COP28: sure, it’s a sham, but let’s use that to our advantage
Let’s start with the host nation: holding COP28, or any other COP in Dubai didn’t augur well. Then the conference president, sultan Al Jaber, the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, Adnoc, claimed there is “no science” indicating that a phase-out of fossil fuels is needed to restrict global heating to 1.5C. At which point, the rest of the participants should have walked out en masse, leaving Dubai’s reputation where it deserves to be: at the bottom of an oil well.
Except this is politics. And politics often means holding your nose to get what you want, and the response by campaigners to such profoundly stupid, anti-scientific and ill-advised statements has been to ramp up demands for our governments to act now to tackle the climate emergency.
The idea that “there is no scientific basis” to the role of fossil fuels in heating up our planet is the personification of the ostrich theory, a bird lumbered with the myth it buries its head in the sand so as not to see danger (something completely false and that would undoubtedly have caused the extinction of ostriches). Al Jaber is exactly like the ostrich of the myth, and besides, he has no shortage of sand where he can go to bury his head: the agreement between climatologists, the people who publish objective and documented studies in…
