While, at an earlier juncture, there appeared to have been some kind of modus vivendi between the ‘climate changers’ and the global oil giants on the need to drastically cut fossil fuel emissions in order to try to push back an imminent climate catastrophe, it transpires, or at least so it seems, that the attempt to ‘paper over’ the gap between the two sides was contrived purely to avoid a circumstance that might have scuttled last December’s COP 28 Forum in the United Arab Emirates. Moreover, if, up to this time there appears to have been no cries of ‘foul’ amongst the climate changers, there is evidence that, contrary to the view in some quarters, climate-vulnerable countries might now feel cheated.
It transpires that a recent Reuters report on what it says really ‘went down’ at the COP 28 forum was an exercise in deception insofar as the global oil giants, including the ‘heavyweights’ from the Arab countries, who were never really committed to a fossil fuel recovery reduction regime that would realize adequate reductions in emissions that continue to hasten the pace of climate change. The ‘reality’ that was being pedaled by the global fossil fuel giants was designed solely to minimize any climate change differences that might have scuttled COP 28 itself. This has, it appears, been exposed in Reuters ‘post mortem’ of the forum in which it laid claim to reliable information to the effect that none of the world’s major oil producing countries had ever intended to go along with any initiative that would interfere with their substantive fossil fuel recovery plans, going forward. That, according to the Reuters Report was a mere chimera, of what it says really ‘went down’ at COP 28.