A triumph for greed over commonsense and humanity
Nov 27, 2024
For the third year in a row the nations of the world, meeting in solemn climate conclave, have vowed to cook their children and grandchildren alive.
COP29, chaired by petro-state Azerbaijan and stuffed to the gills with 1773 oil industry lobbyists, was never going to deliver more than tokenism and lip service to the greatest compound crisis ever to befall H. sapiens.
The outcome – a pledge rising to $300bn a year from the rich countries to the poor, will go nowhere near staunching the $1.3 trillion haemorrhage in climate damage which oil and coal currently inflict on them annually. It is a rich man’s crumb, tossed contemptuously from his overladen table, to his fellow citizens.
To give some perspective on how irredeemably insulting the offer is, the governments of the world seem perfectly content to pay $7 trillion in subsidies to the oil industry, but can afford only 4 per cent of that sum to help stabilise its main victims.
In the words of a plainly frustrated UN Secretary General, Antonio Guterres, “COP29 comes at the close of a brutal year – a year seared by record temperatures, and scarred by climate disaster, all as emissions continue to rise. Developing countries swamped by debt, pummelled by disasters, and left behind in the renewables revolution, are in desperate need of funds.”
“I had hoped for a more ambitious outcome – on both finance and mitigation – to meet the great challenge we face,” he added, mournfully but diplomatically.
In a gruesome concatenation, the COP29 disaster falls on top of the US election, which has led to the appointment of a Trump Cabinet consisting chiefly of MAGA climate deniers. The US must now be rated as hostile to climate progress as Russia or Saudia Arabia.
In leather-furnished oil clubhouses around the planet the champagne corks are popping, to celebrate the petrofascists’ sweeping victory over democracy, humanity and commonsense as the Earth moves another giant stride closer to ‘uninhabitable’.
Uninhabitable, by the way, refers to an Earth heated by an average of +3-+4 degrees C, which will occur before the end of this century. The graph below from the EU climate agency Copernicus, shows land temperatures have risen on average by 1.8 degrees since 1900. The 1.5 degree target for global emissions is now dead, in the view of most climate scientists.
It’s not just about hurricanes, floods and rising sea levels. These are already on the rampage. It’s about the continuing – and potentially sudden – collapse in global food systems and supply chains. That’s where the ordinary citizen will come face-to-face with the real climate crisis – in soaring food bills and empty supermarkets. In the collapse of law and order, mass flight and government failures.
Arguably Trump, and his Cabinet of the Cognitively Impaired, is one direct outcome of the climate food crunch. Journalists write blithely about how inflationary fears are stoking authoritarian movements around the world – but the true fear, for most ordinary people, is the fear of hunger. Memories of WW1 starvation drove 1930s Germany into the arms of national socialism. Stalin used hunger to crush the Ukraine and Soviet farmers. Hunger drove both France and Russia to revolution. Hunger laid the ground for China’s Tai Ping civil war that claimed >30 million lives.
Today, the old Horseman, Famine, is again spurring his skeletal steed over a climate-ravaged world, urged on by the petrogiants.
The particular irony in the refusal of the world’s government to take the climate crisis seriously, and the blinkered greed of the oil magnates is that both will destroy themselves – along with everybody else.
Several organisations have projected climate refugees to reach 1-1.2 billion by 2050. Such numbers are unfathomable, especially when contrasted with current world migration and refugee numbers of about 350 million. The paranoia about refugees and ‘foreigners’ so evident in the recent US election is becoming a universal fear. And rightly so, as such numbers will sweep away entire nations, their borders and governments.
Such an event is unlikely to occur without a simultaneous implosion in the world economy, as nation after nation discovers its currency to be worthless. A world without money and short on food will be a new experience for most – one where they will struggle to cope.
The one upside of global economic collapse is that it would place the ‘rich’ on a par with everybody else, as their monetary holdings evaporate. It may be the greatest leveller of all time.
There is thus a domino chain to the process of collapse. But the falling sequence begins by forcing the world to overheat by increasing carbon emissions – and food and water supplies to fail globally.
Another irony is that the only large and powerful country with anything even approaching a realistic grasp of the situation is China. While not immune to the lure of fossil fuels, China has seen past them into the era of clean energy, renewable food and regenerated lands. It is carefully positioning itself as a leader among nations which wish to avoid collapse. In this new world, ideology will be taking a back seat over the pragmatic necessities for survival.
Australia, and other countries, now have to choose whether they wish to ally themselves to collapse – as exhibited by the US, Russia and Saudis – or survival, on a habitable Earth.
It’s not a hard choice to make. Pity it has to be left to politicians to make it.
For a more detailed read on the looming global food crisis and what to do about it, see Julian Cribb:
Julian Cribb AM is an Australian science writer and author of six books on the human existential emergency. His latest book is “How to Fix a Broken Planet” (Cambridge University Press, 2023)
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