{"id":250602,"date":"2023-12-18T12:00:59","date_gmt":"2023-12-18T12:00:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=250602"},"modified":"2023-12-15T10:55:00","modified_gmt":"2023-12-15T10:55:00","slug":"big-oil-wins-big-at-cop28-in-dubai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2023\/12\/big-oil-wins-big-at-cop28-in-dubai\/","title":{"rendered":"Big Oil Wins Big at COP28 in Dubai"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Democracy NOW!<\/p><\/div>\n

14 Dec 2023<\/em> – Ain Dubai, in English, The Eye of Dubai, is touted as the world\u2019s largest Ferris wheel. The 820-foot tall wheel dominates the man-made island on which it rests. The massive, unblinking Eye permanently stares upon Dubai\u2019s beachfront, its thicket of high rise luxury hotels and its marina, brimming with foreign-owned yachts. The Eye operated for only a few months before being abruptly shuttered in 2022. People can only speculate why, as the United Arab Emirates, the autocratic petrostate that governs Dubai, won\u2019t say. One theory posits the wheel is slowly sinking into the sand, and that the structure, 25% heavier than the Eiffel Tower, will eventually topple, crushing the luxury residential high rises that surround it. The Eye thus stands as a glaring metaphor for humankind\u2019s folly, trying to bend Nature to our will, and failing.<\/p>\n

Across Dubai, Expo City is the sprawling facility where the UAE<\/span> hosted COP28,<\/a> this year\u2019s annual summit of the three-decades-long global effort to tackle climate change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC<\/span>). All-night negotiations heated up as the two-week event neared its scheduled conclusion. Led by this year\u2019s COP<\/span> president, Dr. Sultan Al Jaber, the CEO<\/span> of the UAE\u2019s state-owned Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, the gathered diplomats missed their Tuesday deadline, arguing over whether or not the final document would encourage a total \u201cphase out\u201d of fossil fuels or only the more mildly worded \u201cphase down.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the end, the bleary-eyed negotiators used neither phrase, perhaps overwhelmed by the assembled army of petrostate representatives and 2,400 or more fossil fuel lobbyists. The final text promised, instead, the \u201c[t]ransitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner.\u201d Activists praised the first-time use of \u201cfossil fuels\u201d in a UNFCCC<\/span> document. The climate activist group 350.org called it a \u201cweak but welcome nod\u201d in an otherwise \u201cloophole-ridden text.\u201d<\/p>\n

As COP28 started, climate scientist Kevin Anderson predicted on social media, \u201cThis is a Cabal of Oil Producers not a climate COP<\/span>. The outcome is known.\u201d<\/p>\n

Anderson didn\u2019t attend COP28, in part because he won\u2019t fly due to aviation\u2019s global greenhouse gas emissions, but also because of his growing skepticism with the process.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt every single level, the tendrils of Big Oil are changing our society and fundamentally changing our climate,\u201d Anderson said on the Democracy Now! news hour, halfway through COP28.<\/a> \u201cThese COPs have become little more than a scam under which the oil and other fossil fuel companies are hiding that nothing is being done.\u201d<\/p>\n

The outcome of COP28 includes a Global Stocktake, an assessment of how the world\u2019s 200+ nations are doing eight years after the UNFCCC\u2019s Paris Agreement was hammered out in 2015, with its aspirational goal of limiting global warming over pre-industrial levels to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).<\/p>\n

The loopholes mentioned by 350.org allow continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels. \u201cPhasing out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies\u201d is encouraged, which suggests that \u201cefficient\u201d fossil fuel subsidies exist, a point the climate divestment movement refutes. The document also claims that \u201ctransitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition.\u201d This clearly refers to methane, marketed by the industry as \u201cnatural gas,\u201d which is many times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.<\/p>\n

Then there is the issue of who is going to pay to move the global economy off of its dependence on fossil fuels.<\/p>\n

\u201cNone of the transition is funded,\u201d Asad Rehman, lead spokesperson for the Climate Justice Coalition, said from COP28 after the deal was finalized.<\/a> \u201cThe idea of providing climate finance, public climate finance, that is really desperately needed, is being frittered away. Instead, the only mentions of finance are about private capital.\u201d To attract the vast sums needed, Rehman says, \u201cyou\u2019re lowering environmental standards. You\u2019re lowering workers\u2019 rights standards. You make your economy much more attractive to private capital\u2026so now the responsibility has fallen on developing countries to guarantee profit. It\u2019s utter madness.\u201d<\/p>\n

COP29, next year\u2019s summit, will be in Baku, Azerbaijan, another repressive petrostate. Human Rights Watch reported on December 5th, \u201cA new wave of repression in Azerbaijan is targeting foreign-funded independent media as well as journalists who criticize the government and expose high-level corruption.\u201d Six journalists were arrested.<\/p>\n

Petrostates like the UAE<\/span> and Azerbaijan play predictable roles in protecting the status quo, but it\u2019s the world\u2019s biggest petrostate that brandishes the most power inside the COPs: the United States. As the largest producer and exporter of fossil fuels, and as the world\u2019s largest historical emitter of greenhouse gasses, the US bears the most responsibility for the climate crisis. While negotiations move from the shifting sands of Dubai with its sinking Eye to Azerbaijan, what people demand of their elected leaders, here in the United States, matters around the world.<\/p>\n

___________________________________________<\/em><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Amy Goodman is the host of \u201c<\/em>Democracy Now!\u201d a daily international TV\/radio news hour airing on more than 900 stations in North America. She is the author of <\/em>Breaking the Sound Barrier, released in paperback and now a <\/em>New York Times best-seller.<\/em><\/p>\n

Denis Moynihan is the co-founder of <\/em>Democracy Now! Since 2002, he has participated in the organization\u2019s worldwide distribution, infrastructure development, and the coordination of complex live broadcasts from many continents. He lives in Denver where he is developing a new noncommercial community radio station.<\/em><\/p>\n

The original content of this program is licensed under a <\/em>Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License<\/em><\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 democracynow.org<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

14 Dec 2023 – COP29 next year will be in Azerbaijan, another repressive petrostate where on 5 Dec six journalists were arrested. Petrostates like the UAE and Azerbaijan play predictable roles in protecting the status quo, but it\u2019s the world\u2019s biggest petrostate that brandishes the most power inside the COPs: the United States.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":65754,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[61],"tags":[2182,686,3184,3192,2828,993,981,124,70],"class_list":["post-250602","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-environment","tag-azerbaijan","tag-climate-change","tag-cop28","tag-cop29","tag-dubai","tag-global-warming","tag-uae","tag-united-nations","tag-usa"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250602","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250602"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250602\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":250605,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250602\/revisions\/250605"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/65754"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250602"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250602"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250602"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}