As COP 28 approaches, huge swathes of the affluent ‘North,’ mostly, are contending with one or another manifestation of climate change, extremes of temperature that inflict varying levels of disruption on normal life. Some of these amount to quite alarming emergencies.
Unsurprisingly, the media houses in the North, in the United States and Europe, mostly, have been griping over consequences that range from extreme heat that often exacts a high mortality rate to unbearable cold to deep flooding. In the winter the nature of the climate emergency changes completely. In both sets of circumstances, though, the impact of ‘climate change’ on visitor arrivals and the consequences for the tourism industry are usually a prominent official preoccupation. Here it is, for the most part, the impact of these weather-related changes on the economies of those countries.
Inhospitable climate applies in poor countries too. There, is however, a greater tendency to treat changing weather patterns as occupational hazards of dwelling in particular geographic spaces. Alternate circumstances of flood and drought, for example, have historically been conditions that countries in Africa and Asia, mostly, accept as what we in the Caribbean term ‘a part of life.’ Here, alternate conditions of drought and famine reinforce pre-existing structural inequalities that underline a condition that we commonly describe as the North/South divide. In the South the consequences go beyond periodic fretfulness. They extend into patterns of existence that impact life expectancy.
The response to the little that we still know about how climate change is impacting on the human condition has been to press into service a discipline which we call climate science and which proceeds at a gingerly pace for reasons that have to do with the fact that it operates on hitherto previously under-explored terrain. Truth be told, we are yet to determine with any kind of reassuring clarity just where that which we refer to as climate change is taking us and whether we can act sufficiently quickly and sufficiently efficiently to forestall the complete apocalypse which the climate changers contend may lie just around the proverbial corner.
Climate science, we believe, has gotten as far as pinpointing some of the mitigating measures that might be explored, one of which, we are told, is undertaking what, these days, is severely restricting or even ceasing altogether the recovery of fossil fuels. There are, however, some inevitable challenges with climate science. One of those is the pushback that it must endure from the might of a powerful fossil fuel lobby. The fossil fuel lobby is as intense as it is robust, the essence of its power reposing in the unwavering commitment of globally powerful interests to protecting the fossil fuel industry.
COP 28 will be historic, primarily for the reason that the lobby that has long sought to push back against unrelenting fossil fuel will be ‘up against it in the belly of the OPEC ‘beast.’ Here, one critical question that will arise has to do with whether staging COP 28 in Dubai is not, in essence, the profoundest of contradictions.
Staging a forum that is regarded as a critical juncture in the climate change debate at a location that would likely be regarded by most climate changers as the core of the fossil fuel industry is what appears to be the profoundest of contradictions. Truth be told it reflects the extent to which the all-powerful fossil fuel behemoth now boldly stalks the climate change terrain.
COP 28, as has been said elsewhere, previously, will be significant insofar as there could hardly have been a less convivial environment for climate-changers and, as well, hardly a less welcoming environment for the protestations of the masses of climate-changers who have been fixtures at previous COP fora. These, will doubtless be afforded anything even remotely resembling ‘free rein’ in the UAE.
What the Dubai fora could and probably will do is afford the already immensely powerful fossil fuel lobby opportunity to work its materialistic ‘magic’ in order to weaken the climate change lobby.
Here it should be borne in mind that the arbitrariness in the distribution of fossil fuels across territorial spaces does not conform to the accustomed rich/poor formula that has largely influenced division of wealth. (Guyana is a particularly good example of that truism.)
In the particular instance of fossil fuels, that dynamic has been eroded by the arbitrariness with which fossil fuels have been ‘distributed,’ globally.
Regions and countries that have, historically, been categorized as underdeveloped or as being part of a Third World, not least Guyana, will find themselves ‘singing from the identical hymn book’ as the global oil giants and the powerful global business interests in the matter of the unabated pursuit of fossil fuel recovery.
However much we may seek to delude ourselves to the contrary Dubai is far from likely to be a ‘home run’ for climate change. If the forum will be fashioned in such a manner as perhaps to leave a generous measure for vocal ‘wiggle room among the climate changers attending the forum, COP 28 is probably more likely to turn out to be something of an agenda-altering forum that will probably be much more focused on finding ways to, simultaneously, accommodate fossil fuel proliferation and climate change mitigation on the same ‘ticket.’ That, based on what the science tells us, will take some doing though we will have to wait and see just where the Dubai discourses take us.