Sound the alarm over THIS
This year’s Conference of the Parties on global climate change, affectionately referred to as COP28, is winding down as I write this. It’s being held until it ends on Tuesday in Dubai’s Expo City, the world capital of oil wealth, inhuman greed and obscene, ostentatious excess. Can you imagine a better place? I don’t know, but, isn’t that a little like holding the annual meeting of Gambler’s Anonymous in Las Vegas?
Maybe global warming needs a publicist so we can start taking it seriously? When the planes crashed into the World Trade Center America mobilised, grounded all the planes and swung into immediate action. When the Covid pandemic burst on the world America responded with somewhat less alacrity than it did for 9/11, but at least there were lockdowns and masks and social distancing. Many of us took it seriously.
That same sense of urgent immediacy seems lacking among world leaders when it comes to the perils of climate change. And unlike 9/11 and the pandemic, this current climate crisis is an actual extinction level event.
What’s more, when we stage these annual meetings, ostensibly to fight for our lives against the evils caused by fossil fuels, why are we allowing ourselves to be wined and dined by our enemies at OPEC Central? Whose brainwork was it to allow a conference this vitally important to take place under the watchful eye of trillionaires with a vested interest in the status quo? It has all the chilling effect of Republicans watching over “election security.”
Oh, and get this, the president of Cop28 is one Sultan Al Jaber, the millionaire CEO of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. He claimed that there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global warming to 1.5C. Sorry, Al, but there’s nothing BUT science supporting just that. What’s more, the Sultan also said that a phase-out of fossil fuels would not allow sustainable development — “unless you want to take the world back into caves.”
In other words, the president of COP28 is a climate science denialist. This is nuts. There’s no other term for it. Oh, and by the way, better alive in a cave than dead in a penthouse.
Also, and pardon my recourse to that overworked metaphor, but is anyone unclear on why the fox wants to guard the henhouse in the first place? No, the only enduring mystery is why the fox does so brazenly, openly, shamelessly — and he gets away with it over and over and over again.
In short crude terms, COP28 sucks. We need to start taking climate change seriously, and these greenwashing annual bullshit conferences are simply not the way forward.
I’m in favour of cancelling COP29. Instead, we need engineers getting together to dismantle the fossil fuel industrial complex. We need scientists to design alternative energy sources. We need to go to work in cities like Detroit, London, Beijing, Rio, Tokyo and Paris. No more Limos, no more private jets, no more seven star hotels, no more expensive dinners. We need to get to work.
Clemenceau once said that war is too important to be left to the generals. Well, I don’t know about that, but it’s clear to me that climate change and its solution is clearly too important to be left to politicians. They aren’t interested in fixing it, they only want to make speeches about it, get photo-ops and have a good old time.
In the final analysis, global warming is not a political identity, it is not open to dispute any more than the law of gravity, and it concerns us all, the survival of our species and the health of our only planet. It demands our complete attention and anything less is suicide. We can start by making it a number one priority in our own lives. Let’s get going before it really is too late. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.