to loom large. The likelihood of confrontation at the forum will hardly be seen as good news for many of the delegates who will be traveling to Dubai, hoping for the realization of some real – even if less than earth-shattering – breakthrough gains for the global climate change lobby. Truth be told, the bluntness of the UN Secretary General’s tirade against global fossil fuel interests may well have already set the stage for the tone and, arguably, even the outcome of the COP 28 forum. Disinclined, he seemed to pull no diplomatic punches. The UN Secretary General charged that the oil majors, who will doubtless have their own lobbying functionaries in Dubai, with betraying future generations and undermining efforts to phase out a product he called “incompatible with human survival.” The question that arises out of what appears to be the UN Secretary General’s uncompromisingly militant posture is whether his presence in Dubai at COP 28 might not provoke a ‘head to head’ with the forum’s Chairman, Dr. Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, President-Designate for COP28, whose position on oil and climate change is unlikely to coincide with the UN secretary General’s. Al Jaber’s position on the issue, reportedly, is that fossil fuel firms can keep up production if they can find a way to capture planet-warming carbon emissions. Guterres has already thumbed his nose at the Dubai official’s reported position, asserting that such an approach would only make the global oil producers “more efficient planet wreckers.” What watchers may have been anticipating as a COP 28 forum that serves as breakthrough for concessions that might shift the focus of the climate change discourse to meaningful concessions on all sides, now appears to be a distant, if not a remote prospect. This, given the fact that the UN Secretary General’s recent pronouncement on fossil fuels cannot conceivably be reconciled with that of the designated Chairman of COP 28, the UN Secretary General, which the likely formidable ‘delegation’ of ‘climate changers’ are likely to see, arising out of the UN Secretary’s recent remarks, is the UN itself throwing down a gauntlet on the whole issue of fossil fuel continued recovery and climate change. It is the bluntness of the UN Secretary General recent outburst that appears to underscore the reality that he is now fully seized of the global oil industry’s preoccupation with profits and what he appears to see as the international oil industry’s complete indifference to the real danger that the continued burning of fossil fuels will, sooner rather than later, push the world beyond any safe climate threshold. While, in 2022, the global oil and gas industry reportedly ‘raked in’ a record US$4 trillion in net income Guterres is quoted as saying that “yet for every dollar it spends on oil and gas drilling and exploration, only 4 cents went to clean energy and carbon capture, combined.”
What the UN Secretary General’s uncompromising attack of the global oil recovery sector has done, seemingly, is to set the timbre for the COP 28 forum, by seemingly mobilizing the host of climate changers behind him. There is, as well, the considerable likelihood that traditional groupings of countries (and here Guyana comes to mind) may not be inclined to overwhelmingly publicly endorse what appears to be the UN Secretary General’s unyielding position on oil and the environment. Now seemingly altogether unprepared to accept any ‘comprises’ that embrace continued fossil fuel recovery, Guterres says that the industry must put forward a credible plan for shifting to clean energy “and away from a product incompatible with human survival.” On the other hand, the prevailing position of fossil fuel companies would appear to be that oil recovery should enjoy continuity once they remove greenhouse gas emissions in the process, a suggestion that has reportedly been rejected by experts on the condition that the process is complicated and sufficiently as not to deliver the urgent cuts of greenhouse gas needed.
The gap between the two decidedly camps on the issue of oil and the environment appears, at least at this juncture, to be far too wide to be significantly closed in Dubai.
