What does the new global climate agreement mean?

The first global agreement explicitly addressing fossil fuels indicates theoretical progress, but ignored massive blind spots to which MLK drew attention before his assassination 60 years ago

After two weeks of negotiations in the United Arab Emirates, world leaders celebrated a historic agreement at the COP28 Summit last Wednesday. For the first time, a global agreement addresses the need to ramp down fossil fuel extraction and consumption—while ignoring enforceable targets, historical failures to meet ambitious climate goals, and a series of elephants in the proverbial room that a national hero tried to warn us about before he was assassinated 60 years ago.

Image: Mídia NINJA, licensed through Creative Commons

The first hole in the bucket: enforceability

The COP28 agreement reflects an ambitious vision. In particular, it is being widely celebrated because it arguably represents the emergence of a long overdue global consensus on two related points. First, it aims to invite a future based on renewable energy. As a corollary, it envisions “transitioning away” from non-renewable sources like fossil fuels, whose consumption has shifted the global climate beyond the ranges that human societies have experienced before.

Remarkably, in the 30 years that the United Nations has hosted climate talks, the new COP28 agreement is the first time that a final decision text has ever merely referenced fossil fuels. 

But while the vision of the agreement is worthwhile, the agreement itself offers few concrete or enforceable steps towards it. For instance, leaders announced $400 million in commitments to a fund to help offset the cost of climate disasters in developing countries, but that is ultimately merely a drop in the bucket addressing the impacts of climate chaos while doing little to stem its sources.

Similarly, the new agreement envisions “Tripling renewable energy capacity globally and doubling the global average annual rate of energy efficiency improvements by 2030,” but it leaves those goals unspecified at the insistence of countries including China and India. By allowing countries to contrive any convenient baseline for measurement of future progress, the agreement’s text effectively invites its own subversion.

It also reflects an optimistic belief in technology that the climate catastrophe has already exposed as ultimately fraudulent. For instance, the agreement calls for “Accelerating zero- and low-emission technologies, including…nuclear, abatement and removal technologies such as carbon capture and utilisation and storage….”

But there is no technology that can make continued reliance on fossil fuels sustainable, while history suggests that technological progress often comes at the cost of marginalized communities whose inclusion in a sustainable future is critical to achieving it.

Proponents of technological solutions to climate catastrophe dream of a breakthrough, but relying on one to emerge is the equivalent on betting the future of human civilization on a horse race.

Finally, the agreement invites an expansion in extraction of some fossil fuels, “recogni[zing] that transitional fuels can play a role in facilitating the energy transition while ensuring energy security.” In particular, liquified natural gas (LNG) burns more cleanly than other forms of fossil fuels, but it remains problematic. It may even be worse than other fossil fuels due to methane leaks associated with the fracking increasingly necessary to extract LNG. These are just some of the reasons why insightful critics have described the COP28 agreement as “riddled with cavernous loopholes for [the] fossil fuel industry.”

While the COP28 agreement does reflect theoretical progress, much more must be done to keep fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources in the ground. To celebrate the text merely because it recognizes for the first time that fossil fuels are problematic is charitably, and requires ignoring the accelerating nature of the contemporary climate crisis.

A second hole in the bucket: capitalism

Developing countries have for decades observed that the rules of the international trading system are effectively rigged, forcing developing countries to offer natural resources to international buyers through markets dominated and skewed by rich countries and institutional investors from them. 

Meanwhile, many practices that drive climate chaos, like burning wood or dung for household heating, are driven by poverty and economic inequality. In other words, rich countries claim to care about climate chaos, but not enough to do much about it. The COP 28 agreement reflects essentially no progress from that problematic baseline.

Until rich countries meaningfully invest in developing countries to offer alternative pathways to development that do not rely on the extraction of natural resources, their concerns about climate chaos remain disingenuous. That was one reason that the new loss and damage fund for vulnerable countries is so important.

But international funds to help developing countries recover from climate-related natural disasters do nothing to help stem the tide of greenhouses gasses. They help ameliorate impacts, but do nothing to address root causes.

Addressing root causes would require foreign direct investment in development countries in order to offer alternative development pathways that do not rely on extracting natural resources. Supporting democratic restraints on market-driven rapacity would also help.

But rather than support sustainable development or meaningful democracy in the global South, wealthy countries have instead done everything possible to impede it.

American support for former Brazilian president Jair Bolsanaro provides an apt example. A notorious autocrat fairly described as the Donald Trump of Brazil, he oversaw a massive expansion of deforestation in the Amazon, undermining the capacity of the region to sequester carbon precisely because he respected neither public nor global opinion until he was removed from office.

The connection between climate chaos and capitalism is an inconvenient truth that the COP 28 agreement continues to ignore.

A third hole in the bucket: militarism

It’s striking that the COP28 agreement was negotiated in the midst of an ongoing genocide in Gaza to which both Washington and Tel Aviv remain committed, despite a global uprising. Even attempts within rich countries to organize mass work stoppage have proven insufficiently influential, although they have proceeded without the critical support of organized labor or leaders challenged to remember the meaning of solidarity.

On the one hand, discussions about military aggression and international human rights are usually shorn from those about climate chaos. Yet each of these spheres critically influence each other.

The Pentagon is our planet’s largest institutional source of carbon pollution. The amount of petroleum on which the military industrial complex relies is staggering. A single fighter jet can consume up to 385 gallons of jet fuel per minute. But the Pentagon’s rapacious consumption doesn’t convey even a fraction of how militarism forces climate catastrophe.

Washington’s international belligerence has directly contributed to historic releases of greenhouse gasses, while editors of major newspapers have joined policymakers in a continuing cover up surrounding the latest example.

The ecocide inherent in the use of defoliant Agent Orange across southeast Asia during the war on Vietnam offers an earlier example of this pattern. Interestingly, the investigative journalist who exposed the worst human rights abuses by the US military in Vietnam, Seymour Hersh, is the very same writer who more recently documented Washington’s attack on the Nordstream pipeline last year.

Hersh has done more than any living writer to expose crimes and coverups by the American “defense” establishment, yet co-opted editors at major newspapers across the United States continue to ignore his findings, deferring to Pentagon sources who have lied on the record repeatedly about everything from torture to weapons of mass destruction.

This is one way that disinformation attains the status of official narrative. It reflects gaslighting on a mass scale, not unlike the claim across Washington that Pax Americana represents a “rules based order” when the reality is both more straightforward, and unfortunately, seemingly timeless: “might makes right.”

But the Pentagon’s engineering of climate chaos stretches far beyond its ecocidal actions and relentless consumption of fossil fuels. No one in Washington has been willing to publicly observe how the military industrial complex has deployed its formidable resources over and over again to force natural resources onto global markets over the objections of local governments.

Few Americans remember the origin story of U.S. relations with Iran, or why Washington has been existentially opposed to the government of one of the planet’s most ancient civilizations for the past 50 years.

The saga begins in 1953, when a democratically elected Iranian president tried to nationalize the country’s oil and gas reserves, taking them off the international market to avoid economic predation by the west. The response was one among any number of CIA interventions, removing the democratically elected leader, and putting in place a brutal dictator whose abuses then inspired a revolution in 1979 eventually co-opted by right wing theocrats.

Few histories better represent the absurdly prolific incompetence of the Washington policy establishment, or its hateful contributions to a species-wide calamity that will only continue to grow worse in the future.

While the CIA’s intervention in Iran presents the most direct example of how militarism has fueled climate catastrophe, it is far from the only one. Each of the dozens of CIA “interventions” across the world to deny democracy in the service of enabling capitalism fit this unfortunately sordid—and continuing—pattern.

Paid subscribers can access a further section describing how Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. forecast the climate crisis, and warned an unfortunately ignorant country about how to stop it long before most observers realized the crisis was at hand. Even his most ardent supporters tend to downplay the prescience and profundity of Dr. King’s legacy, which stretches far beyond the unsuccessful struggles for civil rights for which he is most widely remembered.