Two Questions Before COP28

I was encouraged by former UN chief Christiana Figueres' comments reported by The Guardian's Dharna Noor September 21, 2023, "If [fossil fuel companies] are going to be [at COP28] only to be obstructors, and only to put spanners into the system, they should not be there.” The subtitle notes, "‘My patience ran out,’ said Christiana Figueres, who for years had advocated oil companies should be involved in policymaking talks." 

This complements my November 28, 2022, post "Circus" COPS and Civil Society "Clowns," and my November 21, 2022 post "Good COP, Bad COP" in which I wrote, "To use a football metaphor, imagine a fullback dropping the ball 27 consecutive games. Maybe it's time to get a new fullback. [par break] In this case, that means two separate COPs each year, one with fossil fuel interests, and one without. Global media, governments, and citizens could decide which COP to focus on. [ . . . . ] Politicians and Big Oil executives have children too, and may eventually see the shared responsibility to protect all children in every country. Unfortunately, the global community, especially in the global south, can't wait another 10 years or longer."

Similarly, Sandra Laville wrote in The Guardian June 22, 2023, "The Church of England is divesting from fossil fuels in its multibillion pound endowment and pension funds over climate concerns and what the church claims are recent U-turns by oil and gas companies."  Laville noted, "Responding to the announcement, Jennifer Larbie, Christian Aid’s head of global advocacy, said: 'It is telling that the Church of England, which has worked tirelessly to engage with the oil and gas industry and shift it on to a sustainable approach, has decided that these companies are beyond the pale.'"

Recently, the UK and Sweden seem to be following the advice of a Shell CEO who told Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Founding Director of Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, "The climate problem is real but it is completely intractable. You can not solve it. So, let's get rich quick before the world ends, huh?" I included Schellnhuber's words in my August 25, 2018 post before the video was deleted. 

In other words, as I wrote in my October 10, 2022 post, "Deactivating Big Oil now will likely be no less dramatic than Deactivation of Hal 9000."

Here are two questions for my readers in 110 countries:

1) What would a Nonviolent Political D-Day look like at some future COP?

2) Would you like to do this before or after Earth's coral reefs are bleached, Amazon rainforest is gone, and island nations are submerged?

Late 2023 and Summer 2024 look bleak from various forecasts. In my previous post I linked Dave Borlace's video The heat may not kill you, but the global food crisis might! - September 17, 2023, in which he noted a Mintec August 21, 2023 paper with "forecast updates [ . . . ] pointing towards a Very Strong El Nino event [ . . . ] triggering extreme and potentially destructive weather globally," and a Barclay's January 2023 paper noting "extreme weather" as one of three factors in "the current predicament" [ . . . . ] "with the food price volatility further exposing the fragility of our global food system: rising food insecurity, social unrest, human displacement and migration are all possible effects."

I also chose Dave Borlace's new video Big Oil, Big Lies and Big Al... as one of my favorites. It was posted yesterday, and already has 87,496 views. 

Johan Rockström, IPCC, and World Leaders Bet Human Future on Fantasy-Scale Direct Air Capture, and Carbon Capture/Storage

Video begins at 33:47.

Unsaid in the above video is that world leaders would rather use risky, and possibly war-producing, unilateral geoengineering than lose privilege and negative emission technologies fantasy. 

As Al Gore, former Harvard Fellow Ye Tao, and Kevin Anderson (above) have clearly shown, negative emission technologies are not realistic solutions given scale, rate of climate change, and time it will take these machines/devices to make meaningful carbon reductions. Instead, fossil fuel use must be quickly cut. God and the universe have given us a winning lottery ticket with a blue planet supporting life, and world leaders are trashing it.

In the above video Johan Rockström says at 33:47: "If you take away negative emission technologies, you would exceed 10 percent [on mitigation pathways to reduce carbon] very rapidly [to meet our goals]. You would be more than 10 to 15 percent. [ . . . ] That's not revolution. That is a complete disruption of the global economy. [ . . . ] I mean then you need to bulldoze down coal-fire plants basically. You would be in a compete global Marshall Plan. It's a war zone agenda."

Kevin Anderson responds, "[ . . . . ] Our choice to fail over the last 30 years has brought us to this position. [ . . . . ] Our way out of the Marshall Plan is to say we are going to have these negative emissions. I think we need to say that, okay, that's one way out of it -- if they work. Another way out of it is the Marshall Plan. [ . . . .] I would have a guess when we say 'That's not feasible.' many people elsewhere in the world say, 'Of course it's feasible. We've been living like that for years.' And other people live good quality of lives in the developing countries as well [ . . . ] with much lower consumption than we have on average in the global north, let alone the wealthy of us in the global north. [ . . . . ]" 

Rockström responds, "[ . . . . ] For an orderly phaseout [of fossil fuels] I think The Marshall Plan option is simply not an option. [ . . . . ]"

Anderson acknowledged, "I'm not against doing these technologies. I think we should be researching them. Deploy them if they meet broader sustainability, ecological, and social sustainability criteria. [ . . . . ] But to deeply rely on [negative emission technologies] in all of our models is to me a systemic bias, and it has stopped us asking other questions. [ . . . . ] We, as [an academic] community here, have not served society well because we have closed that debate down."

I agree with Anderson about the problem of relying on negative emission technologies. I recall Al Gore's criticism of a direct air capture machine, "They're improving this, and [in] the new model seven years from now each of these machines is going to be able to capture 27 seconds worth of annual emissions."

Prof. David Kipping, Carl Sagan Fellow at Harvard College Observatory, made an excellent video September 19, 2023 called Direct Air Capture Vs Thermodynamics to help readers understand the enormous challenges. 

My third favorite recent video is Dave Borlace's The heat may not kill you, but the global food crisis might! - September 17, 2023. I was also impressed by one of the saddest, and most honest, cartoons I have seen August 28, 2023 done by First Dog on the Moon in The Guardian called I only read about climate change now because I have to.

Given our small window of opportunity to avoid worst climate impacts, negative emission technologies appear nowhere near as good as a Hail Mary pass thrown by a rookie quarterback with an injured elbow against the wind.

To be clear, stakes are high. Founding director of the Potsdam Institute Hans Joachim Schellnhuber was quoted by Paddy Manning in a July 9, 2011 article in The Sydney Morning Herald: "in a 4 degree warmer world, the population ' . . . . carrying capacity estimates [are] below one billion people.'" Today theworldcounts.com notes Earth's population is over 8 billion. 

December 3, 2019 I suggested "Barry McGuire's protest song 'Eve of Destruction' written by P. F. Sloan in 1964 is a good COP25 theme song." The same goes for COP26, COP27, and it seems from Al Gore's comments COP28 (Nov 30, 2023 – Dec 12, 2023).