Where to hold a global conference about the climate crisis? Why, Dubai of course

A petrostate hosting a climate conference: Brilliant!

It sounds like a Monty Python sketch, as dreamed up by Terry Gilliam, newly wakened from a fever dream, and hosted by Spiny Norman, the giant hedgehog.

Almost everything about CoP28, underway in Dubai through Dec.12th, is enough to fry the brain, from the name — “CoP” stands for “Convention of the Parties,” a headline grabber if ever there were one — to the inconvenient truth that the conference’s president, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, also happens to be the CEO of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil firm.

Don’t look so doubtful! It’s a coincidence, and coincidence only. What’s the matter with you?

As extinction events go, debating the End of Days in the glass towers of Dubai, a gleaming metropolis on the Persian Gulf where, rightly speaking, there shouldn’t even be a town, let alone one of the shinest cities on the planet, deserves top marks for style, if not substance.

It’s hard to go out on a limb and argue the benefits of keeping carbon emissions within a limit that will hold temperature to within the 1.5°C increase agreed to at the 2015 Paris Agreement if that limb is no longer attached to a living, breathing tree.

Most scientists worth their 250 grams of salt now say we’ll be lucky if we can keep world temperatures within 3.0°C of the ideal. In the same way those same scientists admit their original climate projections, criticized at the time for being overly pessimistic and alarmist, were too conservative.

Never mind Al Gore. Global heating is happening at a faster rate than even the most dire predictions in 2015. That’s especially evident in the polar regions, where ice melt is accelerating at a pace not seen since the last mass extinction. The day may yet come when even 3° seems mild. The question is no longer if, but when.

Against this backdrop, an opinion piece by climate campaigner Vanessa Nakate for Al-Jazeera, posted this past summer, hit any number of sore points, all the more so as Nakate, from Uganda, has become the public face for the climate campaign across the developing world, in the same way Greta Thunberg, a close friend, has raised consciousness across the northern hemisphere.

“There is a big difference between national leaders and global leaders,” Nakate wrote. “The former push national interests on the global stage, often using the rhetoric of global solutions. The latter carry a vision that extends beyond personal interests, election cycles or profit margins to do the best for humanity.”

The world will have to heat a lot more before Thunberg’s native Sweden is affected to the point where it becomes unlivable; Uganda, on the equator, is already on the way there.

Global ice melt may be easiest to spot in the polar regions, but it’s across the equatorial tropics that climate change’s effects will be felt first.

With that as a backdrop, it’s hard not to be skeptical of the idea that the head of a global oil company will drive CoP28 towerd an outcome that will give the world hope in the looming shadow of a mass extinction.

Nakate: “The United Nations has made it clear that the world needs to cut its emissions by 45 percent by 2030 to have a chance at staying under the 1.5C warming threshold. Currently, carbon capture and storage technology is highly expensive and simply does not exist at the necessary scale to make even a scratch on that target. We do not have time for fairytale solutions designed to save the oil and gas industry.

“UN Secretary-General António Guterres has called investing in new fossil fuel projects ‘moral and economic madness.’ The International Energy Agency says we cannot afford to put in any new finance for coal, oil or gas if we are to meet net-zero targets; instead, we need a massive deployment of renewable energy. The science is clear and the goal is clear, but we are still missing the global leadership to take us there.

“We can no longer prevent the climate crisis, but every fraction of a degree of further warming will make heatwaves more intense, droughts more pro- longed and storms more powerful.

“Every year that passes without a rapid transformation of our economies away from fossil fuels means more will be lost to the climate crisis.”

The truth is no longer just inconvenient. It’s beginning to hurt.