Nairobi hosts the Africa Climate Summit next week, three months ahead of the Conference of Parties (CoP28) in the United Arab Emirates. The UAE conference comes a year after CoP27 in Sharma El Sheikh, an Egyptian desert resort.
These are three of many climate change-related jamborees in recent times. Others are planned for the immediate future. Reduction of production and consumption of fossil fuel and climate justice financing are lead agenda items.
The agenda of the Nairobi summit, which the Africa Union is organising in partnership with the host country, is ‘driving green growth and climate finance solutions for Africa and the world.’
Fossil fuel lobbyists know their interests are jeopardised when green technologies – solar and wind – gain traction. The fossil fuel steakholders are out, with capital, to defend their commercial interests.
Influence peddling, climate change denial and manufacturing stalemates are their priorities during endless climate justice negotiations. Texas Energy Alliance, a US fossil fuel lobby, is among the funders of climate change denialists.
The common denominator in these conferences is the influx of delegates from the fossil fuel industry. The interests of petrostates often dominate. Petroleum producers have a huge stake in climate change discussions.
International climate change discussions are increasingly prone to filibustering – sponsored and manufactured stalemates. Nairobi will likely see these next week, as CoP27 did.
CoP28 to be in Dubai’s Expo City, is already compromised. It is not a coincidence that the president of CoP28, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is also the chief executive officer of Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
It may also not be coincidental that the United Arab Emirates, a major petrostate, will host CoP28 in December.
During last year’s CoP27 in Egypt, petrostates vetoed references to a ‘fossil fuel phase-down’ in the CoP resolutions. They are likely to create the same stalemate in Abu Dhabi, and likely during the Nairobi Africa Climate Summit.
Cynics have observed the dominance of fossil fuel delegations at these meetings. Their filibustering was noted during the Madrid CoP25 in 2019.
Al Gore, a former US vice president and a lead voice for the reduction of carbon emissions, gives these issues a fresh momentum in a blistering Ted Talk.
Al Gore, a Nobel laureate, is a consistent, pioneering voice in climate change solutions. He warns fossil fuel industry has brazenly gained de facto control of the United Nations’ annual Conference of the Parties, including this year’s CoP28.
He says: “They have used fraud and falsehoods on an industrial scale. And by lavishly funding their legacy networks of political and economic power, they have captured the policymaking process in too many countries.”
Climate change refers to long-term shifts in temperatures and weather patterns, mainly caused by human activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels.
United Nations secretary general Antonio Guterres describes the fossil fuel industry as, “the polluted heart of the climate crisis”.
Covering Climate Now, a US advocate of climate change reporting, captures the crisis in 15 words: "Extreme heat is driven by climate change. Climate change is driven by burning fossil fuels.”
Al Gore says in the Ted Talk, “The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis.”
The fires on Maui Island, Hawaii, US, this month, and record heatwaves in China and elsewhere in June, lend climate change solutions new urgency. “This year’s record heat, fires and flooding around the world are climatic cousins — related by way of climate change,” writes Covering Climate Now.
"In our climate-changed era, disasters like the Maui fires no longer happen in a vacuum. All of them, to some extent, are provoked or made worse by climate change."
Yet fossil fuel boosters still talk as if carbon capture is the solution, without care for accountability. Some oil firms expect to reduce carbon emissions by ‘direct air capture’ – a technology for sucking carbon directly from the air, after it’s emitted, or for reuse to produce more oil.
But cynics dismiss the idea of carbon-sucking vacuums as a way of combating climate change. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change warns, “Engineering-based removal activities are technologically and economically unproven, especially at scale, and pose unknown environmental and social risks.”
A University of Oxford study concludes that carbon capture and storage is an example of a “non-improving technology”.
