A year on from COP26 in Glasgow, COP27, the UN’s 27th conference on climate change, took place in Egypt from 6 to 18 November 2022. During the intervening period, a further 40bn tonnes of carbon dioxide have spewed into the atmosphere with a host of climate disasters in fresh memory: horrific floods in Pakistan and Nigeria, crop-destroying droughts in East Africa, and unprecedented heatwaves in China, the Arctic, India and Northern America. Fight Racism! Fight Imperialism! has reported extensively on the failure of past COPs in addressing the climate crisis, revealing them as greenwashing stunts.* Greta Thunberg, who regarded last year’s COP26 as several bouts of ‘blah blah blah’, did not even bother to attend COP27, declaring it a forum for ‘greenwashing’, not a place where system change could happen. Confirming her views, COP27 pushed humanity a further step towards irrevocable climate destruction. SOMA KISAN reports.
Fossil capital reigns supreme
The clearest indicator of the dishonesty of COP27 is who was given a seat at the table. This year, 636 delegates at COP27 were linked to fossil fuels, a 25% increase from COP26 and numbering more than the combined delegations from the ten most climate-impacted countries. Some of these fossil fuel delegates shockingly include people like BP chief executive Bernard Looney, arriving as a part of Mauritania’s delegation and given access to key negotiation areas under the pretext of signing a separate green hydrogen agreement with Mauritania, a likely story considering BP’s fossil fuel profit of $8.2bn (£7bn) from just one quarter. Delegates from fossil fuel-rich countries actively halted any progress on stronger measures, with Saudi delegates forcing focus on emissions rather than energy sources and specifically refusing to mention fossil fuels at all. This directly links to countries’ capital interests: Saudi oil giant Aramco recently reported $48bn (£40bn) in profits from one quarter, thought to be one of the largest quarterly profits in history. Such actors’ specific purpose is to ensure that fossil fuel capital interests remain untouched, guaranteeing that the primary cause of climate change will never be regulated by conventions like COP.
New entities at COP27 also looked to exploit new sources of oil. A contingent of African oil lobbyists made the case for the development of oil and gas in Africa, arguing on the basis of the 600 million people across the African continent who do not have electricity, disregarding the exacerbation of climate change impacts that drilling will cause. Such arguments demonstrate the impossibility of reaching truly sustainable development through the frameworks of COP that falsely dictate that development can only occur through capital accumulation.
No hope for 1.5C
Capitalists’ impact on proceedings is clear: COP27 negotiations regressed on mitigation and adaptation measures agreed in COP26. Mitigation refers to decreasing carbon emissions presently to reduce the impacts of the climate crisis. In the final days of COP27, some delegates were fighting to maintain COP26’s acknowledgment of 1.5C as an absolute limit to warming, let alone touching the phase-down of all fossil fuels. Despite a final push by India to include more fossil fuels than just coal in phase-down plans, in itself a concession on phase-out, the language remained the same: only a phase-down of unabated coal, leaving the door open for abated coal that depends on fantastical, unproven carbon capture and storage systems to draw down carbon emissions. Furthermore, language to ensure emissions fall after 2025 was removed, backtracking from COP26. There was no mention of revisiting and strengthening Nationally Determined Contributions to climate change mitigation, as proposed in COP26, leaving an abysmal path forward for binding countries to emission reduction plans.
Attempts to establish a framework to address adaptation goals agreed in 2015’s Paris Agreement were summarily dismissed by richer countries. This framework would have moved adaptation plans from exploration into more structured implementation including factors like country vulnerability, financing methods, and priority sectors. Developing countries included a clause to request the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change prepare a special report on adaptation so discussions could be grounded in science, a request again denied by the US on dubious grounds. Adaptation needs in the developing world are set to reach as high as $340bn (£295bn) a year by 2030. Adaptation support today stands at less than one-tenth of that amount. The absence of any commitment to either implementation or finance reveals how little value imperialist countries place on saving human lives.
While mitigation and adaptation were left by the wayside, much pomp and circumstance was paid to carbon markets. Aside from the issues of double-counting and transparency, current carbon markets are already used by businesses to greenwash their continuing rates of fossil fuel burning by throwing a fraction of their profits at carbon credits. That alone should be enough reason to throw out carbon markets as a feasible solution to climate mitigation. Nevertheless, carbon markets continue to be advanced as one of the most viable approaches to mitigation for private corporations despite COP27 formulations deliberately leaving massive loopholes for greenwashing. Such language allows leeway for national governments to write their own carbon market rules and includes secrecy clauses on carbon trades as well as vague definitions of ‘carbon removal’. This opaqueness of carbon markets leaves the system wide open for exploitation by corporations for further greenwashed profits, encouraging continued emissions.
Negligible action on mitigation and adaptation and a focus on false solutions like carbon markets show that COP27 was yet another climate summit with no intention let alone capability to bring about the radical change needed to keep our planet under the 1.5C threshold. With 1C of warming already breached, UN Environment Programme’s recent report has affirmed that ‘no credible pathway to 1.5C [is] in place,’ stating clearly that only dramatic transformation of our economies and societies can save us from accelerating climate disaster. Global emissions must fall by almost 50% by 2030 to keep 1.5C alive; new emissions pledges shave just 1% off emissions in that time. According to the same report, current pledge plans would still lead to 2.4-2.8C warming by the end of the century. Climate activists at COP27 reminded politicians that 1.5C and even the current 1.2C would still result in large-scale drought, famine, heat stress, species die-off, loss of entire ecosystems, and loss of habitable land, throwing more than 100 million people into poverty. Despite such dire consequences, negotiators’ refusal to even consider addressing the main source of carbon emissions, fossil fuels, confirmed who retains power at COP27.
Loss and damage
In a departure from past COPs, the Santiago Network on Loss and Damage Fund (SNLD) took main stage as the most urgent topic given recent disasters. Established at 2019’s COP25 in Spain, the SNLD was the first attempt to address ‘loss and damage’ funding. ‘Loss and damage’, in UN climate speak, refers to costs already being incurred from climate-fuelled weather extremes like rising sea levels. So far, climate funding has primarily focused on cutting carbon dioxide emissions with a third going to adaptation measures for vulnerable communities. As more evidence demonstrates that the human-driven climate crisis is causing more severe natural disasters, most recently rendering devastating floods in Nigeria 80 times more likely, developing countries have increased their pressure, demanding funding from richer countries as the largest historical emitters.
Previously, the US and EU were strong opponents of establishing such a fund, fearing possible spiralling liabilities. The EU changed its position during COP27 with the condition that developing countries with large economies like China also pay into it. With this shift and, notably, a removal of any language around liability from the agreement, the US also bought into the establishment of a loss and damage fund during the last moments of COP27, hailed a ‘massive success’ by climate moderates. How a loss and damage fund which has no established processes of procuring capital, let alone disbursing it equitably and effectively, will address the climate disasters sure to come in the near future remains unexplained.
Funds like the SNLD have little trust given developed countries’ legacy of broken promises. In 2020, only $83.3bn (£70.3bn) of the $100bn (£84.4bn) promised annually by developed countries from 2009 agreements were provided to vulnerable states, much of which went to middle-income developing countries for solar and wind projects that could easily turn their own profit rather than adaptation. Even then, $100bn is only a fraction of what is actually needed. With such a legacy the SNLD is unlikely to bridge even a fraction of the climate finance needed for countries most vulnerable to climate change to recover from an ever-multiplying crisis, especially when there are no limits on fossil fuel expansion.
Failure of climate finance and coercive Third World debt
With SNLD as an example, finance to limit global warming was a focus of COP27 with demands to reform the World Bank, which continues to invest in fossil fuel projects, to force it and other development banks to provide far more financial assistance to developing countries. Previous bank alliances set up to finance net zero emissions, like the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (Gfanz), failed to meet targets, committing only $1.9 trillion annually when $3-5 trillion is needed for the transition to net zero. As part of Gfanz, many emissions targets are set as relative to a portfolio’s size, stopping short of guaranteeing any change in real-world emissions. Other targets are overly broad and open to interpretation. Such feeble targets commit banks to only symbolic action, allowing them to continue business as usual with a pretence of green finance.
In the calls for World Bank restructuring, the elephant in the room is the current global debt crisis. Debt Justice estimates that 54 countries are currently living in debt crisis, up from 31 in 2018 and 22 in 2015. Developing country debt payments have increased 120% between 2010 and 2021 and are higher than at any point since 2001. Average government external debt payments were 14.3% of government revenue in 2021, up from 6.8% in 2010. In 2022, of external debt payments due to be paid by low and lower middle-income governments, an eye-watering 47% are to private lenders, 27% to multilateral institutions, 12% to China and 14% to governments other than China. For developing countries, debt repayment directs sorely-needed money away from climate change mitigation and adaptation investments, ramping up the impacts of the climate crisis as planning finance is stripped away by private actors.
Most heinous among lenders are private entities like BlackRock who refuse to agree to any debt relief despite lending at astronomically high interest rates of 9% to cash-strapped countries like Zambia, while offering 0-2% to wealthy countries. BlackRock’s unwillingness to cancel debt spells disaster for the people of Zambia who have to contend with flooding, extreme temperatures, and droughts, forced to spend over four times more on debt payments than on addressing the impacts of the climate crisis. While voicing empty calls for private creditors to participate in debt relief, the World Bank and IMF have taken no action to enforce such participation. Indeed, the IMF actively uses debt repayment as justification for the new development of climate-destroying activities like fracking in countries like Argentina or Mozambique where new oil and gas are touted as the solution for debt and wider economic problems, ignoring impacts on local communities and the broader environment.
Empty words and destructive actions expose the World Bank and IMF as criminal institutions designed to enforce the status quo that sacrifices the large majority of humanity living in the poorest countries for the sake of profit. To assume any sort of financial assistance from such institutions is either harmful naivete or purposeful deception. We will get no solutions from such conventions. Our only way forward is the complete uprooting of the parasitic system of capitalism! Fight for socialism on the streets!
* Capitalism is extinction, socialism is survival: the climate crisis – no solution under capitalism, Larkin Publications, 2022
