An aircraft carrier-sized meeting room filled with screens of troubled parties (the Saudis, for example, with a giant kiosk welcoming their efforts to promote a “circular carbon economy agenda”).
But as I wandered the halls and the streets outside, I was impressed again and again that much had changed since the last major air conditioning confab in Paris in 2015 – and not just because carbon levels and temperatures were rising. The biggest change was in the political climate. During these few years, the world seemed to have moved abruptly away from democracy and totalitarianism – and in the process dramatically reduced our ability to fight the climate crisis. Oligarchs of many kinds had seized power and used it to maintain the status quo. There was a Potemkin attribute throughout the gathering, as if everyone were reciting a scenario that no longer reflects the real politics of the planet. Now that we have watched Russia launch an oil invasion of Ukraine, it is a little easier to see this trend with great relief – but Putin is far from the only case. Consider the examples. A climate activist holds a sign depicting Jair Bolsonaro with the slogan “Exterminator of the Future”. Photo: Luis Robayo / AFP / Getty Images Δία India, which may prove to be the most pivotal nation given the projected increases in energy use – and which had denied Greta Tunberg even a visa to attend the meeting. (At least Disha Ravi was no longer in prison). Or Russia (about a minute more) or China – a decade ago we could still, though with some risk and a little caution, stage climate protests and demonstrations in Beijing. Do not try it now. Or, of course, the United States, whose deep democratic deficits have long haunted the climate negotiations. The reason we have a system of voluntary commitments, not a binding global agreement, is that the people finally realized that there would never be 66 votes in the US Senate for a real treaty. Joe Biden waited to get into talks with the Build Back Better account in his back pocket, knock it on the table and start a bidding war with the Chinese – but the other Joe, Manchin of West Virginia, the biggest cashier from fossil fuels in DC, make sure this does not happen. Instead, Biden appeared empty-handed and the talks failed. And so we were left to think of a world where people really want action on climate change, but whose systems do not offer it. In 2021, the United Nations Development Program conducted a remarkable survey around the world – asking people through video game networks to reach out to people less likely to respond to traditional surveys. Even in the midst of the Covid pandemic, 64% of them described climate change as a “global emergency” and that they desperately wanted “broad climate policies beyond the current situation”. As UNDP Director Achim Steiner summed it up, “the results of the survey clearly show that climate emergency action is widely supported by people around the world, by nationality, age, gender and level of education.” The irony is that some environmentalists have occasionally longed for less democracy, no more. Surely if we had strong people in power everywhere, they could just make the difficult decisions and put us on the right track – we would not have to interfere with the constant whims of elections and lobbying and influence. But this is wrong for at least one moral reason – powerful people who are able to act directly in the climate crisis are also capable of acting directly on many other things, as the people of Xinjiang and Tibet would testify if they were allowed to speak. It is also wrong for a number of minutes. These practical problems stem from the fact that authoritarians have their own vested interests to please – Monti campaigned for his role at the top of the world’s largest democracy with the Adani Jet, the largest coal company on the continent. Do not assume for a moment that there is no fossil fuel lobby in China. he is currently busy telling Xi that economic growth depends on more carbon. And beyond that, authoritarian is often the direct result of fossil fuels. The crucial thing about oil and gas is that they are concentrated in a few places around the world, and therefore the people who live at the top or otherwise control these places end up with huge amounts of unwarranted and unaccountable power. Boris Johnson was in Saudi Arabia trying to collect some hydrocarbons – the next day the king beheaded 81 people he did not like. Would anyone pay the slightest attention to the Saudi royal family if it did not have oil? No. Nor could the Koch brothers dominate American politics on the basis of their ideas – when David Koch ran for the White House with the Libertarian ticket in 1980, he received almost no votes. So he and Charles’s brother decided to use their profits as America’s biggest oil and gas barons to buy the GOP, and the rest is (dysfunctional) political history. The most striking example of this phenomenon, needless to say, is Vladimir Putin, a man whose power is based almost entirely on the production of objects that you can burn. If I wandered around my house, it would not be a problem to find electronics from China, fabrics from India, all kinds of products from the EU – but nowhere is there anything that says “made in Russia”. Sixty percent of the revenue from exports that equipped his army came from oil and gas, and all the political influence that plagued Western Europe for decades came from his fingers in the mouth. This and his heinous war are the product of fossil fuels, and his interests in fossil fuels have done much to corrupt the rest of the world. Vladimir Putin and Alexei Miller, CEO of Russian gas giant Gazprom, attend a ceremony to celebrate the opening of the Sakhalin-Khabarovsk-Vladivostasha gas pipeline in 2011. Photo: Photo Another way of saying this is that hydrocarbons by nature tend to support despotism – they are very energy dense and therefore valuable. geography and geology means that they can be controlled with relative ease. There is a pipeline, an oil terminal. While the sun and the wind are, in these terms, much closer to democracy: they are available everywhere, diffuse instead of concentrated. I can not have an oil well in my yard because, as in almost all yards, there is no oil there. Even if there was an oil well, I would have to sell what I pumped to a refinery, and because I’m American, it would probably be a Koch business. But I can (and do) have a solar panel on my roof. My wife and I rule our own tiny oligarchy, isolated from the market forces that Putin and Koch can liberate and exploit. The cost of energy delivered by the sun has not increased this year and will not increase next year. Hydrocarbons by nature tend to support despotism As a general rule of thumb, those regions with healthier democracies that are less tied to acquired interests are making the most progress on climate change. Look around the world for Iceland or Costa Rica, Europe in Finland or Spain, USA in California or New York. Thus, part of the job for climate activists is to work for functioning democracies, where people’s demands for a working-class future take precedence over interests, ideology and personal feuds. But given the time constraints imposed by physics – the need for rapid action everywhere – this may not be the whole strategy. In fact, the activists were arguably a little too focused on politics as a source of change and did not pay enough attention to the other center of power in our culture: money. If we could somehow persuade or force the world’s financial giants to change, that would also make rapid progress. Maybe faster, since speed is more a feature of stock markets than of parliaments. And here the news is a little better. Take my country for example. Political power has stood in the reddest, most corrupt parts of America. Senators representing a relative handful of people in sparsely populated western states are able to tie our political lives, and these senators are almost all on the payroll of big oil. But the money has been raised in the blue parts of the country – Biden-voting counties account for 70% of the country’s economy. That’s one of the reasons some of us have worked so hard on campaigns like selling fossil fuels – we’ve won big wins with New York’s pension funds …
