In 1994, Saudi Arabia, backed by other members of the oil cartel Opec, insisted that all general decisions must be made by consensus. The failure of the Cop meetings is baked in. When states want something to happen – trade agreements, for example – they use different methods. The only global negotiations that are organised like the climate summits are other environmental summits, such as the UN biodiversity conferences. The process itself is terminally crocked. But the fossil fuel lobby, grotesque as it is, is by no means the only problem with the way these jamborees are run. The first and most obvious reform is to shut out the lobbyists. You could almost imagine they wanted to fail. But the world’s governments carry on doing the same thing in the expectation of different results. If any other process had a 3.7% success rate, it would be abandoned in favour of something better. Perhaps it’s unsurprising that, of 27 summits completed so far, 25 have been abject failures, while two (1997’s Kyoto protocol and the Paris agreement, in 2015) have been half-successes. There have been some uninspiring presidents of the international climate summits, but none so manifestly unsuited to the role. Fossil fuels present the real threat to civilisation. In arguing with people calling for more effective action, he recited classic fossil fuel industry tropes, including that old favourite: if we were to phase out fossil fuels, we’d go back to living in caves. Before the meetings began, Al Jaber was planning to use them as a lobbying opportunity to sell his company’s products to delegates. Adnoc is now planning a massive expansion of its oil and gas operations. His day job is chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, Adnoc. The appointment of Sultan Al Jaber as president of Cop28 could be seen as this fiasco’s denouement. Nor should we be astonished that these agreements favour non-solutions such as carbon capture and storage, whose sole purpose is to provide an excuse for inaction. It’s not surprising that the two decisive measures these negotiations should have delivered at the outset – agreements to leave fossil fuels in the ground and to end most livestock farming – have never featured in the final outcome of any Cop summit.
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