Do you remember the movie Groundhog Day released in 1993, where a weatherman is sent to cover a story about a weather forecasting “rat” (as he calls it) and finds himself in a time loop until he gets it right? Somehow the annual COP-shindigs remind me of exactly this situation: At each conference lots of promises, financial and other commitments and of course the obligatory back slapping but with the notable difference that the politicians haven’t got it right yet.
In a very interesting piece and a special report in its 5 November 2022 issue The Economist highlights in detail the many ways in which the attendees at the COP-meetings have failed to live up to expectations and that as a consequence keeping the increase of global temperatures at below 1.5 degrees Celsius, set at the COP21 meeting in Paris in 2015, looks nigh to unachievable now.
Of course, as I have already written in my blog entry last year, most if not all participants will reach Sharm El Sheikh by plane and I wonder how many of the attendees, particularly those arriving by private or chartered aircraft, will offset the carbon footprint of their journey. At least this year some help is at hand: A team of University College London researchers has developed an open-source calculator that allows those travelling from the UK to Egypt for COP27 to assess, reduce and offset the carbon footprint of their journey. The project is a response to the widely publicised news that last year’s COP26 in Glasgow had the largest carbon footprint of any Conference of the Parties (COP) to date – with 75 per cent of this down to international flights. And the footprint of COP26 was apparently twice that of COP25. So much for a conference on climate change!
To coincide with the talks in Sharm El Sheikh, Oxfam has published a paper on the carbon emissions of the investments of the world’s 125 richest people. It is fair to say that the findings paint a rather gloomy picture, showing that on average they are emitting 3 million tonnes a year, more than a million times the average for someone in the bottom 90% of humanity. Billionaires outright own or hold large stakes in many of the world’s largest and most powerful corporations and, as the authors of the paper rightly state, it is each government’s responsibility to hold them to account by legislating and if necessary enforcing reporting requirements and imposing taxes on the big polluters (increasing tax revenue in the current economic climate should be an issue close to governments’ hearts anyway). I just wonder how many of these billionaires are in Egypt right now…
So is anything going to change on the back of the COP27? Hopefully yes, but the current economic woes are likely to throw a spanner in the works as far as immediate measures are concerned. And, as The Economist rightly states, the developed countries will have to stump up substantial amounts of money to assist the developing world. This at a time when government finances are already strained. I hope not, but it might be Groundhog Day once more after all.
The grumpy older man 