In 2015, when the details of The Paris Agreement were being hashed out at the COP21 climate conference in France, there was a real feeling of watching history happen: world leaders had finally come together to create a binding plan to keep the planet from surpassing 2 degrees Celsius of warming, if not 1.5 degrees, even, which would help humanity avoid the most dire effects of the climate crisis.
So there weren’t details on how much, exactly, major carbon producers like the United States would need to cut their greenhouse gas emissions by, and no real means of punishing countries that fail to both set and meet their goals, but it was at least something.
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Now, as COP28 gets underway, it’s easy to feel like that sense of momentousness was misplaced: world leaders and the lobbyists who try to persuade them are jetting off to the United Arab Emirates for the conference, which is being overseen by Dr. Sultan al-Jaber, whose day job is running the country’s massive oil company, Adnoc.
And it’s not just that the optics are bad: according to documents obtained by the BBC, the UAE planned to discuss various oil and gas dealings in private meetings held during COP28. All of which is to say, if there’s a feeling of watching history here again, what’s on display is the continual erosion of the deal that came out of COP21 — and with it, both an avenue to and a sense of hope for a non-catastrophic climate future.
As Think 100%, a project of Hip Hop Caucus, tweeted, “At this point, it’s either fossil fuels or us. We can’t let empty promises keep us from a lived reality that finally frees Black and Brown communities from the harm fossil fuels cause.”
This year’s climate conference comes on the heels of a summer full of disastrous extreme heat — and the effects on Black and Brown people disproportionately living on the frontlines of the climate crisis — and the foreboding omen of the average global temperature surpassing the 2-degrees Celsius threshold for two days in a row. But despite how increasingly difficult it is to ignore that the climate has already changed for the worse, President Joe Biden is skipping this year’s summit, much to the frustration of climate activists.
“If Biden wants to be taken seriously on climate by young people at home and by the rest of the world, he needs to use every tool at his disposal to mobilize the U.S. government to save lives,” Michele Weindling, political director at the Sunrise Movement, told the New York Times. Israel’s U.S.-backed bombardment and invasion of the Gaza Strip complicated the President’s schedule, according to the Times.
But he’s also currently under pressure from moderate Democrats who think he should run for reelection not on his climate achievements like the Inflation Reduction Act, but the record-setting crude oil production and liquified natural gas exports that the energy industry has achieved during Biden’s first term. (There has indeed been record fossil-fuel production in the U.S. this year, thanks in large part to the Biden administration approving various plans for drilling and other infrastructure.)
There is, of course, a whole U.S. contingent in the UAE right now, and they’re the ones who will be doing the actual work of negotiating new plans and deals during COP28.
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An appearance from President Biden would be largely (but importantly) symbolic. But representing the world’s largest oil and gas producer will put the U.S. negotiators on the wrong side of the most radical and necessary proposals on the table at COP28: a brokered agreement to phase out fossil fuel production completely, which increasingly looks like it will be necessary in order to keep warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius.
As Senator Jeff Merkley told the Guardian, “Not only do we produce more oil and gas than any other country, but Team Biden is greenlighting one fossil project after another. The U.S. is devoid of any moral authority to phasing out fossil fuels.”
Indeed, Black people are more likely to live near oil refineries or petrochemical plants, with more than 1 million Black folks living within a half mile of one. The majority-Black communities in Lousiana’s Cancer Alley certainly know first-hand about the devastating health and environmental consequences of this.
But if world governments do agree to a phaseout — a critical missing piece from the Paris Agreement — it could bring a bit of that witnessing-history feeling to what otherwise feels like a deeply cynical climate summit. Meanwhile, even European Union climate ministers recognize that it is “extremely ambitious.”