There are more delegates from the oil and gas industry than from most big countries at COP27, writes Rod Oram in Sharm el-Sheikh
Fossil fuels hijacked the carefully crafted theme-of-the day arc of the COP27 climate negotiations in Egypt yesterday.
Thursday was supposed to be Resilience Day. And indeed, there were plenty of presentations, debates and negotiations on the likes of adaptation to the climate crisis, and ways to ensure the health of people and the planet.
It followed on from Wednesday’s theme of Finance, in which a host of new proposals were made to massively ramp up the flow of money from governments and the private sector to help developed and developing countries rapidly decarbonise their energy systems and make their economies climate resilient.
Which itself flowed on from the World Leaders Summit Monday and Tuesday, in which more than a hundred men - but only 11 women -- offered soaring rhetoric about humanity’s climate nightmare and their countries’ responses.
But on Thursday a barrage of carbon bombshells landed on Resilience Day. The first was from Climate Action Tracker, the authoritative group of science organisations than lives up to its name.
Its latest report says that if all the new gas projects proposed to ease the supply crisis caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine were built, the resulting carbon emissions would be 10 percent of all the carbon dioxide that can be safely emitted by 2050.
The increase in gas capacity would be 235 percent by 2030 alone. The oversupply of liquified gas beyond likely demand would be some 500 megatonnes by the end of this decade, CAT calculates.
“We are witnessing a major push, which could cause global emissions to breach dangerous levels,” said Bill Hare, the chief executive of Climate Analytics, one of the organisations in CAT. “Increasing our reliance on fossil gas cannot be the solution to today’s energy and climate crises anywhere.”
Current plans to expand LNG capacity undermine the 1.5C goal
Only last year, the International Energy Agency warned that no new fossil fuel developments could be undertaken if the world was to keep under to 1.5C, the threshold above which climate change will accelerate rapidly.
A second carbon bombshell revealed that global oil and gas companies are rapidly increasing their exploration and development projects in Africa, which threatens to destroy vast areas of rainforest and other biodiverse landscapes, the Rainforest Foundation UK and Earth Insights said in their report Congo in the Crosshairs.
Oil and gas fields already cover some 10 percent of the African continent. But this could almost quadruple if all the new projects currently proposed go ahead. The Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, is offering large areas of its rainforest, the world’s second largest after the Amazon, for oil exploration.
“As much as we need oxygen, we also need bread,” Congolese environment minister, Ève Bazaiba, said last month.
Yet, the DRC also has vast potential sources of renewal energy, and biodiversity to support nature-based solutions to the climate crisis.
Echoing the Resilience theme-of-the-day, Tyson Miller, Earth Insight’s executive director said: “What the world needs now are 21st-century solutions that put people, nature, and climate stability first. The international community needs to support Congo basin countries in charting new paths to leave oil and gas in the ground and preserve the rich natural and cultural heritage of the region.”
Yet, currently Africa lags far behind the rest of the world on renewable investment. Last year it attracted less than 1 percent of such capital, which totalled US$434 billion, Bloomberg New Energy Finance reported recently.
A third carbon bombshell on COP27 yesterday was the revelation of the number of fossil fuel industry delegates attending the climate conference: 636. That’s a rise of 25 percent from COP26 in Glasgow last year.
There, they were larger than any single country delegation. Here, they are outnumbered by the delegation from the United Arab Emirates, the fossil fuel nation hosting COP28 next year. It has 1,070 registered delegates, up from 176 in Glasgow. COP27’s delegates total some 45,000.
“The explosion in the number of industry delegates attending the negotiations reinforces the conviction of the climate justice community that the industry views the COP as a carnival of sorts, and not a space to address the ongoing and imminent climate crisis,” said Kwami Kpondzo from Friends of the Earth Togo.
The fundamental transformation from carbon economies to renewable economies will take profound changes in government policies, business strategies, societal behaviour and consumer responses – with a fundamental shift in capital flows making those possible.
Among the suggested new finance mechanisms proposed on Wednesday, one was by far the most ambitious. It was the Bridgetown Initiative from Mia Mottley, the Prime Minister of Barbados. Earlier this year she had given a broad outline of how to reform the finances of the International Monetary Fund and the World to better serve countries’ climate needs. She then gathered an impressive array of economists, philanthropists, capitalists and government and UN officials in her country’s capital to come up with the comprehensive proposal released here at COP27.
The core would be a new climate mitigation trust established by the IMF and funded by an initial Special Drawing Rights. Those are part of the reserves held by the IMF and funded by member countries.
The SDR capital would then help underpin flows of private sector capital into climate investments. By way of example, Mottley, said US$5 billion of SDRs could stimulate US$5 trillion of investment in mitigation, adaptation and repairing climate-caused loss and damage to developing economies.
Among other features, climate-vulnerable countries would have special access to very low interest loans. Another is a 2 percent tax on all fossil fuel exports to fund grants to countries for the economic and physical losses to their countries caused by climate catastrophes.
She likened this initiate to the Bretton Woods Conference in 1944 which created the IMF and World Bank, the two multilateral financial institutions that played leading roles in helping countries rebuild their economies after World War Two.
As radical as such changes to the structure and additions to the purposes of the IMF and World Bank seem, a growing number of influential economists are supporting them. One of the champions is Lord Stern, a former head of the UK Treasury, and author of the seminal report on climate economics in 2006.
This is just one example of extremely bold, creative and unorthodox new initiatives being aired at COP27. A sign perhaps that some leaders in government, civil society and business realise they have to respond in unprecedented ways to meet the rapidly escalating speed, complexity and impact of the climate crisis.
