Glimmer of Hope

Roundups of the year’s most important environmental stories can’t help but focus on the bad. Here’s a good news story, though.

The most important environmental stories of any year are always those most likely to have ripple effects well into the future.

Hot winter, hot spring, hot summer and hot fall, capped by a bogus climate conference in an Arabian Gulf petrostate to close the year, marked 2023 as a year to forget, though, of course, we can’t — and shouldn’t.

The past year was the world’s hottest since record-keeping began, meteorologists and climatologists agree. Don’t argue. The science is in. Time to stop playing games.

On every continent and across every season, surface temperatures broke long-standing records and, in the process, made it clear that the age of climate change isn’t some distant what-if. It is here, now.

There were glimmers of hope, though, if a glimmer is, in truth, all they are. Offhand, I can think of two.

I’ll get to the second, involving youth climate protesters and the courts, in my next post. First, though, here’s a story that barely caused a ripple in the mainstream press, but which has the potential to change the way governments think and act in the future.

Ecuador, August. This country of 17 million people (according to the official 2022 census) and covering some 282,000 km² (109,000 square miles) is one of 17 countries officially designated by the NGO Conservation International as megadiverse, those countries that are home to the majority of the Earth’s wild species, including a wide range of endemic plant and animal species found nowhere else. Ecuador’s territorial responsibility includes the Galápagos Islands — and it is also home to potentially vast reserves of oil.

Even as some countries say one thing and do another with regards to oil exploration and development — hello, Norway — on Aug. 20th Ecauadorans voted in a historic referendum to put the brakes on the development of all new oil wells in Parque Nacional Yasuní in the Amazon, one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet.

Unesco designated Yasuní as a World Biosphere Reserve in 1989. It covers more than 1m hectares (2.5m acres) and is home to 610 species of birds, 139 species of amphibians and 121 species of reptiles. On one hectare alone there are 665 tree and bush species, more species than in the whole of Europe or the USA and Canada combined.

On one hectare alone there are 665 tree and bush species, more species than in the whole of Europe or the USA and Canada combined.

The referendum was included as part of the first round of presidential elections. In the end, voters chose to safeguard the biosphere by a margin of nearly 20%, with more than 58% in favour and 41% against.

The move means an estimated 725m barrels of oil will stay underground in an area of the Amazon that is also home to the Tagaeri and Taromenane indigenous tribes, two of the world’s last remaining “uncontacted” Indigenous communities.

Ecuador’s voters took the unprecedented step of knowingly forgoing the profits to be made from oil extraction. They decided the damage was not worth the risk, no doubt aware of the oil industry’s reckless practices and appalling record when it comes to extracting oil in the Amazon region, not to mention attendant factors such as water pollution, environmental degradation and human rights abuses.

At a time when the climate crisis is intensifying and the Amazon rainforest is fast approaching an irreversible tipping point, Ecuador has become one of the few countries in the world to set limits on resource extraction through a democratic vote.

In a second referendum, Ecuadoran voters voted to block gold mining in the Chocó Andino, a sensitive highland biosphere near the capital of Quito, by an even larger margin: 68% to 31%. Pedro Bermeo, founding member of Yasunidos, an activist group that gathered hundreds of thousands of signatures petitioning the referendum, told the Guardian newspaper that the vote shows that the “greatest national consensus at this time is in the defence of nature, the defence of Indigenous peoples and nationalities, the defence of life.”

Well, yes. It doesn’t end there, though.

“The fight isn’t over,” Bermneo added. “Even if politicians separate us, nature unites us, and we will work together to ensure the government complies with the will of Ecuadorian people.”

And, with luck, the will of people the world over.

The referendum is binding — and permanent. It cannot and will not be undone by a future government; it’s enshrined in law.

Baby steps, but steps just the same.

Hablemos de Culturas

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Deal! Or No Deal?

An 11th-hour deal has been struck at the CoP28 climate talks — but what kind of deal? The devil’s in the details, as always.

It’s being labelled “the UAE consensus,” but those are not the kind of words to stir hope and joy in the climate science community.

On the face of it, the 11th hour — literally, midnight Pacific Time — agreement to “transition away” from fossil fuels sounds like, if not the end result exactly, a step in the right direction.

What the EU has labelled “the beginning of the end of fossil fuels” is also being singled out by the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) as an “improvement,” but with a “litany of loopholes.”

Climate justice campaigners are, by and large, disappointed with the wording, which they say can — and probably will — stand in the way of implementation.

Was it ever thus.

The reaction from small island countries like Tuvalu, Vanuatu and Kiribati is telling because they are the nation states most vulnerable to the impacts of the climate crisis in the immediate term, as opposed to “somewhere in the future,” say, 2050, when — in theory — the world will have cut greenhouse gas emissions enough to limit global heating to no more than 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.

That was already a tall order as the science tells us that the world is already at 1.7°C ahead of pre-industrial levels. Rapid ice melt in the polar regions and glaciers in more temperate climes might not seem evident right now in London, New York and Washington D.C., but it is an existential issue in Tonga, Micronesia and the Maldives, among 33 other member states.

The deal encourages the world’s nations to embark on a de facto phasing out of fossil fuels, but developing countries still need billions of dollars to help them transition away from coal, oil and gas. The G7 nations, fast-growing economies like those in China and India, and the wealthy oil sheikhdoms of the Arabian Gulf are not compelled, let alone required, to move as quickly as the climate science urges. The US has pledged just $20 million in new finance to help emerging nations, and even that amount — paltry considering the US is also the world’s most active producer of oil and gas — and even that is likely to be rolled back when political conservatives regain power in the US White House and Congress, as they are likely to do next November, with Canada to follow in 2025.

China has already vowed to expand coal production, and India will face no penalty for following suit. Russia, which worked hard behind the scenes to forestall any kind of deal, including this one, will face little opposition next year, when the UN’s climate conference will be held in Azerbaijan, an oil producer and more or less a client state of the oil and gas-producing Putinocracy.

There is a silver lining to all this, if silver is the right word exactly. Timing, as always, is a factor. Perhaps shamed by the optics of handing the world’s biggest, most important climate conference to Azerbaijan in 2024, the following year’s conference will be held in Brazil. And not just Brazil, but in the heart of the Amazon rainforest, the symbol of nature’s last stand against global heating.

Let’s hope it’s still there.

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And the Winner Is … Azerbaijan

United Nations policy of sharing climate conferences among the world’s regions means next year’s meeting will be held in another petrostate. Politics trumps climate policy — again.

Saturday’s “Global Day of Action,” in which climate campaigners from around the world staged demonstrations at an already fractious CoP28 meeting in the UAE, produced yet another disconnect. Next year’s climate conference — or what’s left of climate anyway — will be hosted by the unitary semi-presidential Republic of Azerbaijan, a petrostate rich in oil and gas with many, many pipelines.

So much for the idea of rolling back the world’s reliance on emissions-causing fossil fuels, let alone phasing fossil fuels out entirely.

The Southern Gas Corridor connects Azerbaijan’s vast Shah Deniz gas field to continental Europe, reducing the EU’s dependence on Russian gas — making it one of the most active regions in the world for oil exploration and development. Hoopla!

If you’re wondering how a petrostate ended up hosting the UN’s most high-profile conference on the environment — for the second year in a row — blame war.

UN policy means that 2024 is Eastern Europe’s turn to take over the rotating presidency. The decision has to be unanimous. In theory, that’s good policy for a global organization that claims to represent every region of the world, though in practice it often results in decisions that satisfy no one. Russia vetoed EU countries from hosting — don’t cry for me, Ukraine — and Armenia initially blocked Azerbaijan’s bid. Azerbaijan seized the Armenian enclave of Nagorno-Karabakh in September after more than 30 years of simmering tensions, forcing some 120,000 ethnic Armenians to flee their homes in what Foreign Policy magazine called “one of the starkest examples of forced displacement in the 21st century.” This was about four weeks before the conflagration in Gaza, and follows on the heels of Russia’s invasion of eastern Ukraine, which has stalled in the bloodiest stalemated conflict in Europe since the Second World War.

Late last week, in a desperate bid to forge a peace deal, Armenia — hopelessly overmatched militarily against Azerbaijan — withdrew its own bid to host CoP29 and agreed to support its tormentor. Money talks. The reality is that few countries in Eastern Europe are able to stump up the finances and facilities needed to host such a large conference, and Russia’s threatened veto against EU countries ruled out benign candidates like the democratic republic of Slovenia — it’s governed by a democratically elected prime minister as the head of government and a democratically elected president as head of state!

Never mind that, by most accounts, Slovenia — a mostly mountainous and forested country bordered by Italy to the west, Austria to the north, Hungary to the northeast, Croatia to the south and the Adriatic Sea to the southwest — would have made an ideal host for a global climate conference.

What the hell had this got to do with the climate crisis, you might well ask. Welcome to realpolitik in the 21st century.

“Choosing Azerbaijan as a host will do little to quell protests from climate (campaigners) that (global climate conferences) have been … captured by fossil fuel interests,” The Guardian reported Saturday. “Much like this year’s host, the country of 10 million people on the border of Eastern Europe and Western Asia relies heavily on digging up fuels that heat the planet when burned.

“Oil and gas production accounted for nearly half of the country’s GDP and over 92.5% of its export revenue last year, according to the US government’s International Trade Administration.”

Alrighty then!

Business as usual, in other words.

EPA

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Yes, But Is That Hot Dog Halal?

Judging from early media reports, the CoP 28 climate conference in Dubai is as much about optics as substance. Now about that $6 cup of coffee…

Press Association/PA

If you’re like me and your visual cortex has been conditioned over time to react to an image in real-time before reading the caption, you could be forgiven for thinking the picture above has something to do with Unilever.

Since the photo accompanies a story about the CoP28 climate conference underway in Dubai, you can be forgiven for thinking that Unilever, the world’s largest producer of soap that distributes a wide range of consumer products to more than 190 countries, has run afoul of moral and ethical guidelines that govern locally sourced, enviro-friendly consumer goods.

But no, it has nothing to do with that.

Rather, it’s a speech by Bank of America’s CEO during a reception this past week at the annual UN climate conference.

This year, the conference is being staged in a gleaming city of glass towers on the edge of the vast Arabian sand sea.

Yes, it has been hot there — 30°C, or 86°F — but do keep in mind that November to April is reportedly the best time to visit Dubai, “during the winter months.”

Irony is never in short supply at these get-togethers, and so far, just 72 hours in, CoP28 has not disappointed.

Staging a global climate conference in an oil kingdom during a time of unprecedented temperature rises — and melting ice caps — is one thing, but news reports fixating on where to go and what to eat in Dubai during a global climate conference linking 70,000 delegates take the frisson to a whole new level.

Media communication in our modern-day wired world is all about optics, after all.

Style is everything, and substance just has to take its chances. Irony — loosely defined as language that says one thing but means the opposite — abounds.

And so we have news stories about $6 coffees (£4.75) — more expensive than New York! — and reports of delegates packing boxed lunches and Thermoses to beat the cost of doing business in one of the priciest cities on the planet.

After all, it’s hard to grow coffee in the Empty Quarter, the largest continuous body of sand in the world, where temperatures can climb as high as 52°C (125.6°F) on a warm summer’s day.

Scouring the area for locally sourced food can only go so far in the middle of a sand sea.

Green-minded delegates insist on vegan, eco-friendly food — CoP24 in Poland was roundly criticized for being a sausage fest, literally — but as the Guardian reported this past week, carnivores aren’t being left out entirely in Dubai. The chicken sausage rolls are said to be halal, too; local customs have to count for something.

Then there are the news stories about eco-fashions on display. Delegates, diplomats and climate campaigners from more than 180 countries — almost as many as Unilever distributes to — reputedly sport everything from Amazonian headdresses and West African wax prints to Pacific island floral garlands and Mayan huipils.

Then there is the ever-present presence of the fossil fuel industry — fitting for a climate conference in a petrostate with one of the world’s largest sand seas on one side and the Persian Gulf on the other. As Guardian environment editor Damian Carrington reported Thursday, when one delegate opened her hotel room curtains in the morning, she was greeted by the world’s largest gas power-producing facility.

“‘Fitting,’ Carrington reported her as saying, ‘I am going to stare at this through the haze of pollution for two weeks.’”

Heading to the conference centre on the metro — public transportation! — “at least 50 tall industrial smokestacks mark the way,” Carrington noted.

Gas flaring is an added bonus. It’s part of the entertainment.

Some delegates arriving at CoP28, Carrington observed, are more concerned about what’s outside the Expo City conference centre, namely the air quality.

“A haze settled over Dubai on Tuesday and Wednesday,” Carrington reported, “shrouding its vertiginous buildings and bringing air pollution unhealthy to sensitive groups, according to IQAir, an air monitoring service.

“The air quality improved a little on Thursday, the opening day of CoP28, but was still four times worse than guideline levels set by the World Health Organization.”

Now that’s irony for you.

The Sustainable Agency

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