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Yes, "the world" just gathered in the United Arab Emirates, a major oil producer, to decide the fate of our planet. And among those attending COP28 were at least 1,300 fossil-fuel lobbyists (three times the number at the previous year's climate summit), and possibly as many as 2,500 of them, along with the Saudis, the U.S., and other oil-producing states. Oh, and don't forget those "at least 166 climate deniers and fossil fuel public relations professionals" that, according to the Guardian, were also lending a helping hand.
The lead-up to this climate summit was, of course, the hottest six straight months in human history. Still, those lobbyists, climate-change deniers, fossil-fuel company representatives, and oil, coal, and natural gas states represent a world in which fossil-fuel production is still expanding. Meanwhile, China, the largest user of coal on the planet, continues to build new coal-fired power plants at a record rate.
In the end, the climate conference agreed not to agree on "phasing out" fossil fuels but all too vaguely on "transitioning away" from them. That's more like deciding to phase down humanity. But perhaps John Silk, the minister of natural resources for the Marshall Islands, those atolls in the Pacific that are likely to be early victims of climate-change-driven rising sea levels, should have the last word in this introduction before the remarkable Juan Cole of the must-read Informed Comment website offers his views on just how Big Energy of every sort is greenwashing this planet. At COP28, Silk said, "The Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant. What we have seen today is totally unacceptable. We will not go silently to our watery graves." Nor should the rest of us. Tom
How Big Oil is Taking Us for a Fossil-Fuelized Ride
With the World the Hottest in 125,000 Years, We're Being Gaslighted
By Juan Cole
A recent opinion poll rocked the world of the Big Oil lobbyists in their proverbial thousand-dollar suits and alligator shoes. The Pew Research Center found that 37% of Americans now feel that fighting the climate crisis should be the number one priority of President Joe Biden and Congress, and another 34% put it among their highest priorities, even if they didn't rank it first. Companies like ExxonMobil and countries like Saudi Arabia have tried since the 1990s to gaslight the public into thinking climate change was either a total fantasy or that the burning of coal, natural gas, and petroleum wasn't causing it. Having lost that battle, the fossil-fuel lobbyists have now fallen back on Plan B. They want to convince you that Big Oil is itself swinging into action in a major way to transition to yes! green energy.
The hosting of the recent COP28 climate summit by the United Arab Emirates, one of the world's leading petroleum exporters, exemplified exactly this puffery and, sadly enough, it's just one instance of this greenwashing world of ours. Everywhere you look, you'll note other versions, but it certainly was a classic example. Emirati businessman and ruler of the United Arab Emirates Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber served as president of the Dubai-based 28th Conference of Parties countries that had signed onto the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. While his green bona fides include his role as chairman of the board of the UAE's green energy firm Masdar, controversy swirled around him because he's also the CEO of ADNOC, the UAE's national petroleum company. Worse yet, he's committed to expanding the oil and gas production of his postage-stamp-sized nation of one million citizens (and eight million guest workers) in a big-time fashion. He wants ADNOC to increase its daily oil production from its present four million barrels a day to five million by 2027, even though climate scientists stress that global fossil-fuel production must be reduced by 3% annually through 2050 if the world is to avoid the most devastating consequences of climate change.
Meanwhile, since COP28 was held in the heart of the petroleum-producing Middle East, it also platformed bad actors like Saudi Arabia, which led the charge to stop the conference from committing to ending the use of fossil fuels by a specific date. The awarding of COP28 to the Emirates by the UNFCCC Secretariat allowed a whole country, perhaps a whole region, to be greenwashed, a genuinely shocking decision that ought to be investigated by the U.N.'s Office of Internal Oversight Services. (And next year, it looks like COP29 will be hosted by another significant oil producer. In other words, the oil countries seem to be on a hot streak!)
Imaginary Algae
Mind you, those Gulf oil states are anything but the only major greenwashers on this planet. After all, the private sector has outdone itself in this arena. A congressional investigation into the major oil companies produced a long report and an appendix that came out last year, including internal corporate emails showing repeated and systemic bad faith on the subject of climate change. ExxonMobil executives, for instance, had publicly committed their company to the goals of the 2015 Paris Agreement to keep the increase in the average surface temperature of the earth to no more than 1.5 degrees Centigrade (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above the pre-industrial era. Although a 1.5-degree increase might sound small, keep in mind that, as a global average, it includes the cold oceans of the higher latitudes, the North and South Poles, and the Himalayas. In already hot climates like South Asia and the Middle East, that means over time it might translate into a stunning 10- to 15-degree increase that could make some places literally unlivable.
Scientists worry that exceeding that level could throw the world's climate system into full-scale chaos, producing mega-storms, substantial sea level rise, ravaging wildfires, and deadly heat and drought over large parts of the earth's surface. Still, despite his public commitment to it in 2019, the CEO of ExxonMobil, Darren Woods, asked an oil industry lobbying group to delete a reference to the 2015 Paris climate agreement from the draft of a statement on sustainability it had prepared. That mention, Woods said, "could create a potential commitment to advocate on the Paris agreement goals." So much for oil company pledges!
In a similar fashion, in 2020, executives of the London-based Shell PLC asked public relations employees to highlight that the company's vow to reach zero net carbon emissions by 2050 was "a collective ambition for the world," rather than a "Shell goal or target." As a company executive admitted all too bluntly, "Shell has no immediate plans to move to a net-zero emissions portfolio over our investment horizon of 10-20 years." (Oh, and in case you missed this, the profits of the major fossil-fuel outfits have in recent years gone through the roof.)
Nor is corporate greenwashing simply a matter of public pronouncements by oil company executives. ExxonMobil has run a multi-million-dollar campaign of television and streaming advertising attempting to pull the wool over people's eyes about what it's doing. In one instance, it paid the New York Times to run an extended commercial gussied up as if it were a news article, a shameful procedure to which the Times acquiesced. Studies show that most readers miss disclaimers about such pieces actually being paid advertisements. It was entitled, gtand plant waste to fuel a sustainable energy future." The advertisement was extremely misleading. As Chris Wells, an associate professor of emerging media studies at Boston University's College of Communication, told BU Today last February, "Exxon is doing a lot of advertising around its investments in algae-based biofuels. But these technologies are not yet viable, and there is a lot of skepticism that they ever will be."
In fact, about a month after Wells gave that interview, ExxonMobil admitted publicly that it had pulled out of algae biofuels research entirely at the end of 2022, having invested about $29 million a year over 12 years. It spent more millions, however, in advertising to give the public the impression that this paltry investment outweighed the company's multi-billion-dollar efforts to bring ever more petroleum online.
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