C'est la mort

 

JEFFREY ST. CLAIR

This year has been the hottest in the recorded history of the planet, a year when the Earth hit five catastrophic tipping points posing “threats of a magnitude never faced by humanity,” so you might be forgiven for thinking it’s an auspicious time for a global summit on the climate crisis. You’d be wrong. In fact, rarely have we seen a more blatant and gratuitous display of carbon washing, starting with siting the conference in the world’s 7th largest oil producer, the UAE, whose entire economy flows from crude production, and ending with the leader of the world’s largest crude oil producer, the US at 12.9 billion barrels a day, skipping the conference altogether and sending in his place the desiccated globetrotter John Kerry, to assure the assembled that the US “largely” backs “phasing out” the use of fossil fuels …once they’ve drained the Arctic slope and Gulf of Mexico.

Before COP28 even opened its doors to the flood of oil executives, lobbyists, PR hacks and carbon capture conmen, the chair of the conference, Sultan Al Jaber, had been caught red-handed plotting to use the gathering to cut deals to sell UAE oil and carbon capture technology, deals he later shrugged off by ridiculing the whole idea of phasing out fossil fuel production, claiming it would return the people of the world “back into caves.”

“There is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C,” the president of COP28 asserted last week. “I’m telling you, I’m the man in charge.” So, c’est la vie. Or c’est la mort, I suppose