Mek Mi Fly Go Dubai: CARICOM and the COP28 Masquerade
On November 30, the COP28 United Nations Climate Change Conference formally opened at Expo City, Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Caribbean heads-of-state, government ministers, and advisors descended on Dubai two short weeks after the Saudi Arabia-CARICOM Summit in Riyadh.
At this stop on their Gulf tour, the familiar talk of climate debt financing, disaster relief, and environmental vulnerability from prior COP meetings took on a different tenor against the backdrop of the UAE. Condemned by many pundits as hypocritical at best (and Machiavellian at worst), the host country and world’s seventh-largest oil producer engaged in a public makeover as it prepared for the arrival of world leaders, diplomats, civil society organizations, and observers to the summit’s sessions and negotiations. This cleaning exercise involved a thorough greenwashing that swapped the image of an opulent petro-state for that of a champion of sustainability and renewable energy.
Billboards lined the highway from Dubai International Airport to Expo City announcing the arrival of COP28 with pithy taglines such as “Our Greatest Investment is Planet Earth” and “From Pledge to Change.” Along the Dubai Metro route to the Expo City conference site, isolated wind turbines sponsored by the British renewable outfit Octopus Energy (a partner of the UAE’s state renewable energy company, Masdar) rose conspicuously from the desert adorned in the distinctive purple of Octopus’s corporate brand.
US oil majors claimed a piece of the action too. ExxonMobil — insisting that we can have our proverbial cake and eat it too — sponsored another billboard to preach the virtues of Carbon Capture and Storage (CCS) technologies. As a leading advocate of CCS and host to an outpost of the Global CCS Institute at its Masdar City campus in Abu Dhabi, the host nation modeled a future in which fossil fuels and climate mitigation can comfortably coexist.
Climate activist collective Clean Creatives swiftly called out this green masquerade as a propaganda campaign coordinated by public relations firms and advertising agencies to “strengthen the overall reputation and standing of the UAE, His Excellency Dr. Sultan Al Jaber and COP28 among Western audiences.” Any remaining hope that the cleaning exercise indicated a genuine commitment to carbon mitigation dissolved before the summit officially began. On November 21, COP28 President and CEO of the Emirati state oil company, Adnoc, disputed the scientific consensus by arguing that there “is no science out there, or no scenario out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”
Inside the credentialed space of COP28's “Blue Zone,” Caribbean government officials struck a different chord as they underscored the disproportionate vulnerabilities faced by small-island developing states. In plenary sessions and side events, CARICOM heads of state and government officials decried the perils of life in “hurricane alley” and insisted time and again that “we did not cause” the crisis of anthropogenic climate change.
The “we” in this clause obscures far more than it reveals. As the mask came off of the Emirates cleaning exercise, we might ask why Caribbean leaders did not direct their grievances to the UAE and Al Jaber himself (or the U.S. and Europe, no less) as one of several principal culprits. Without naming the causes of climate change — multinational fossil fuel companies and the carbon consumption patterns of transnational elites—CARICOM leaders staged a masquerade in which their own complicity in both enterprises remained hidden from view. Rather than bite the hands that feed them — fossil fuel and mining companies with Caribbean investments and foreign financiers from the U.S., Europe, China, and the Gulf—Caribbean elites played their role in the larger masquerade of COP28 to perfection.
To paraphrase the recent dancehall anthem “Wild Out” from Montego Bay artiste RajahWild, what was it that mek CARICOM dem fly go Dubai to jump up in their own section in this climate masquerade? When RajahWild muses, “Kiki weed mek mi fly go Dubai,” he invokes the Gulf less as a material geography than an imagined destination of faraway luxury (that he ascends to through his indulgence of “high grade” ganja). RajahWild’s Dubai is not the ordinary geography forged from global flows of crude oil and transnational migrant labour, but the fantasy that flows from the curated image of the Gulf. Likewise, the flight of CARICOM leaders to Dubai indulged the spectacle of COP28 alone as a stage for their own theater of deception.
COP City: Dubai
Originally constructed for the Expo 2020 (which was delayed by COVID-19 until September 2021), Expo City promised to serve as a “model global community for the future and home to world-class innovation, educational, cultural and entertainment facilities.” While the rhetoric behind the Expo City emphasized collaboration and communitas, the architecture of the COP28 summit proved anything but.
As with past meetings, COP is divided into distinct zones: A “Green Zone” that is free and open to the general public and a “Blue Zone” limited to credentialed parties and delegates. Within the Blue Zone, another divide was palpable between the more intimate and participatory panels and events hosted at organizational pavilions and the curated plenary sessions in large exhibition halls. Further, the conference customarily opens with a two-day “high-level segment” in which heads-of-state deliver speeches and host other “party events.” The arrangement of country pavilions pushed them into isolated cabinets on the Expo City grounds that discouraged the usual exchange (or proximity, at least) that characterized previous COP meetings in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt and Glasgow, Scotland.
Historically, world’s fair-style pavilions purport to display representative exhibits of individual nations, state delegations, and emerging technologies. In taking the unit of the nation for granted, the world’s fair notoriously obscured the battlegrounds within nation-states between elite statesmen and monarchs and the hapless masses compelled to toil beneath them. Farmers, fishermen, industrial workers, or Indigenous communities may be put on display as icons of national heritage or pageantry, but their political will and self-directed liberating activity are subordinated to the elite interests of the “nation.”
The COP summit embraces this form, in part, through its presentation of national pavilions and signature addresses delivered by heads-of-state from each recognized country. But COP is not merely a spectacle. Indigenous nations and climate activists make their presence felt and voices heard even within the securitized theater of the Blue Zone. These events were explicitly dialogic, often aimed at coalition building across communities and continents. Occasionally, they spilled out into the open-air plaza for limited, but noteworthy protest actions demanding “No More Fossils” and defending the dignity of Indigenous livelihoods, lands, and waters in the face of climate change. Unlike the curated backdrop of state pavilions, the open-air forums permit ordinary people to refuse their passive adoption as mere icons of national heritage. Here, it becomes clear that it is not states and rulers who are prepared to lead the world back from the brink of climate collapse.
While this proceeded in the semi-public, open-air arenas of the Expo City, Caribbean leaders minced their words outside the high-level areas curated for their participation. Inside these areas — ostensibly open to any Blue Zone delegate — the leaders could assume the pulpit without the threat of disruption by dissenting voices or unruly activists. Here, appointed representatives of each member state are permitted to speak in turn. Dissident voices from within their borders— working people, dispossessed peasants, and Indigenous nations— are not afforded the same platform.
One high-level event at COP28 fashioned to submerge dissident voices convened under the title “SIDS: A Just and Equitable Energy Transition Towards a Climate-Resilient Future.” Staged in the stately Al-Waha Theater at Expo City, the program featured a roster of Caribbean ministers alongside their Indian Ocean and Pacific counterparts.
Looking ahead to the Fourth International Conference on Small Island Developing States in Antigua and Barbuda next May, CARICOM speakers fell into line for their signature masquerade. Just as Caribbean masqueraders arrive to collect their costumes, feathers, and Monday wear in the prelude to Carnival, CARICOM leaders arrived in Dubai to wrap themselves in the flags of the region and proclaim themselves the authentic voices of ordinary Caribbean people.
One might ask why representatives of small-island states located at the disaster-prone peripheries of metropolitan capital would not join in with the limited demonstrations staged by their Indigenous counterparts. Indeed, many also hail from small, vulnerable coastal and inland communities. To view this missed connection as merely incidental would be a deep and profound error of judgment. Despite adopting similar rhetoric, Caribbean state officials had a different objective in mind than the clamors for “No More Fossils” that resounded through the tightly policed COP (Expo) City.
In high-level negotiations that ran parallel to the sponsored plenary sessions, Caribbean leaders found ample time to engage their Emirati hosts in talks and broker compacts. This included a Promotion and Protection of Investment Agreement between Barbados and the UAE to “reinforce investor interest, expand the flow of investment, and strengthen the economic and trade ties between the two countries.” CARICOM member states, too, applauded the approval of a US$700m Loss and Damage Fund that CARICOM had long advocated for and presented on their “wish list” delivered to COP28 President Al Jaber in August of this year.
The urgent necessity of climate mitigation in the Caribbean cannot be overstated. But the failure to name the culprits themselves (or boycott negotiations in solidarity with front-line activists) demonstrates that the language of vulnerability is less a genuine protest than a negotiation tactic to secure financing from North Atlantic and Gulf paymasters. In the securitized theater of “COP City,” Caribbean government ministers successfully masquerade as humble, grassroots activists by co-opting the language of climate justice and autonomy.
Caribbean leaders liberally indulged in the language of “community empowerment” supplied by decentralized renewable microgrids as alternatives to diesel and natural gas. Indeed, few would object to a popular democratic vision of a Caribbean society founded on energy sustainability and self-management by ordinary people themselves. If the goal is genuinely one of community empowerment (and not merely bilateral financing masquerading as popular power) then surely Caribbean leaders would see fit to empower the ordinary people of today to advance their visions for Caribbean society. To do so, however, would require CARICOM to confront the possibility that the visions of ordinary people may diverge from, or contradict, their own. And this would mark an end to their globetrotting masquerade.
The framing of “loss and damage” as a principal feature of the CARICOM wishlist, though, indicates a different objective for the schemes brokered between elite actors in Dubai. Community empowerment, by their calculus, must wait until a sufficient sum of cheques arrive. Climate justice is doled out after the fact of disaster, with the inevitability of “loss and damage” accepted (or even endorsed) as a basic condition of claims-making for Caribbean communities on the front lines of climate change.
The tragic duplicity of CARICOM — in its refusal to join forces with frontline activists —is that the rising waters and tempestuous winds of climate change will take out the peripheral islands and inlets first. The parliament halls and state houses, even when they are affected by disaster events, will be protected and restored. Those truly at its most vulnerable peripheries, the workers and peasants of Union Island, Bequia, Carriacou, Barbuda, and Nevis, for instance, are not afforded a role on the stage at COP28. In their absence, the ruling classes who tower over them are permitted to speak in their voice while brokering compacts with oil and mining multinationals and preaching the necessity of preferential capital financing for themselves and their partners in the private sector. But they may soon crash the party with a road march of their own.
Meet the Brownes
And who is on the front lines of climate change, anyhow? Is it the Mottleys, Alis, Brownes, Rowleys, and Skerrits? Based on their statements, it would appear so. At COP28, entire nation-states are depicted as monolithically vulnerable by their leaders and cabinet ministers, enabling the leaders themselves to be the principal beneficiaries of preferential loans and financing.
Indeed, if we would like a clue as to their designs for Caribbean society financed by a Saudi and Emirati largesse, we might look at environmental policies and programs already in place. Guyana has forged ahead with deepwater oil development as the latest episode in its post-independence saga of ethnic patronage politics. Trinidad and Tobago seeks desperately to replicate Guyana’s success and revive its own sputtering oil and gas sector. Barbados hopes to join the fête with its own push to monetize offshore oil reserves along its maritime border with Trinidad. In none of these cases have leaders suggested that state extractive rents and revenues be managed by communities of peasants and workers themselves. Instead, they draw inspiration from the Emirati model— in which carbon capture and storage technologies will permit them to accumulate petrodollars and supply a remedy for anthropogenic climate change.
In Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne and his St. John’s government exploited the devastation of Hurricane Irma to displace Barbudans and declare an end to its centuries-long communal land tenure system. While insisting that the people of the Caribbean are uniquely imperiled by climate change, Caribbean leaders take their turn playing a mas as “the people” at a safe distance from their own populations in the COP City of Dubai.
This masquerade came into full view during the comments delivered by Antigua and Barbuda Ambassador for Climate Change, Diann Black-Layne, at the aforementioned SIDS plenary. Again, compared to the near total devastation of the smaller Barbuda, Antigua suffered minimal long-term damage as a result of Category 5 Hurricane Irma in 2017. Barbuda, however, did not warrant a single mention of its own. Instead, the devastation of Barbuda was permitted to stand in for the unique vulnerability of the federated nation as a whole.
After sharing the “excitement we are feeling back home” ahead of the SIDS Summit in Antigua scheduled for May 2024, Black-Layne turned her attention to her “small Caribbean nation” of origin.
We were hit by the first Category 5 hurricane. So all of my negotiators including myself, my Minister, our Prime Minister…We know what we’re talking about. We were there when the Category 5 hit our shores, our communities. And so there’s a passion, there’s an urgency that we would like to see that everybody can adopt. So Antigua and Barbuda is like every other Small Island Developing State. We suffer with getting access to capital for renewable energy…And so the strategy for Antigua and Barbuda and we hope to show to you when you get there is that we want to harness the power of our people, our savings, and our own local financial institutions. The solar panel system that exists on my home was expensive because it cost twice as much, I pay twice as much as somebody who lived in the United States. And I don’t make the kind of salary they make. But I purchased it anyway and there’s a lot of saving you can have. And I use the financing in my own local bank — my own community bank — and install it into my own home. When the hurricane hit, the next day I had power.
Black-Layne set the terms of the CARICOM masquerade by insisting that Hurricane Irma endowed the political class of Antigua and Barbuda with a specialized knowledge of climate disaster. In fact, while Barbudans were displaced for months, prohibited from returning home, and subject to land grab schemes in their absence, the Ambassador had her power restored a single day after Irma.
The global audience at COP28 was not supposed to be alert to this paradox. She and her government associates play a mas as “small” men and women at the very same moment that they collaborate to transform Barbuda into a billionaire paradise funded by Robert De Niro, among others. In Dubai, their mas was successful. The audience was not permitted to raise the question of Barbuda.
Throughout COP28, Caribbean politicians and professionals descended on Dubai to collect their costumes in their preferred section of the Emirati climate masquerade. Safely cloistered away from the people of Barbuda, Antiguan officials played a mas as Barbudans themselves.
CARICOM will not join their counterparts in protest of the spectacle at COP28 for fear that it may encourage their own people to join in. Indeed, the people of Barbuda, Cockpit Country, the Essequibo, and other communities degraded by the rulers who “fly go Dubai” would be justified in protesting CARICOM for exacerbating the vulnerability of ordinary people in their own territories.
When the theater shifts from Dubai to St. John’s for the May 2024 SIDS Summit in Antigua, the Brownes may not be able to hide any longer.
