By Robert C. Hinkley
30 November 2023
The headline in this morning’s Washington Post, read “The UAE has Big Plans for a ‘Success Story’ at the COP28 Climate Talks.” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/29/cop28-climate-summit-dubai-financing/.)
The story talked about how this COP wasn’t going to focus on reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions or reducing carbon in the atmosphere. That had been tried with the previous 27 COPs and failed. This year it’s going to be about the petro-states and other rich countries financing recoveries in poorer regions which will suffer catastrophic
Photo by Marcus Spiske
events as a result of climate change.
It reminds me of the 1980s on Wall Street. Those were the times of the since failed investment bank, Drexel Burnham Lambert, headed by the “Junk Bond King” and later jailed, Michael Milken. Back then Drexel and Milken used to hold an annual conference of corporate raiders and their financiers to engage in excess and discuss new opportunities. They called it “The Predator’s Ball.”
For too long we’ve laboured under the false impression that finance was one of the ways the climate crisis was going to be solved. The industry now boasts that more than $30 trillion of investment funds are under socially responsible management. Yet, carbon levels in the atmosphere are higher than anytime in recorded history. Simply put, socially responsible finance has done little to solve the biggest corporate generated environmental problem of all time.
Now it’s angling to take advantage of the situation by financing disaster recoveries in countries hit the hardest. Though today portrayed as altruism, you can expect that, down the road, those providing the funding will demand a return on their investments. Some would call it predatory lending. COP28 is shaping up as The Predator’s Ball II.
That’s not what COPs are for. Their purpose is to find a way to stop the emissions. Twenty-seven times they’ve tried and failed, but that doesn’t mean there is no solution. See, www.codeforcorporatecitizenship.com.). Delegates to COP 28 should try again. Not throw their hands up and invite the perpetrators of the disaster in to feast on its victims.
Great point --the world's leading capitalists are about to cost in the climate disasters that will inevitably occur as a result of their inaction and disguise it as altruism. It needs the pen of an Aaron Sorkin to write the screenplay. Absurd --totally absurd. The advanced nations still have not paid their dues as far as helping the global south. There is a breakdown of any kind of global humanity. Every man woman and child for themselves as we rocket ourselves over the climate ravines using rubber lids from garbage bins. Now with suddenly EV demand down --it looks like we have all grown to accept the inevitable.
As usual, Bob. Spot on. If emissions are increasing in spite of the "investment in saving the planet," how do "we" get nations to actually make a real, lasting difference? Elections? Not here in the U.S. where we are avoiding becoming an autocracy by hanging by our fingernails? More regulation? How do you regulate change in the midst of a crisis like this? Anyone who doesn't see or feel on their skin the change in the climate over the past decade must be...... (you fill in the blank.) Keep up the good work, my friend.