For a few compelling reasons the Conference of Parties (COP 28), the November 30 to December 12 staging of what has become the foremost international forum on climate change, scheduled to be held in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates, is likely to attract at least as much controversy as its predecessors, quite likely, a great deal more.
The reason? The world’s climate-changers, or at least a considerable portion thereof, now appear to be persuaded that we are now, well and truly, in the ‘fast lane’ to an irreversible fossil fuel-driven climate catastrophe.
Another reason, the more immediate one, has to do with the fact that, as COP 28 draws closer, the likelihood that the forum will take us any closer to realizing a breakthrough in the fossil fuel/climate crisis debate is becoming increasingly remote.
Abu Dhabi, it would seem, is hardly the universally favoured location for the staging of what could be a virtual last-ditch attempt to roll back the fossil fuel juggernaut. Abu Dhabi is the capital of a region in the Middle East known as the United Arab Emirates. There is hardly another region in the world, one might think, that can serve as a more fertile battleground for what may well turn out to be a dialogue of the deaf.
For good measure, the proceedings in Abu Dhabi will be chaired by Sultan Dr. Ahmed Al Jaber, a member of the Cabinet of the UAE, its Minister of Industry and Advanced Technology and Managing Director and Group CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. These, decidedly, are not the sorts of credentials that suggest that when the Sultan takes the Chair at COP 28 in November he is likely to be a frenetic ‘flag-waver’ for rolling back fossil fuel recovery and by extension, climate change. On the contrary Abu Dhabi and Dr Al Jaber might well become a lightning rod that might turn COP 28 into a powder keg in a climate change controversy that continues to drift in an incendiary direction.
After all, however much the gathering in Abu Dhabi is convened against the backdrop of some hope that even modest measures might be realized in the rolling back of fossil fuel recovery, it is impossible to ignore the fact of just what both Abu Dhabi and Dr Jaber represent in the context of what we are told has become a virtual eleventh hour pushback against climate catastrophe.
Nor does there seem to be (with COP 28 now just four months away) any real room for some kind of refereeing intervention by the United Nations, particularly in circumstances where Secretary General Antonio Gutteres appears to have thrown down his own unequivocally uncompromising gauntlet on the climate crisis to “fossil fuel producers and their financial backers,” accusing them of “racing to expand (fossil fuel) production, knowing full well that their business model is inconsistent with human survival.”
Truth be told, this may well have been a signal moment in all of the global debate on climate change, a moment when the UN stripped itself of its diplomatic ‘glad rags’ in order to make a defining mark, to send an unmistakable message to a fossil fuel industry that has already gorged itself at the expense of the environment, remaining indifferent to what Secretary General Gutteres calls an “open and shut case for taking the climate change argument far more seriously,”
That what Mr Gutteres had to say in Davos was said before what one might call a Davos crowd, some of whom might even, themselves, have been investors in the fossil fuel industry, would have made his pronouncements both more poignant and contextually, more relevant.
Up until this time the various ‘chapters’ of the successive COP fora, have held together through diplomatic ‘tailoring’ that has managed to avert a terminal parting of ways between the fossil fuel adherents and the climate changers. It would appear that things are different this time. In Davos the UN Secretary unequivocally declared that the commitment to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels is “going up in smoke……….we are,” he added, “flirting with climate disaster.” Antonio Gutteres could hardly have gone any further.
In Davos, too, any hope that the UN Secretary General’s presentation might have declined to ‘point fingers’ was dashed by his unequivocal calling out of “the fossil fuel industry” some of the investors in which were likely among his audience in Davos and will probably show up again in Abu Dhabi.
In Abu Dhabi, what are likely to be postures designed to finesse, circumvent, or simply bluntly dismiss altogether the compelling reality of climate change will come up against the hard line climate-changers (coming to think of it their numbers may be limited at a location like Abu Dhabi) backed this time around by a United Nations Secretary General who now appears to have thrown down an unmistakable gauntlet on climate change.
