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When Coca-Cola Fails at its Sustainability Goals, That’s Everyone’s Problem
Beneath the veneer of public, seemingly good-faith attempts to clean up its operations and help solve the climate and plastic crisis, lurks a deep and systemic commitment to a take-no-prisoners approach to the bottom line.
Aug 29, 2023
The Coca-Cola Company has managed to do well this year when it comes to climate change—last winter it sponsored the annual climate change meeting COP27, and despite the indignation, the company still managed to get through it unscathed. This summer, sales are up as heatwaves rip across the globe and leave nearly half the world’s population parched and grasping for the nearest respite, often a cold bottle of sugary release.
The company has spent years perfecting the art of selling a heck of a lot of product that most of us would agree is not health food nor planet saving, while simultaneously convincing consumers that the company is indeed saving the planet and helping communities thrive. Confused? That may be the point.
In the past decade Coca-Cola has had a history of publicly declaring targets for reducing its contribution to plastic pollution—from selling its beverages in recyclable packaging, to using more recycled material in its bottles, to using more reusable packaging.
It has had the dubious distinction of being the largest plastic polluter for five years in a row, with its name on more pieces of plastic litter collected around the world than any other company.
But it’s all hot air, or fizzy water, or whatever. Its failure to meet self-imposed, largely unambitious goals, is well-documented. The company has been criticized for backsliding on its various “sustainable” commitments: to reduce the single-use plastic consumption (it in fact increased its consumption from 125 billion bottles in 2021 to 134 billion in 2022); use more recycled plastic in its bottles (a 1990 pledge to make its bottles from 25% recycled plastic has not been met over 30 years later); and to transition to reusable packaging (a gimmicky, piecemeal rollout in a handful of neighborhoods, with little to no scalable impact yet to be seen). In the meantime, it has had the dubious distinction of being the largest plastic polluter for five years in a row, with its name on more pieces of plastic litter collected around the world than any other company.
But these are actually the least of its failures: Beneath the veneer of public, seemingly good-faith attempts to clean up its operations and help solve the climate and plastic crisis, lurks a deep and systemic commitment to a take-no-prisoners approach to the bottom line. Coca-Cola Capitalism comes first.
Take, for example, a 2020 report on the food industry’s systemic greenwashing tactics that dedicates a full 50 pages to the world’s 10 biggest food and beverage industries’ concerted efforts to undermine plastic waste reduction policies in 15 countries. Documents from The Coca-Cola Company reveal its true commitments—to “fight back” against package regulations in Europe, to slow down the rollout of deposit return schemes in Europe and Kenya, and to oppose a plan to streamline recycling in the U.S. state of Georgia.
While at least reluctantly acknowledging its role in the plastic pollution problem, the company has done little to address the toxic impacts of its supply chain and product.
This sort of behavior isn’t just limited to the realms of plastic pollution and climate change. The control over national and state policy extends to how the company approaches toxic chemicals in plastics.
While at least reluctantly acknowledging its role in the plastic pollution problem, the company has done little to address the toxic impacts of its supply chain and product. Our reporting shows that the plastic bottle supply chain is a critical driver of the environmental racism behind whole communities being poisoned by dangerous air and water pollution and treated as sacrifice zones. Meanwhile, Coke’s consumption of PET plastic does not seem to be decreasing.
Perhaps the most problematic of The Coca-Cola Company’s sustainability failures is that as Coke goes, so goes the PET resin and PET bottled beverage industries. We found that Coke alone uses a fifth of all the PET bottles made in the world. And our in-depth reporting and follow-up conversations with beverage companies around the particularly dangerous antimony catalyst used to make the bottles confirm that the same bottlers that supply The Coca-Cola Company, brands like Amcor and CKS, are often the same bottlers used by other, often smaller brands that must rely on for their products. We held conversations with beverage companies of varying sizes as part of our Detox the Bottle Pledge, and an emerging theme revealed that the majority of PET bottles on the market are the product of a close relationship between the several biggest brands like Coke, big bottle manufacturers like Amcor and CKS, and giant resin producers like IVL and DAK. These relationships foster a shared interest in sustaining the plastics industry, even if it means compromising on consumer safety and ignoring established science on toxic impacts of their current practices. Smaller brands with an interest in selling safer products often have little sway within the industry and face difficulties when pushing for safer, more just packaging under the specter of strong business relationships among industry behemoths.
As long as The Coca-Cola Company maintains an iron grip on the PET bottle industry, makes little to no progress on its own goals, ignores the full impacts of its reliance on plastics on fenceline communities and consumers, and actively undermines legislation to reduce the harmful impacts of plastics, the entire interconnected universe of bottled beverage industry, bottlers, and resin makers will continue to harm people and the planet. If the company wants to be the global citizen it purports to be, it should start by telling its bottle manufacturers to make bottles with a safer alternative catalyst and it should rapidly scale up reuse and refill systems in countries like the U.S. where they’re woefully nonexistent. It’s time for the biggest plastic consuming companies to find safer packaging that doesn’t poison entire communities and their consumers.
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John Kerry Says 'Under No Circumstances' Will US Pay Poor Nations for Climate Damages
"This is unfair and goes against what was agreed upon at COP27 in Egypt. Climate activists especially from the Global South must stand up to the U.S. and other Western powers that want to short-change developing countries."
Jul 14, 2023
John Kerry, U.S. President Joe Biden's climate envoy, made clear at a congressional hearing Thursday that Washington has no intention of compensating impoverished countries for destruction wrought by the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency despite playing an outsized role in creating it and continuing to accelerate it.
During the United Nations COP27 summit held last year in Egypt, delegates agreed to establish a "loss and damage" fund through which rich nations can provide poor ones with financial resources to help cover the escalating costs of extreme weather disasters, which are growing in frequency and intensity due to unmitigated greenhouse gas (GHG) pollution. Although developing and low-lying countries bear the least responsibility for causing the climate crisis, they suffer disproportionately from its deadly consequences and remain most vulnerable to future impacts.
Asked by Rep. Brian Mast (R-Fla.), chair of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Oversight and Accountability, whether the U.S. would allocate money to eligible nations harmed by increasingly common and severe droughts, storms, floods, and other climate change-exacerbated catastrophes, Kerry emphatically rejected the idea.
"No, under no circumstances," said Kerry.
The U.S. diplomat is preparing to travel to Beijing in the coming days to discuss the climate crisis with Chinese officials, including plans for the upcoming COP28 conference hosted by the United Arab Emirates.
Last year's agreement to establish a loss and damage fund was hailed as a positive step forward even though it coincided with yet another failure by policymakers to commit to a swift and just phaseout of coal, oil, and gas—the primary sources of further devastation. Fossil fuels are estimated to cause more than $5 trillion in unpaid damages around the globe each year.
Details of the fund—including which governments will be expected to pay and which will be eligible to receive as well as how much financing will be provided and how it will be distributed—are still being worked out.
Denmark, the first U.N. member to pledge loss and damage funding, promised to allocate just $13 million to Africa's Sahel region and other areas. At the time, critics warned that a significant portion of the paltry sum is structured in a way that could enrich private insurers at the expense of those most in need.
Global justice advocates who pushed to create the fund have stressed that the U.S.—by far the world's largest historical emitter of heat-trapping gases—and other wealthy polluters have a moral obligation to provide grants, not interest-bearing loans or other predatory instruments, to help alleviate the burdens they are imposing on billions of vulnerable people who have done little to unleash climate hell.
A loss and damage fund was deemed necessary because a certain amount of destruction has been locked in due to extant emissions and atmospheric concentrations of GHGs. But it is not the U.N.'s first foray into climate-focused redistribution.
Developed countries agreed at COP15 in 2009 to disburse $100 billion in green finance per year to the developing world by 2020 and every year after through 2025, at which point a new goal would be set. However, only $83.3 billion was mobilized in the first year, and governments are not expected to hit their annual target, which has been criticized as woefully inadequate, until this year.
An analysis published last year showed that the U.S. is the biggest reason for the shortfall. If Washington were to give at a level commensurate with its cumulative contribution to global GHG pollution, it would allot $39.9 billion of the $100 billion pledge each year. That's $32.3 billion more than the estimated $7.6 billion it actually shelled out in 2020.
With his comments on Thursday, Kerry signaled that the U.S. has no plans to reverse course and start providing its fair share when it comes to the emerging loss and damage fund.
Not only have the U.S. and other rich countries refused to adequately fund climate action in the Global South, but they are also actively moving to expand fossil fuel extraction and combustion—ignoring the international scientific consensus and eliciting condemnation from U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, who has described existing policies as a "death sentence" for humanity.
In addition to rapidly slashing planet-heating emissions, progressives have emphasized that canceling impoverished countries' external debts would free up trillions of dollars that can help close the widening chasm between what science and justice demand and what policymakers are currently doing.
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COP27's Greenwashing Scam
This year's UN climate conference offered some reason to celebrate. But the growing clout of the 'carbon capture' industry is hindering urgent efforts to clamp down on fossil fuels.
Dec 05, 2022
As the annual UN climate conference, COP27, came to a close in late November, the talks produced a lot of lofty rhetoric but little concrete progress on the gravest threat facing humanity today.
There was one very important positive development: After years of demands by poor countries in the Global South suffering the worst impacts of climate disasters, the COP27 agreement finally established a "loss and damage" fund for the wealthy countries most responsible for climate change to compensate poor countries for climate disasters.
Much remains undecided, including the size of the fund, its governance structure and how much countries should contribute. And even if wealthy countries pledge contributions, there's no guarantee they'll keep their promises -- they've already broken the promise made in 2009 of providing $100 billion a year in climate finance for the Global South.
Regardless, it's a win worth celebrating. Wealthy countries were uniformly opposed to establishing the fund, while the Global South displayed unprecedented unity, and ultimately prevailed.
Unfortunately, when it came to meaningfully addressing the key driver of climate change -- fossil fuels -- leaders at COP27 failed to act. And the growing clout of a "greenwashing" scam deserves much of the blame.
Failing on fossil fuels
The final COP27 agreement calls on countries to move away only from "unabated coal power," reiterating the weak language coming out of COP26 last year that failed to address oil and gas. It also dodges the issue of government subsidies for fossil fuels by calling only to phase out "inefficient" subsidies. (Which begs the question: What's an "efficient" subsidy for poisons, anyway?)
A number of countries called for phasing out fossil fuels. They included two Pacific Island nations, Tuvalu and Vanuatu, as well as Colombia, who were subsequently joined by the rest of the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) and Independent Association of Independent Latin America and Caribbean (AILAC) groups.
Surprisingly, they also included India, the world's second largest coal producer; Norway, a major oil producer; and, most surprisingly, the United States, the world's largest oil and gas producer. However, pressure from Saudi Arabia, the world's second largest oil producer, helped kill these efforts.
Some of these interventions may not have been well-intentioned. There's speculation that the Indian delegation knew Saudi Arabia would kill the proposal anyway, so they made a symbolic proposal to look good without actually changing anything. This is substantiated by the right-wing Indian government's domestic energy policy of expanding coal production.
But the U.S. position also deserves scrutiny. The devil is in the details.
A carbon sucking "unicorn"
To understand why, look at the line about phasing out only "unabated" coal power. What, then, is "abated" coal power?
In the terms of the agreement, this refers to fitting coal plants with technology to pull carbon dioxide out of smokestacks and bury it underground, known in industry terminology as carbon capture and sequestration (CCS).
CCS is a disastrously bad idea, as several studies have documented. It's a largely unproven technology with an empirical record of failure, and relying on it to deal with averting climate catastrophe is reckless. Many climate activists liken reliance on CCS to a belief in unicorns.
CCS doesn't address other serious environmental concerns with fossil fuels, such as the impacts of surface coal mining and particulate pollution from power plants, which disproportionately affect poor and vulnerable people in the United States and elsewhere. And it generates new environmental justice hazards of its own, such as carbon dioxide pipeline ruptures.
It's also inordinately expensive, something even CCS proponents acknowledge. In Wyoming, for example, utilities have opposed a law requiring them to retrofit coal-fired power plants with CCS, citing cost concerns.
CCS has a superficial appeal -- if it worked, it would allow us to keep burning coal (as well as oil and gas) and avoid warming the planet. Unfortunately, that's exactly what makes it an industry fig leaf.
This brings us to the U.S. position.
When the U.S. joined the call to phase out oil and gas in addition to coal, the delegation evidently wanted to insert the descriptor "unabated." So they weren't really calling for an oil and gas phaseout. They were calling for the universal adoption of CCS technology with fossil fuels.
If the U.S. language were adopted, U.S. fossil fuel exports would be allowed to continue. Under the territorially based emissions accounting used by the United Nations, "abating" emissions from burning oil and gas exported by the United States would be the responsibility of the importing countries.
U.S. oil and gas exports are substantial, and the Biden administration is adding fuel to the fire by permitting a massive buildout of oil and gas export terminals on the Gulf Coast. Soon after COP27 ended, a U.S. Department of Transportation agency approved yet another oil export license for a proposed terminal in Texas.
The Biden administration appears intent on expanding U.S. oil and gas exports, and the U.S. proposal at COP27 was consistent with this objective.
Challenging CCS
Over the last few years, despite growing evidence against CCS, broad popular opposition, and findings by the U.S. Treasury Department's own watchdog that tax breaks for CCS have been abused by industry, Congress and the Biden administration have doubled down on expanding CCS.
Congress passed two bills, the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act (IIJA) and the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which massively expanded subsidies for CCS. But that hasn't stopped the Biden administration from bragging about the IIJA and IRA as major climate achievements, even though the IIJA contained no funding for renewables at all.
Given the high-level political backing for CCS in domestic energy policy, it's plausible that the U.S. proposal to expand CCS internationally is also intended to position the United States as the global leader in CCS technology, holding technical knowledge and intellectual property for a "climate solution" it wants the world to be hooked on, in addition to U.S. oil and gas exports.
Challenging this CCS-centric approach to climate policy will be key to dismantling the U.S. fossil fuel industry and its bipartisan political support system -- and winning environmental justice both at home and abroad. It will also be key to undermining dangerous U.S. negotiating positions in international climate talks, making true international cooperation on climate justice more possible.
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The Poorest Still Paying the Biggest Price on a Burning Planet
What is the U.N. climate summit but a meeting place where the world's elite have protected their power for 27 years and counting?
Dec 01, 2022
On October 29th, 75-year-old Saifullah Paracha, Guantanamo Bay's oldest detainee, was finally released by U.S. authorities and flown home to his family in Karachi, Pakistan. He had been incarcerated for nearly two decades without either charges or a trial. His plane touched down in a land still reeling from this year's cataclysmic monsoon floods that, in July, had covered an unparalleled one-third of that country. Even his own family's neighborhood, the well-heeled Defense Housing Authority complex, had been thoroughly inundated with, as a reporter wrote at the time, "water gushing into houses."
Having endured 19 years of suffering inflicted by the brute force of imperialism during America's "Global War on Terror," Paracha, along with all of Pakistan, will now suffer through the climatic devastation wrought by the invisible hand of economic imperialism. Indeed, even as his family members were embracing him for the first time since that fateful day in 2003 when he was seized in an FBI sting operation in Thailand, governments and corporations throughout the Global North were sharpening their knives, preparing to reassert their dominance as they do at every year's U.N. climate conference--this one being COP27 in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt.
But delegates from climate-vulnerable, cash-poor countries like Pakistan and Egypt, along with members of climate-justice movements from across the planet, were also there. Tired of being pushed around, they had other plans.
A Breakthrough and an All-Too-Predictable Flop
At previous COPs, negotiations inside the hall were focused primarily on what's come to be known as "climate mitigation"--that is, trying to keep future greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere--along with adaptation to climate disruptions, past, present, and future. For the first time in official negotiations, COP27 would also feature the demands of low-income, vulnerable countries eager to be compensated for the devastating impacts they, like flooded Pakistan, have already suffered or will suffer thanks to climate change. After all, the global overheating of the present moment was caused by greenhouse gases emitted during the past two centuries, chiefly by the large industrial societies of the global North. In the shorthand of those negotiations, such polluter-pays compensation is known as "loss and damage."
At previous climate summits, the "haves" resisted the very idea of the have-nots demanding loss-and-damage compensation for two chief reasons: first, they preferred not to admit, even implicitly, that they had created the crisis now broiling and drowning communities across the Global South, and, second, they had no interest in shelling out the humongous sums that would then be required.
This year, however, the shocking death and destruction inflicted by the inundation of Pakistan and more recently of Nigeria stoked an already surging movement to put loss and damage on COP's agenda for the first time. And thanks to unrelenting pressure from that climate-justice groundswell, COP27 did end with the United States, the European Union, and the rest of the rich world approving an agreement to "establish a fund for responding to loss and damage." Echoing the thoughts of many, climate justice leader Jean Su tweeted that the deal was "a testament to the incredible mobilization of vulnerable countries and civil society. Much work still to be done, but a dam has broken."
The euphoria that followed over the creation of a loss-and-damage fund was well justified. But, as Su noted, the struggle is far from over. In a correction to its story reporting on that agreement, the Washington Post made clear that, although the batter had now been mixed, the cake was anything but in the oven. The paper informed readers, "An earlier version of this article incorrectly said wealthy nations agreed to pay billions of dollars into a loss and damage fund. While they agreed to create a fund, its size and financing mechanism have yet to be worked out." Those two remaining how-much and how-to-do-it questions are anything but trivial. In the loss-and-damage debate, in fact, they're the main issues countries have been arguing over for many years without resolution of any sort.
If the world does commit sufficient (or even insufficient) funds to pay out on loss and damage (and that's a truly big if ), vulnerable countries may finally have the means to begin recovering from the latest climate disasters. Tragically enough, however, there's little question that, as ever greater amounts of carbon and methane continue to head for our atmosphere, whatever the affected populations may need now, it's likely just a hint of the sort of compensation they'll need in a future guaranteed to be full of ever-increasing numbers of disasters like the Pakistan floods.
And the reason for that isn't complicated: COP27 negotiators failed to match their loss-and-damage breakthrough with any significant progress on reining in greenhouse gas emissions. Efforts to come to an agreement on phasing out the chief sources of those emissions--oil, gas, and coal--flopped, as they have at all previous COPs. The only thing the negotiators could manage was to repeat last year's slippery pledge to pursue a "phase-down [not '-out'] of unabated [not 'all'] coal [nor 'coal, gas, and oil'] power."
On the one hand, civil-society movements prevailed in the debate over loss and damage. On the other, energy imperialism remained all too alive and well in Egypt, as corporate interests and the governments that serve them extended their 27-year winning streak of blocking efforts to drive emissions down at the urgently required rate. Yeb Sano, who led Greenpeace's COP27 delegation, told Phys.org, "It is scarcely credible that they have forgotten all about fossil fuels. Everywhere you look in Sharm el Sheikh you can see and hear the influence of the fossil fuel industry. They have shown up in record numbers to try and decouple climate action from a fossil fuel phaseout."
How to Pay?
The World Bank estimates that the floods in Pakistan caused more than $30 billion in damage, while rehabilitation and reconstruction will cost another $16 billion. And that, says the bank, doesn't even include funds that will be needed "to support Pakistan's adaptation to climate change and overall resilience of the country to future climate shocks." The floods seriously harmed an estimated 33 million people, displaced 8 million from their homes, and left more than 1,700 dead. According to the World Bank's report, "Loss of household incomes, assets, rising food prices, and disease outbreaks are impacting the most vulnerable groups. Women have suffered notable losses of their livelihoods, particularly those associated with agriculture and livestock." The disaster starkly illustrated the indisputable moral and humanitarian grounds for compelling the governments of rich countries to pay for the devastation their decades of fossil-fuel burning have caused.
For Pakistan in particular, America's lavishly funded war-making and national-security industries are joined at the hip with the global climate emergency. While those forces are directly responsible for depriving Paracha and countless others of their freedom or lives, the greenhouse-gas emissions they generate have also contributed to the kind of devastation that he came home to when finally released. Furthermore, these industries have wasted trillions of dollars that could have been spent on preventing, adapting to, and compensating for ecological breakdown.
So far this fall, Washington has pledged $97 million (with an "m") in flood-relief aid to Pakistan. Sounds like a lot of money, but it amounts to just one five-hundredth of the World Bank's loss-and-damage estimate. In bleak contrast, from 2002 to 2010 alone, at the height of that Global War on Terror, the U.S. government provided Pakistan with $13 billion (with a "b") in military aid.
To dodge blame and minimize their costs, the rich countries have been proposing a range of alternatives to simply paying loss-and-damage money to low-income ones as they should. Instead, they'd far prefer to have disaster-plagued governments finance their own climate-change recovery and adaptation by borrowing from banks in the North. In effect, rather than obtain relief-and-recovery funds directly from the North, countries like Pakistan would be obligated to make interest payments to banks in the North.
Fed up with having unbearable debt burdens thrust upon them time and time again, countries in the South are saying no thanks to the proposition that they go even deeper into debt. In response, the North has been tossing out other ideas. For instance, encouraging development banks like the World Bank or the International Monetary Fund to release disaster-hit countries from their obligations to pay some portion of the money they already owe as interest on past debts and use it instead to support their own recovery and rebuilding. But countries in the South are saying, in effect, "Hey, for decades, you've used your power to saddle us with punishing, unjust debt. By all means, please do cancel that debt, but you've still got to pay us for the climate loss and damage you've caused."
The rich countries have even floated the idea of taking a portion of the money they've previously earmarked for development aid and depositing it in a global fund that would pay damages to vulnerable countries suffering future climatic disasters. Note the key to all such "solutions": no extra expense for the wealthy countries. What a sweet deal! It's as if, domestically, the U.S. government started issuing smaller Social Security checks and used the money it "saved" that way to pay Medicare benefits.
The new COP27 loss-and-damage fund is supposed to prohibit such shell games, while also pulling climate finance out of the realms of imperialism, debt servitude, and what Oxfam calls the "disaster begging bowl." What's needed, says Oxfam, an organization focused on alleviating global poverty, is "a fair and automatic mechanism for financial support--rooted in the principle that those who have contributed most to the climate crisis pay for the damage it causes in countries least responsible and hardest hit."
How Much and Where to Get It?
When confronted with numbers ending in "-illion," as Americans were during the debates over the congressional spending bills of 2021 and 2022, it's easy enough for your eyes to glaze over and miss the orders-of-magnitude differences among such figures. In an American world where the Pentagon budget alone is headed for $1 trillion sometime in this decade, it's easy enough to forget, for example, that a million of those dollars is just one-millionth of a trillion of them. In response, in discussing the staggering sums needed to deal with our already desperately overheating planet and the amounts available to pay for loss and damage, we'll now put everything in terms of billions of U.S. dollars.
High-emitting countries like ours have run up quite a climate tab. A June 2022 report from the V-20 group, which represents 55 of the world's lowest-income, most climate-vulnerable economies, estimates that, from 2000 to 2019, their membership lost $525 billion thanks to climate disruption. That's a huge blow to a staggeringly large set of countries whose gross domestic products add up to just $2,400 billion. But in the Global North, such sums and even far larger ones, while more than pocket change, are still easily affordable, as that Pentagon budget suggests.
By Oxfam's reckoning, hundreds of billions of dollars could be raised for paying loss-and-damage by taxing fossil-fuel extraction, international cargo shipping, frequent flying, and other significantly carbon-producing activities. Progressive wealth taxes could net even more: $3,600 billion annually, according to the Climate Action Network (CAN), which also estimates that ending government subsidies to corporations (one-third of which go to fossil-fuel companies) could net $1,800 billion annually. Furthermore, cuts in military spending could free up a whopping $2,000 billion per year globally. The latter could be an especially juicy target. For instance, by CAN's estimate, the United States's fair share of payments owed to the Global South for climate mitigation and adaptation, plus loss-and-damage reparations, would come to roughly $1,600 billion over the next decade. And those 10 payments of $160 billion each could be covered if the Pentagon just ditched production of its most disastrously expensive jet fighter, the $1,700 billion F-35, and diverted the money toward climate assistance.
It's always the government's job to spend big when America faces a dire emergency, wherever the money comes from. In 2020-2021, Congress passed more than $3,000 billion in Covid relief--enough to pay our international climate tab, as estimated by CAN, for 19 years.
"Our Cause Is One"
Shortly after Saifullah Paracha's return to Karachi in October, another family, in Sharm el Sheikh 2,340 miles away, had embarked on what reporter Jeff Shenker called "a desperate and possibly reckless mission" to save the life of one of their own: the British-Egyptian human-rights activist Alaa Abd el-Fattah, possibly Egypt's most prominent political prisoner.
Abd el-Fattah, who has spent most of the last decade behind bars for speaking out against Egypt's oppressive regime, had been on a partial hunger strike since April. After visiting him on November 18th, his family reported that he had broken his hunger strike "out of a desire to stay alive, but he would resume it if no progress was made regarding his freedom." His sister Sanaa Seif told reporters inside the COP27 conference hall,
"He's not in prison for the Facebook post they charged him with. He's in prison because he's someone who makes people believe the world can be a better place. He's someone trying to make the world a better place... There are tens of thousands of political prisoners in Egypt. There are more around the world. Climate activists get arrested, kidnapped in Latin America. We face the same kind of oppression, and our cause is one."
What is Guantanamo Bay but a place where the American empire has practiced its human-breaking tactics for 20 years without accountability offshore of any system of justice? What is the U.N. climate summit but a meeting place where the world's elite have protected their power for 27 years and counting?
Living as a "forever prisoner" (as the Guardian dubbed Saifullah Paracha in 2018) was, he once said, "like being alive in your own grave." Forever wars, forever prisoners, forever climate chaos, forever theft. That's the world we live in, where governments like those of the United States and Egypt throw innocent Muslims like Saifullah Paracha and pro-democracy dissidents like Alaa Abd el-Fattah into prison for standing in the way of their forever-repressive interests.
Reporting on the struggle to free Abd el-Fattah, Shenker noted, "The phrase 'We Have Not Yet Been Defeated' became the unofficial slogan of COP27, a reference to the title of a book by Abd el-Fattah published in 2021, 'You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.'" Could the perseverance and courage of people like Paracha, Abd el-Fattah, and the activists for climate justice and human rights--both those who attended the conference at Sharm el Sheik and countless others around the world--make it possible someday to drop the "Yet" and say simply, "We Have Not Been Defeated"?
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Lula Aims to Create New Federal Police Unit to Curb Environmental Crimes in Brazil
"Reverting the destruction from the past administration and taking meaningful action to protect the Amazon and the climate must be a priority of the new government," said one advocate.
Dec 01, 2022
The administration of leftist Brazilian President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva wants to establish a new Federal Police unit focused on deterring environmental crimes, Reuters reported Wednesday.
"The crimes that happened during the current government will now be combated."
The news outlet cited Sen.-elect Flavio Dino, who is widely considered a top candidate to be Lula's next justice minister and currently runs the transition team's task force aimed at reducing violent crime, restricting gun ownership, and protecting the Amazon rainforest, roughly 60% of which is located in Brazil.
In an interview with Reuters, Dino said that "there is now a specific complexity of environmental crimes, in which there is, a kind of combo of crimes in the Amazon," referring to the interconnected nature of illegal deforestation, drug trafficking, money laundering, and gang violence. "We no longer have isolated environmental crimes."
"You have this sophistication and there is a transnationality, because it involves other countries in the Amazon," Dino continued. "So the idea is a specialized unit for greater efficiency and greater articulation with neighboring countries."
While environmental crimes are currently addressed by the Federal Police's organized crime department, Dino said that creating a new unit would be a "practical proposal, which shows a sense of priority for this environmental issue."
Lula, a Workers' Party member who recently defeated Brazil's outgoing far-right president, Jair Bolsonaro, said two weeks ago at the United Nations COP27 summit that "there's no climate security for the world without a protected Amazon" and outlined his plan to achieve "zero deforestation."
Parts of the Amazon--nicknamed the "lungs of the Earth" because of its unmatched capacity to provide oxygen and absorb planet-heating carbon dioxide--recently passed a key tipping point after Bolsonaro spent his four-year reign intensifying the destruction of the tropical rainforest. Bolsonaro's regressive policy changes pushed deforestation in Brazil to a 15-year high last year, helping to drive the country's greenhouse gas emissions to their highest level in almost two decades.
"The past four years have been marked by Bolsonaro government's anti-environment and anti-Indigenous agenda, and by the irreparable damage caused to the Amazon, biodiversity, and to the rights and lives of Indigenous people," Andre Freitas, Amazon campaign coordinator for Greenpeace Brazil, said Wednesday in a statement.
"Reverting the destruction from the past administration and taking meaningful action to protect the Amazon and the climate must be a priority of the new government," said Freitas.
During his COP27 speech, Lula, who previously served as Brazil's president from 2003 to 2010 and takes office again on January 1, said: "The crimes that happened during the current government will now be combated. We will rebuild our enforcement capabilities and monitoring systems that were dismantled during the past four years."
Most of the deforestation that occurred under Bolsonaro was illegal, fueled by logging, mining, and agribusiness companies that were given a green light by the outgoing president and often used violence to repress Indigenous forest dwellers and other environmental defenders.
"We will fight hard against illegal deforestation. We will take care of Indigenous people," said Lula, who drastically slashed clear-cutting and inequality when he governed the country earlier this century. "Brazil is emerging from the cocoon to which it has been subjected for the last four years."
According to Freitas, "To start rebuilding the climate agenda in Brazil, it is fundamental for the new government to have a robust plan to control deforestation and fight mining and land-grabbing by resuming the creation of protected areas, respecting the rights of Indigenous peoples, and holding those responsible for environmental crimes accountable."
"It is essential," he added, "that the future government promotes an ecological transition that establishes a predominant economy in the Amazon that can live with the forest standing and that brings real, just development to the region."
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The Notable Victory on Loss and Damage at COP27
The UN-backed climate summit in Egypt was a failure, no doubt about it. But it was not a systemic failure.
Nov 29, 2022
There is something in the modern radical mind that wants the climate negotiations to fail. Such a failure, after all, would seem to prove that this wretched system cannot be reformed, that only a revolutionary break can save humanity's future.
COP27, the climate conference in Sharm El Sheik in Egypt, was not, however, a failure. I say this despite the fact that my inbox contains, among much else, an alert from an international organization I generally support (and will not name) that tells me that "For the 27th time in its history, COP, the United Nations Convention on Climate Change, has failed. The rapid degradation of our planet by our industrial economy will not be held in check."
Alas, this email's date stamp, November 18, places it two days before COP27 ended. During those two days, the rich countries that had blocked the establishment of the Loss & Damage fund folded under immense political pressure, thus allowing COP27 to finally create the fund.
The United States, the greatest of the miscreants, was the last to stand down. By some reports, it only did so after a last-minute threat by European negotiators to abandon the talks. But despite this win, the endless U.S. stalling did immense damage. In particular, it allowed the Egyptian presidency, no friend of humanity and nature, to play out an end-game gambit in which, finally, the core mitigation text--which is far too weak--couldn't be challenged without putting the new fund at risk.
This was a failure, no doubt about it. But it was not a systemic failure. It wasn't the fault of "the COP"--as in "COP27 is a COP out," one of the least inspired of the recent headlines--unless this accusation extends to the UN system itself, which condemns the climate talks to consensus decision-making. But blaming the UN lets the governments themselves off the hook, and this will not do, because the governments could yet change the rules.
Still, the Loss & Damage fund is a very big deal, or will be if it is adequately funded. As Mohammed Adow, the executive director of Power Shift Africa, a key civil society group based in Kenya, puts it, "What we have is an empty bucket. Now we need to fill it so that support can flow to the most impacted people who are suffering right now at the hands of the climate crisis."
Not only is a great deal of loss and damage finance needed, so is a great deal of mitigation finance. And adaptation finance. And just transition finance. But after COP27's loss-and-damage finance battle, something very large has shifted. Back in the old days, when it was still possible to honestly imagine that mitigation alone would be sufficient, it was also possible to argue that the redirection of private capital flows world more or less suffice. But those days are over. Today, no one honestly believes that a meaningful flow of loss-and-damage finance will come through private channels. And this realization spills over to the transition portfolio as a whole.
The decision to create the Loss & Damage fund has thus queued up the real financing battle, in which international public finance takes center stage. Further, it did this even while it pushed the linked battle to phase out fossil fuels to a qualitatively new level. That battle was lost at COP27, but this was just an initial skirmish. Indeed, at COP27, the government of India, which will soon hold the G20 Presidency, came out, again and unambiguously, for the "phase down" (not "out") of all fossil fuels, not just coal. The politics here are complex and fraught, and they promise to remain so, but this was unambiguously good news. The old days in which all major G77 politicians could be expected to reflexively argue that fossil energy is essential to development are, it seems, over.
The COP Context
COP27 was a Childhood's End moment. But it sure didn't feel like one on arrival at Sharm El Sheik. The COVID pandemic set the stage, and so had a host country that has, since the Arab Spring, settled into an old-school authoritarianism that has oscillated between brutality and incompetence. Meanwhile, Russia's war in Ukraine had roiled global food and energy markets, increased the short-term use of coal, drawn fleets of LNG tankers to Europe, and seriously threatened to undermine the precious little mitigation ambition that had been won last year in Glasgow.
Ambition had in fact lagged in the run-up to the COP: 2022 was on track for record emissions, and the UN had just warned that "no credible pathway" to the official goal of a 1.5C maximum global temperature increase still existed. Given this, the tin-pot realism that had attempted to frame COP27 as an "implementation COP" was basically dead-on -arrival. So too, more unfortunately, was the effort to frame COP27 as an "African COP" that would be defined by battles over gas, battles in which national regimes such as Senegal and Congo sought to develop their oil and gas resources--even if the resulting fuels would be exported to Europe and Asia rather than used to "develop" their own societies--while African civil society demanded a laser focus on justice-first renewable energy leapfrogging.
The themes resounded at the COP, but quickly gave way to larger ones. The developing countries--and importantly the global civil society networks--had decided to go all in on the loss-and-damage showdown, and this was even before the Pakistani floods ratified the wisdom of this decision. There was also the Global Adaptation Goal, which could not be forgotten. And the Global Stocktake, an essential component of the Paris "ambition ratchet." And on the horizon was the New Collective Finance Goal, of which more soon.
And above all there was the challenge of "keeping 1.5C alive."
It was soon obvious that together, the loss-and-damage and global mitigation battles would entirely dominate the proceedings. These two are tightly bound together, and neither makes any sense without the other.
"Loss and damage" is that which lies beyond adaptation, and the only way to limit its demands is to stabilize the climate system as quickly as is humanly possible. Despite all the optimism and spin about carbon dioxide removal and other "negative emissions" technologies, the only real chance at rapid stabilization lies in very rapidly phasing out fossil fuels. Spoiler alert: this cannot be done unless it is done fairly. Both of these challenges have everything, or almost everything, to do with money, and COP27 marked the moment in human history when this became altogether obvious. Further, this knowledge really does change everything. To have any real chance of success of stabilizing the climate system, one of the oldest and most difficult questions of global climate justice must be answered: Who pays?
The 1.5C Goal
Just before COP27, David Wallace Wells, now stabled at The New York Times, went out of his way to explain that 1.5C is no longer achievable. The Economist then did him one better by adorning its COP27 cover with a lurid image of the Earth pierced by an arrow, and the caption "Say Goodbye 1.5C."
But in Sharm El Sheikh, below the surface was a more complex and challenging truth, in which the 1.5C goal appears not as an impossible dream but rather as a strong weapon that would be foolish to just give up. Bluntly, and perhaps paradoxically, the chances of avoiding an overshoot of 1.5C are fading. But it's possible to reframe the 1.5C goal in the concrete, visceral terms of fossil fuel phase-out. The number itself, after all, was never the point, but only an instrument by which to vividly and productively invoke the mind-boggling ambition needed to stabilize the climate system in time, and the social and political transformation necessary to make that ambition real.
For a while, the 1.5C goal did just this, and beautifully. Think, for example, of the warnings of the IPCC's Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C, which in 2018 said that "Limiting global warming to 1.5degC would require rapid, far-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society," and that "there is no documented historic precedent for their scale." Recall, particularly, that the IPCC translated these statements into numeric terms, reiterated in its Fifth Assessment Report, that to have a 50 percent chance of holding warming to 1.5C, emissions must drop by about 50 percent by 2030. These numbers were extremely powerful, for they sketched out an easily understood short-term goal that would establish a defensible "net zero" pathway. But, alas, even in the short time since 2018, it has gotten harder to imagine change actually happening at the necessary pace, and this despite the fact that, technically, there's enough money and the science to make it so.
What's to be done? Numbers alone do not give the full picture. If, however, the idea of a fossil fuel phase-out--or, rather, the idea of a fair fossil fuel phase-out--is added, the narrative shifts. No longer is 1.5C merely an abstract target distilled from vast bodied of complex science. Now there are the nuts and bolts of desperate prudence and rational capital expenditure. The pivot was marked by the International Energy Agency, which has taken to emphasizing the fact that to achieve 1.5C requires an immediate cessation of all investment in fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere in the world. This key point has as much to do with international justice as it does with planetary physics.
COP27 marked the point where equity finally, decisively, took center stage. Never before had the term "fossil fuel phase-out" so often been preceded by the word "fair." It came as one of those wonderous moments of learning that mark living social movements, in which suddenly everybody knew that the fossil fuel phase-out could only happen if it was simultaneously a shift towards developmental justice. Everybody, that is, except the wealthy country delegations, who still insisted on pounding on about the necessity of the 1.5C goal, in itself, as if it were a mere implementation problem, even though they had absolutely failed to deliver, or even seriously consider, the finance and technology transfer breakthroughs that might make it achievable. Even though they tried, at every opportunity, to leave out all references to equity.
Brandon Wu, the director of policy and campaigns at ActionAid USA, was notable for channeling his irritation into a scathing op-ed. It goes to the core of the decarbonization challenge, and the hypocrisies that pretend that rapid decarbonization is achievable without centering equitable international burden-sharing:
Objections from developing countries to the current language emphasizing the 1.5-degree goal is fundamentally premised on equity concerns--especially in light of all this developed country hypocrisy. Statements like "all Parties must increase efforts towards 1.5-compatible pathways" are completely devoid of equity. They erase history, ignoring that developed countries have been polluting for more than 150 years, in favor of putting all countries at the same starting point regardless of their historical emissions or their current levels of development.
Without any equity principles, where is the balance of efforts going to fall? If history is any guide, developed countries will not do their fair share, and will push off their obligations onto the backs of the poor. They will continue with their fossil fuel expansion plans and blow through the remaining carbon budget for a 1.5-degree world, all the while failing to provide the finance and technology developing countries need to have any chance of making just transitions a reality in their own economies.
The Centrality of Equity
COP27 did not formally advance the anti-fossil effort, though over 80 countries--including even the United States and India--came out in favor of a "phase down" of all fossil fuels. Despite all the politics and complex dynamics below the surface, the fact of these declarations remains, and remains stunning. Civil society, for its part, left Sharm El Sheikh with new focus and energy and united around one key point in particular: no adequately rapid phase-out is possible unless the equity challenges posed by extremely rapid decarbonization in this extremely unjust world are faced with far more bravery than hitherto seen.
The challenges here have leapt from the pages of the climate equity literature (see for example, the Civil Society Equity Review's 2022 report The Imperative of Cooperation) and into the pages of actual diplomatic history. The COP27 decision text itself establishes an ad hoc "transitional committee on the operationalization of the new funding arrangements for responding to loss and damage and the associated fund," which is charged with making its initial report by COP28. Which by the way will be in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates. Which is going to be amusing as well as maddening, because it's not going to be easy for the UAE or Saudi Arabia or any of the Middle East's oil exporting states to insist that they are "developing counties" and should not therefore be contributors to global climate transition funds, not while the opulence of the Dubai cityscape sets the background.
Or, rather, it will be easy, but it won't plausible.
There's a distinction to be made here between the long term and the short. In the long term, achieving anything like true sustainability will require developing some robust sort of planetary economic and ecological justice. But rapid decarbonization is needed in the short term. This means an end to disingenuous rich-world fantasies of a rapid global transition in which each country--whether it be rich or poor--is essentially on its own. But it also means finding pragmatic ways forward, ways that do not assume that the trillions of dollars needed for international transition financing are soon going to pass through the national treasuries of global north countries that, frankly, are embroiled in low-level civil wars with a reawakened neo-fascist right. And here too COP27 offered some long overdue focus, for it was thick with ideas for international finance workarounds and multilateral mobilization. No prior COP saw anything like this discussion of "transformational climate finance."
Several points are already clear. One is that the decision text has been seeded with references to developing country "debt burdens," which affirm the need to avoid exacerbating these burdens with loan-based climate financing mechanisms. Another is that there is a great deal of buzz about the "reform" of the multilateral development banks, a prospect that cannot be passed over, though the history here does not inspire a great deal of confidence. A third is that the Bridgetown Initiative floated by the Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley has garnered a terrific amount of attention and demonstrated just how great the desire for visionary pragmatism is. If the elites can actually come up with something real--some quasi-Keynesian mechanism that can actually mobilize hundreds of billions in climate finance--it would be widely welcomed. And, yes, a global tax on fossil energy profits would be a great place to start.
In the longer term, true transitional justice is in order, and it's going to be more challenging. This issue too exploded at COP27, which saw an unprecedented interest in climate reparations, which notably disconcerted U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. This reparations discussion returns, inevitably, to the UN Framework Convention's keystone equity principles of "common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities." The issues here will not fade away, especially now that the New Finance Goal is on the table and the ultimate taboo topic of "expanding the contributor base" has been cracked open. Without returning to first principles, how can U.S. and Chinese fair shares be compared?
Because of COP27, national fair shares are now on the agenda, if only as the background to an inevitable debate about pragmatic ways forward. Future meetings will determine these next steps--at the IMF, at the World Bank, at the big conclave that Mottley and France's Emmanuel Macron are spinning up for next year, and of course at COP28.
One last point: about the tragedy of the situation, the tragedy that focuses the conversation on ways and means--finance and technology--instead of mobilization and solidarity. In other words, the debate is on money rather than an emergency phase-out of fossil fuels, a phase-out that simultaneously lifts up the poor and creates new development paths around the world.
At COP27, the crunch came down to finance and fossil fuels, and this is likely to happen again and again, even as loss and damage remains forever on the stage. These are the key pieces, and all of them must be addressed as part of an honest and productive conversation about a rapid fossil fuel phase-out that is fair, or at least fair enough. The only option is to talk about developmental justice--for everyone--despite the terrifying waves of loss and destruction that can no longer be avoided.
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Loss and Damage Fund as a Paradigm Shift
The fight for a liveable planet will be won or lost in this decade.
Nov 26, 2022
The 27th Conference of Parties (COP27) under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Kyoto Protocol and Paris Agreement, attended by 47,000 delegates, delivered on the promise of being an 'Implementation COP'. It was the third longest in the history of the annual climate summit, with parties working overtime thirty-six hours after the conference's scheduled closure. As dawn broke in Sharm el-Sheikh, the host city of this year's summit, located on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula and the coastal strip of the Red Sea, on 20 November, the landmark agreement on loss and damage was gavelled by COP27 president and Egypt's foreign minister Sameh Shoukry.
The biggest news of COP27 is the global consensus on loss and damage, which was a positive, surprising outcome of the talks.
The biggest news of COP27 is the global consensus on loss and damage, which was a positive, surprising outcome of the talks. The two-week annual meeting attended by over 100 heads of states and governments started at a tense temperature, as there was a clear divide between historic and huge-emitter countries (US, UK, EU) and the Group of 77/China bloc on the issue. Developing countries--the resource-rich but climate-vulnerable countries, and those suffering intense impacts from climate change despite very little contribution to it--view the UN climate negotiations as a way to secure much-needed funds from those they deem as historically responsible for climate change. Many developed countries, on the other hand, have resisted being held financially accountable.
The general public perceive the UN COPs as a global governance body where diplomats, politicians, climate scientists, business leaders and civil society actors gather each year to solve the climate crisis. Under that surface, the COP's annual two-week conference was actually a battlefield wherein various simultaneous intense negotiations occur. Parties fight for their national and regional interests and the processes are actually full of conflicts.
Corporate agenda in full show
When COP17 was hosted in Durban, South Africa in 2011, civil society groups dubbed that COP as the 'Conference of Polluters' due to the sponsorship by mining companies of the talks. Ten years since, COP27 was criticised as a trade show, as there were over 100 more fossil fuel lobbyists in the list of attendees in Sharm el-Sheik, or 25% more than at COP26 last year in Glasgow. There were at least 636 fossil fuel lobbyists, affiliated with some of the world's biggest polluting oil and gas giants such as Shell, Chevron and BP. The BBC also reported that BP's chief executive Bernard Looney was registered on the official UN list as a delegate of Mauritania. This flagrantly shows the increasing influence of the fossil fuel industry at the climate talks.
Our research at Global Justice Now showed that the Big 5 oil companies--Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and TotalEnergies--have made over $170 billion of profit in the past 12 months. That's more money every day than the sum committed so far to loss and damage finance by rich countries ($272 million). These five companies alone are also responsible for 11% of historic emissions. If we apply that share to the estimated costs of climate chaos to the global south, that means they could be responsible for an $8 trillion climate bill that is instead being footed by the global south.
Loss and Damage: a paradigm shift
In the context of the climate negotiations, loss and damage dates back to the original drafting and development of the UNFCCC in 1991 when the Alliance of Small Island States was formed, which includes 40 states, many of them developing countries within the G77 groupings. They called for a mechanism that would compensate countries affected by sea level rise. Since 1990, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) through its comprehensive assessment reports has shown evidence of increasingly severe predictions of the future impacts of climate change and how to address them. It was set up by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the UN Environmental Program.
There has been a shift in the last 20 years in the global climate change regime. Previously, the primary focus was on mitigation, which means preventing the planet from warming to more extreme temperatures by avoiding and reducing emissions of heat-trapping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. It then shifted to both mitigation and adaptation--climate adaptation refers to adjustments in ecological, social, or economic systems in response to actual or expected climatic stimuli and their effects or impacts.
Finally, loss and damage has emerged as a key fixture on the agenda with the establishment of the Warsaw International Mechanism (WIM) on loss and damage at COP19 in November 2013. This shift can be attributed to the realisation that mitigation and adaptation efforts can avoid future losses and damages, but in some cases this will be insufficient.
The historic outcome of the establishment of a loss and damage fund was delivered in COP27 by the unity of the G77/China bloc led by Pakistan, the Egyptian presidency that kept that unity, and civil society groups that supported the G77/China bloc and put pressure on the United States, which had been the main blocker to having the fund. The developed nations have been blocking and delaying this outcome for years.
This first victory is indeed huge, but developed countries still need to deliver on this fund because an empty fund is an empty promise for the millions of people all over the world who are already suffering from the consequences of climate change they cannot adapt to any longer. Details about the fund are still to be discussed at next year's climate summit in the United Arab Emirates.
Unfinished business
While the loss and damage fund will need future negotiations to be filled, there was no significant development on finance in Egypt. The Santiago Network on Loss and Damage (SNLD), set up at COP25 held in Madrid in 2019 to lead on a technical assistance facility for developing countries, is also devoid of any financial commitments. The finance decisions adopted only pushed developed countries to deliver the still unfulfilled $100 billion per year by 2020 pledge and new pledges of more than $230 million to the Adaptation Fund. Given the scale of the needs of developing countries, this is a meagre sum.
Climate justice movements and campaigners will need to keep vigilance, though, as there will be a role for multilateral development banks to respond to loss and damage. This could be done through increased capitalization or loans, including from regional development banks. The UK pushed not just for the role of private finance, but also philanthropic organisations.
There will be more future fights on fossil fuels and energy. The final COP27 text included a message that "low-emission" energy should be part of the world's response to rising seas and searing heat waves. This could include nuclear power, or some forms of hydrogen. It could also mean to include gas. There is certainly a debate on what this means. The Paris Agreement goals require most fossil fuel use to be ended within a generation.
Most importantly, national plans that countries had submitted on cutting greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 were not enough to meet the vital goal of limiting global temperature rises to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, in line with scientific advice. As the UN secretary general Antonio Guterres told world leaders at the opening of the summit, humanity is on a "highway to climate hell." The national plans are not adding up and we have very little time left. The fight for a liveable planet will be won or lost in this decade.
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Carbon Bombing the Climate Must End
We cannot tackle climate change, and save our collective future, while increasing military spending.
Nov 25, 2022
The annual United Nations climate talks, known as the Conference of Parties (COP), have traditionally promised much but delivered little. This year's COP27 was no different, with most observers noting that it even backtracked on commitments made at COP26 in Glasgow.
The difference between the way the world's richest countries responded to the Ukraine war and the carbon war on our whole planet is undoubtedly stark.
What was less observed was that the summit faced a major additional obstacle in 2022. This year, the climate crisis was overshadowed by the war in Ukraine which has been the foreign policy priority of the United States and the European Union since the beginning of Russia's invasion in February.
The difference between the way the world's richest countries responded to the Ukraine war and the carbon war on our whole planet is undoubtedly stark.
Since the beginning of Russia's invasion, the US and its NATO allies provided Ukraine with military assistance worth more than $25bn, welcomed nearly seven million refugees, and willingly absorbed severe economic shocks caused by energy price increases triggered by the war.
Despite a global recession looming on the horizon, these countries did not hesitate to increase their military expenditure. Germany allocated 100 billion euros ($104bn) of its 2022 budget for the armed forces, for example, and the US House of Representatives approved a record $840bn military spending.
Yet at COP27, these same wealthiest nations were not even able to deliver the $100bn in climate finance that had been promised as far back as 2009 to the world's most climate-vulnerable countries. A recent report co-published by the organisation I work for, the Transnational Institute, found that the richest countries spent $9.45 trillion on their militaries between 2013 and 2021 compared with an estimated $234bn on climate finance - in other words, they have spent 30 times as much on the military as climate finance.
After many years of pressure, at COP27, nations finally agreed to create a loss and damage mechanism to provide funds to impoverished countries suffering severe climate impacts, but it is so far just an empty pot. The accelerated arms race that has emerged since the Russian invasion and rising US-China tensions signal that filling that pot will not be a priority for most wealthy nations in the near future.
These spending choices matter not just because they are diverting resources from urgently needed climate action, but also because every dollar spent on the military is worsening the climate crisis. Most militaries consume significant amounts of fossil fuels. One estimate calculates that military emissions may make up 5.5 percent of global emissions. If the global military were a country, it would be the fourth biggest emitter in the world, ahead of Russia.
Furthermore, most of the world's military spending goes towards the purchase of equipment and vehicles that are among the worst offenders when it comes to carbon emissions. In 2022 alone, for example, 475 new F-35 fighter jets, which use a whopping 5,600 litres (1,480 gallons) of oil per hour of flight, have been ordered. These fuel-guzzling planes could be flying for the next 30 years.
The emissions increase even further when war breaks out. The Ukrainian government at COP27 presented research showing that the first eight months of war had already led to 33 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions, equivalent to adding 16 million cars to the United Kingdom's roads for two years.
US and UK military chiefs argue that they are committed to reducing military emissions, but their plans so far remain undetailed, opaque and unconvincing. Adding solar panels to a military base is easy to do, but does nothing to tackle the main challenge, which is fossil fuel consumption by military jets, ships and tanks. For now, there is no alternative, green fuel that can be produced at the scale needed and without triggering unacceptable social and environmental consequences, such as increased deforestation and the dispossession of Indigenous peoples.
The uncomfortable truth is that there is no way of ensuring that our planet remains habitable in the long term while continuing to increase military spending. In the midst of an intense and brutal war in Ukraine, this fact is too easily lost as governments are able to justify any increases in military spending to deal with the new immediate "threats".
Moreover, the military spending of many rich countries is already way out of proportion to any real or perceived threat. NATO member states, for example, already spend 17 times as much on the military as Russia. The US spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined.
Meanwhile, the world has an ever smaller window to tackle climate change - the most pressing threat to our collective future. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says the world must cut emissions by 45 percent by 2030 to have any chance at keeping global average temperature increases below 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit). When every month counts, embarking on an accelerated arms race is the worst path the world's most powerful nations can take. It diverts money and attention from urgent climate action, it increases emissions and it fuels conflicts at a time of increased climate instability.
Climate change can teach us a critical lesson about security. Carbon emissions do not recognise borders. It is not possible for any nation to shield itself from the effects of climate change using tanks or fighter jets. The only way to tackle the climate emergency is through global cooperation. Demilitarisation and peace are the best and perhaps the only ways to ensure that humanity has the capacity and resilience to respond to this crisis.
Only if the world's leaders recognise that uniting to confront the threat of global heating is more important than any imperialist strategy or narrow economic interest, may we have a chance to avoid climate catastrophe. A secure nation in the end depends on a secure planet.
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Billionaires Like Elon Musk Are the Most Dangerous People on Planet Earth
The best hope of averting climate disaster may well be wealth taxes that significantly reduce the wealth and power of the super-rich.
Nov 22, 2022
Watching Elon Musk reveal himself in recent weeks to be the world's richest buffoon has certainly been entertaining. However, it could lead to the conclusion that billionaires are silly but harmless--which is far from the truth.
The real danger they pose to humanity is their enormous and largely hidden role in the climate crisis.
Yes, they are often silly. But they are rarely harmless. Indeed, they're among the most dangerous people to walk the earth.
And I'm not just referring to their hoarding of resources while much of the world goes hungry. The real danger they pose to humanity is their enormous and largely hidden role in the climate crisis.
The problem is twofold. First, the carbon footprint of a billionaire is gigantic.
By contrast, the poorest half of the world's population--four billion people--hardly contribute to climate change at all. On average, each person in this deprived bottom half of humanity contributes only 1.6 tons of carbon a year.
However, the average person in the top one per cent of the global population contributes 110 tons of carbon a year, while the average person in the top .01 per cent contributes a monstrous 2,531 tons. Meanwhile, a billionaire typically contributes a jaw-dropping 8,190 tons.
So while the ranks of the superrich are small, their carbon emissions (from private jets, yachts and multiple homes) are so immense--and fast-growing--that they are a key driver of climate change.
Now we come to the second part of the problem: their role as corporate owners directing enormous pools of capital towards fossil fuel production and infrastructure.
In a new study, Oxfam notes that if the investments of billionaires are factored in, their average emissions move from thousands of times greater than an ordinary person to more than a million times greater.
Oxfam examined the investments of 125 billionaires and found that they were skewed toward fossil fuels. If these billionaires moved their investments to a fund that simply followed the S&P 500, the intensity of their emissions would be reduced by half.
Billionaires clearly have a choice where to put their money, but there are only rare exceptions to the pattern--such as Patagonia sportswear billionaire Yvon Chouinard, who put the company's ownership into a trust, declaring "Earth is now our only shareholder."
Most, however, use their capital--and the enormous political clout that comes with it--in ways that further our dependence on fossil fuels, both by investing in their production and infrastructure and by influencing governments to block climate action.
That influence can be observed at the COP27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, where more than 600 lobbyists and executives from fossil fuel-related industries are working hard--often ensconced right inside national delegations--to block climate progress.
Canada's official delegation includes eight industry supporters, including a senior vice-president of the Royal Bank of Canada, which invests heavily in fossil fuels.
With that kind of insider's seat, no wonder there's so little progress at these global climate gatherings.
Given the gigantic carbon footprints of the mega-rich and their oversized political influence, the best hope of averting climate disaster may well be wealth taxes that significantly reduce their wealth and power.
Oxfam argues that wealth taxes could help fund assistance for poor countries devastated by climate change, whose citizens have contributed almost nothing to the problem.
There are lots of other good reasons to introduce wealth taxes, which have been proposed by U.S. senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and in Canada by NDP Leader Jagmeet Singh.
But, despite the popularity of such taxes as well as the urgency of the climate crisis and other needs, momentum toward them has stalled.
Certainly, the Trudeau government has never been interested, instead merely imposing extra sales taxes on luxury cars and yachts--taxes which barely impact the superrich.
But if Prime Minister Justin Trudeau really were the climate warrior he poses as, he'd be listening less to the Royal Bank and more to groups desperately trying to save their countries from drowning in rising sea waters.
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'Let's Try Something New': Naomi Klein Calls for Boycott of Next COP Climate Summit
"Now is the time to decide not to do this all over again next year, when the summit will be in the UAE," argued the author and environmentalist.
Nov 22, 2022
Author and environmentalist Naomi Klein on Monday urged civil society organizations to boycott the 2023 COP climate summit in the United Arab Emirates--one of the world's largest oil producers--after this year's summit concluded without any concrete action to phase-out fossil fuels, despite the best efforts of campaigners from around the world.
Listing off some of the marked failures of COP27--from the host government of Egypt's refusal to release political prisoner Alaa Abd El-Fattah to the "weak climate agreement that protects polluters"--Klein argued in a series of tweets that "now is the time to decide not to do this all over again next year, when the summit will be in the UAE. Of all places."
"Civil society should announce a boycott + instead hold a true people's summit," Klein wrote. "One gathering per continent to limit flying. Links to the official summit by video."
"There can be lobbying sessions built into the COP28 program with governments who will obviously go to the UAE," she continued. "But why should civil society expend the carbon, money, and time to join them just to declare it a failure all over again? Let's try something new."
Klein's call for a new oppositional approach to the annual United Nations climate summit came in the wake of a gathering at which civil society was harassed, surveilled, and sidelined by Egypt's authoritarian government as lobbyists from Exxon, Chevron, and other fossil fuel giants responsible for record-high greenhouse gas emissions swarmed the summit, fighting off efforts to include a fossil fuel phase-out in the summit's final text.
As the Financial Times reported, "The final hours of the summit were marked by a push from dozens of countries to include a pledge to phase down all fossil fuels, which was ultimately unsuccessful."
Klein was hardly alone in lamenting the repeated failures of COP summits to directly confront the industry driving the climate crisis and stressing the urgent need to develop alternative avenues toward achieving ambitious climate action--particularly as COP28 in the UAE appears set to deliver more of the same.
"It is extraordinary that in 30 years of U.N. climate negotiations, eliminating the primary cause of global heating has never been mentioned in the decisions," Damian Carrington, The Guardian's environment editor, wrote Sunday in a postmortem on the Paris climate accord's critical 1.5degC warming target, which continues to slip further out of reach as fossil fuel extraction proceeds apace. "Given that next year's U.N. climate summit will be hosted by a petrostate, the United Arab Emirates, it is hard to see how a crackdown on fossil fuels will happen there either."
"It remains imperative to get off coal, oil, and gas as rapidly as possible. Every tonne of CO2 that remains in the ground means less harm to lives and livelihoods," Carrington added. "Can the U.N. climate talks deliver this at speed? It does not look that way. It is too easy for the fossil fuel states to hold the consensus-based negotiations to ransom, threatening to blow up the whole thing if their black gold is so much as mentioned by name. There were more fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop27 than delegates from the Pacific islands, which their industry is pushing below the waves."
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