Little reason for optimism at COP27

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2022 (1457 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Ten years ago, I was on the last flight into Ronald Reagan Airport, just a few hours before hurricane Sandy hit Washington, D.C. That category 1 storm (the lowest designation on the hurricane scale) shut down the city for several days, causing several billion dollars of damage as it then spun up the coast and hit New York harder.

Ironically, that trip was the start of my involvement with the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP). I went out the next day, in the storm, and took a picture of the U.S. Capitol building, deserted except for a lone patrol car, parked in front of the steps.

It was an uncanny metaphor for the 10 years that have followed. What was, back then, called climate change has now come to be known as a climate crisis. In 10 more years, it will be a climate catastrophe. Sadly, our places of government are still deserted when it comes to changing the trajectory of that impending disaster.

Three years later, there were cheers marking the 2015 Paris Agreement on reducing global emissions. That year also marked the start of the UN’s 2030 Agenda, with its 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs) that we need to reach if we hope to have a sustainable and just future for everyone.

And yet, here we are, seven years later still, and emissions have either stayed the same or gone up (including in Canada). We have set new records for heat, drought, severe storms and deadly flooding. Halfway to 2030, most people in developed countries have never heard of the SDGs, nor have their governments (at all levels) done anything much to achieve them.

So, as the 27th Conference of the Parties (COP27) begins in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, I am not expecting any real breakthrough. While it has been billed as Africa’s chance to drive the agenda against global warming — as the region that will be hit the hardest by it, while having done the least to generate emissions — the optics for COP27 changing our collective climate story are not hopeful.

Holding the conference at a remote resort, in a country ruled by the iron fist of a military dictatorship that savagely represses dissent, freedom of expression and pretty much anything and anyone it chooses, is certainly a good way to control whatever narrative emerges.

There will likely be few protests, if any, because no one ever accidentally goes to Sharm El Sheikh, especially after the 2005 terrorist attack on its beaches. Access to the resort area, and to the COP27 site itself, will be tightly controlled, and I expect any protests beyond a few signs will be crushed.

(The only worse place to hold COP27 would have been Moscow, with side excursions to the new gulags in Siberia for Ukrainians and dissenters.)

Whether or not protests happen there, global subsidies for the fossil-fuel industry continue — and, in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and soaring fuel costs, the industry is raking in windfall profits that governments everywhere seem afraid to touch.

When it comes to making the obvious and necessary changes toward infrastructure based on other sources of power that a low-carbon future requires, governments are still missing in action.

Thinking about this persistent failure, I reached a troubling conclusion: while part of me wants to blame this paralysis on the pervasive influence of the fossil-fuel lobby and the inherent corruption of the political system, I realized there is a much simpler and more obvious explanation.

Governments are not “cracking down” on the fossil-fuel industry because they are, in effect, being held hostage by it. In a capitalist world of private enterprise, where the largest multinational players have operations of some kind everywhere, any single government that tries to control them risks making things much worse for themselves and their country.

If (for example) Exxon gets fed up with being badgered, harassed and legislated by the federal government, what is to stop it from simply ending all its operations in Canada and closing its doors? After all, any business owner has the right to quit, just like any employee.

Disaster would quickly follow, because we don’t have the means to transition to a low-carbon economy just yet — and the cynic would say the fossil-fuel industry is making sure that we never will. We need the refineries, the oil and gas Exxon produces, and so government subsidies for its operations continue, even at the risk of destroying civilization as we know it. Stalemate.

It is no wonder that support for Extinction Rebellion and its non-violent protests is growing. If multinational corporations continue to dictate policy to government and therefore continue with “business as usual,” we will need to step outside our current systems and find another way to change the situation.

Otherwise, by doing nothing, we are brewing a storm that will make hurricane Sandy look like a minor squall.

Peter Denton is an activist, writer and scholar.