It's ridiculous?

Just Stop Oil!

Two Just Stop Oil activists arrested at Dippy the Diplodocus exhibit in Coventry

Jessica Murray, Midlands correspondent for the Guardian reports (Mon 10 Apr 2023): 

Two Just Stop Oil protesters have been arrested after jumping over a barrier surrounding the Dippy the Diplodocus exhibit in Coventry.

Video footage captured the campaigners, named by the environmental group as Daniel Knorr, 21, and Victoria Lindsell, 67, jumping over the fencing before being grabbed by staff at the Herbert Art Gallery and Museum at around 10am on Monday.

The pair were subsequently arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage, with West Midlands police adding that “two large bags of dry paint” were also seized by officers.

The force said protest liaison officers remained at the scene to “keep people safe and limit disruption to a minimum”.

Footage showed staff members in high viz jackets grabbing Knorr’s rucksack and tackling Lindsell during the protest, with one shouting: “Stop it, stop it now. Do you understand?”

The demonstrators both removed their jumpers to reveal white “Just Stop Oil” T-shirts.

As he was led away in handcuffs by police, Knorr was recorded saying: “Kids need to grow up in a world where they’re safe, not where they’re worrying about if there is enough food to eat. Not when they’re watching TV seeing millions of people die in deadly heatwaves.”

Just Stop Oil said the protest was to highlight the threat of new fossil fuels, adding: “the plaster cast is safe; we are not.” In a statement after the arrests, the group said: “Humanity is at risk of extinction, and so is everything we have ever created.

“Our works of art, our favourite novels, our historical buildings and artefacts, our traditions – we’re terrifyingly close to losing everything we value and love. We cannot rely on our criminal government or our cherished institutions to save us.”

The Dippy the Diplodocus exhibit opened in Coventry in February, with the famous dinosaur cast on loan from the Natural History Museum for three years.

West Midlands police said: “A woman, aged 67, and a man, aged 21, have been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause criminal damage and remain in custody for questioning.”

Meanwhile . . .

. . . "New oilfield in the North Sea would blow the UK's carbon budget"

Fiona Harvey, the Guardian's Environment editor, reports on Saturday 1 April 2023 that:

Campaigners say Rosebank, with a potential yield of 500m barrels, would seriously undermine legal commitment to net zero  

April 1st? April fools? Fake news . . .

The Guardian newspaper has been famously adept at creating "fake news" stories for April fools day, going back to their most successful April Fool’s joke, San Serriffe on 1 April 1977. On this occasion the Guardian produced a seven-page travel supplement on the tiny tropical republic of San Serriffe, “a small archipeligo, its main islands grouped roughly in the shape of a semicolon, in the Indian Ocean”, which was apparently celebrating 10 years of independence.

Last year on the 1st April 2022 the Guardian ran this story by Mari Tyme: 

Tory MPs lobby No 10 to let royal family use seized Russian superyacht

Unfortunately, given the times we are living through, the Guardian coverage of the Rosebank oilfield, and its potential to undermine the UK's legal commitment to meet net zero targets, is NOT "fake news". 

Fiona Harvey writes: 

A single new oil and gas field in the North Sea would be enough to exceed the UK’s carbon budgets from its operations alone, analysis has shown, as the government considers fossil fuel expansion despite the legally binding commitment to net zero.

Rosebank is the biggest undeveloped oilfield in the North Sea, with the potential to produce 500m barrels of oil, and has already cleared several regulatory hurdles, meaning a decision on its future could come soon.

But analysis by the campaigning group Uplift has shown that the likely emissions just from producing oil from the field would be enough to exceed the share of the UK’s carbon budgets that should come from oil and gas production, from 2028 onwards.

That would mean other sectors of the economy would have to cut their emissions further and faster to enable the UK to stay within its carbon budgets, if the Rosebank field went ahead.

The findings raise further questions over the government’s plans to push ahead with the development of oil and gas despite pleas from scientists and the UN to halt new licences. Ministers are in the midst of a new licensing round for oil and gas in the North Sea, and this is expected to continue despite the net zero strategy. The government’s energy security and net zero strategies, running to more than 1,000 pages, were unveiled on Thursday. They contain a major gamble on carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology, which will receive £20bn of government support over 20 years, and which ministers said would allow for continued fossil fuel use.

But scientists told the Observer that using CCS in this way was a dangerous gamble, and that calling off any proposed new development of oil and gas was a safer way to meet the net zero commitment.

The Rosebank field, to be developed by the Norwegian state-owned energy company Equinor, is about three times the size of the Cambo field, which was the subject of intense campaigning before being paused last year.

The emissions from Rosebank’s operations alone – not counting any emissions from burning the oil and gas it is likely to produce – are likely to reach 5.6m tonnes of carbon dioxide, according to analysis by Uplift of the environmental statements provided by Equinor.

This would be enough, when added to the emissions from the operations of existing oil and gas fields, to exceed the amount of emissions that should be allowed to come from the UK’s oil and gas sector, within the UK’s total carbon budget, from 2028.

Counting Rosebank’s likely emissions, oil and gas production would exceed its theoretical share of the UK’s fifth carbon budget, from 2028 to 2032, by about 8%, and exceed its share of the sixth carbon budget, from 2033 to 2037, by about 17%.

The carbon budget is not formally divided up among emitting sectors, but the Committee on Climate Change provides guidelines suggesting that various sectors should stay within approximate limits. By this reckoning, North Sea oil and gas operations should account for only about 4% of the UK’s carbon budgets, which run for five years each and have so far been set out to 2037.

Tessa Khan, executive director of Uplift, said: “This analysis clearly shows what the government has long known but chosen to ignore: that it is impossible to reconcile approving a huge new oilfield like Rosebank with the UK meeting its climate obligations.”

She pointed out that the development could be eligible for £3.57bn in tax breaks under the windfall tax, which hands companies incentives for investing in increased oil and gas production.

“Ministers also know that approving Rosebank will do nothing to lower UK fuel bills and will do very little for UK energy security as most of these reserves will likely be exported. On every level, including legally, Rosebank fails.”

Ed Miliband, Labour’s shadow secretary for climate and net zero, said: “After the miserable failure of ‘green day’ confirmed that the Conservatives will never meet Britain’s energy needs or create the clean jobs of the future, the idea that they are about to throw billions at new fossil fuel exploration shows that they will scandalously waste money on climate vandalism. The evidence is clear: Rosebank will do nothing to cut bills, as the government admit, is no solution to our energy security, and would drive a coach and horses through our climate commitments.”

Grant Shapps, secretary of state for energy security and net zero, said at the launch of the government’s Powering Up Britain strategy on Thursday that a decision on Rosebank was “not on my desk”.

He defended the continued licensing of oil and gas, despite a plea by 700 scientists last week for the UK to halt new development, and the urging of the UN secretary general, António Guterres, for countries to forgo fossil fuel development and reach net zero by 2040.

From bad to worse? 

A spokesperson from the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said: “We are on track to deliver our carbon budgets, creating jobs and investment across the UK while reducing emissions. Our carbon budget delivery plan is a dynamic long-term plan for a transition that will take place over the next 15 years, setting us on course to reach net zero by 2050.”

Liar, Liar - The Castaways (1965)

"Liar, Liar," by 1960s garage rock band The Castaways.  Dance performance by The Honey Bees (Mary Ann, Ginger and Lovey) featured on Gilligan's Island. 

From San Serriffe to Gilligan's Island

Gilligan's Island was the fictional setting for an American sitcom created and produced by Sherwood Schwartz. It aired for three seasons on the CBS network from September 26, 1964, to April 17, 1967. The series follows the comic adventures of seven castaways as they try to survive on an island where they are shipwrecked. Most episodes revolve around the dissimilar castaways' conflicts and their unsuccessful attempts to escape their plight, with Gilligan usually being responsible for the weekly failures.

From terrible to even worse?  

UK insulation scheme would take 300 years to meet government targets, say critics

Jillian Ambrose Energy correspondent writes (Sun 9 Apr 2023) under this subheading:

Exclusive: National Energy Action says progress on energy efficiency is too slow and not well targeted at fuel-poor households

The government’s home insulation scheme would take 190 years to upgrade the energy efficiency of the UK’s draughty housing stock, and 300 years to meet the government’s own targets to reduce fuel poverty, according to industry calculations.

Critics of the Great British Insulation Scheme, which aims to insulate 300,000 homes a year over the next three years, have raised concerns that the plan does not go far enough to reach the 19m UK homes that need better insulation.

The Labour party added that it would fail to address the government’s “disastrous record on heating our homes”: the rate of energy efficiency upgrades is 20 times lower than under the last Labour government.

The UK Business Council for Sustainable Development has calculated that the pace of the new scheme, announced as part of a wide-ranging energy security strategy last week, would take almost 200 years to reach the homes in need of upgrades.

The scheme would take another 100 years to meet the government’s own targets for improving the home energy efficiency of households living in fuel poverty in England alone, according to fuel poverty charity National Energy Action.

“We simply don’t have that long to act,” said Jason Longhurst, chair of the UK Business Council for Sustainable Development.

Matt Copeland, head of policy at National Energy Action, said progress on energy efficiency in the UK had “been far too slow for a decade”, and that the new scheme was “not well targeted at fuel-poor households, who need the most support with their bills”.

He added: “Our own analysis from the most recent set of fuel poverty statistics for England found that it will now take approximately 300 years for the government to hit its statutory target for all fuel-poor homes to reach EPC C – far behind the 2030 deadline.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero said that “strong progress is being made to insulate homes” and that the government does “not recognise this analysis”. 

Entr'acte 

"Liar, Liar, Pants on Fire" 

Home insulation grants are considered a crucial part of the UK’s plan to become a net-zero-carbon economy by 2050 by making homes more energy-efficient. They would also offer immediate benefits to households by making homes warmer and lowering energy bills. However, the pace of home energy efficiency upgrades has stalled in recent years, leaving almost two-thirds of UK homes in need of better insulation.

The number of UK energy efficiency installations, such as insulating lofts and cavity walls, peaked in 2012 at 2.3m, but under the Conservative government, efficiency programmes were slashed, leading to a slump in home upgrades. By 2021, annual installations were 96% lower, at fewer than 100,000.

Ed Miliband, the shadow secretary of state for climate change and net zero, accused the prime minister, Rishi Sunak, of failing to act despite the sharp rise in home energy bills because of rocketing market prices after the war in Ukraine.

“One of the reasons that energy bills are so high is the Conservatives’ disastrous record on heating our homes. Energy efficiency rates are now 20 times lower than under the last Labour government, but Rishi Sunak is failing to act,” he said.

The Labour party has put forward plans for a large-scale energy efficiency drive to make sure all of the UK’s 27m homes are properly insulated. If elected to government, Labour would aim to upgrade the energy efficiency of 2m households in the first year of a decade-long £60bn scheme that could save households £400 on bills annually.

The party claims that by the end of the decade, 450,000 jobs would be created by installing energy-saving measures such as loft insulation and double glazing, renewable and low carbon technologies.

“Labour’s warm homes plan would upgrade the 19m homes that need it, cutting bills and creating thousands of good jobs for electricians and engineers across the country,” Miliband said.

A government spokesperson said: “The Great British Insulation Scheme will support the installation of energy efficiency measures to around 300,000 homes. It is in addition to the £6.6bn we have committed in this parliament, and the additional £6bn of investment to 2028, to help cut emissions from homes and buildings.”

For a ha'p'orth of tar the boat sank!  

Ben Jennings on Rishi Sunak and the ship of state – cartoon in the Guardian Thursday 19 January 2023

From Gilligan's Island to Thorney Island (Westminster)

Thorney Island was the eyot (or small island) on the Thames, upstream of medieval London, where Westminster Abbey and the Palace of Westminster (commonly known today as the Houses of Parliament) were built. It was formed by rivulets of the River Tyburn, which entered the Thames nearby. In Roman times, and presumably before, Thorney Island may have been part of a natural ford where Watling Street crossed the Thames, of particular importance before the construction of London Bridge.

The UK government response to something as straightforward as insulating Britains housing stock, and the "degree of spin" exercised by government spokespersons inhabiting Thorney Island, reveals that they are not interested in reality, or addressing practical solutions, and will avoid accountability for the stark inequalities in UK society at all costs. This political stance is amplified by what may be described in this post as an "island mentality", or what is commonly referred to as the "Westminster bubble".

Outside the "bubble", outside the "echo chambers" of the "anti-woke", extraordinary people have been taking a stand and protesting under the banner of: 

Insulate Britain 

A series of protests by the group Insulate Britain involving traffic obstruction began on 13 September 2021. The group has blockaded the M25 and other motorways in the United Kingdom, as well as roads in London and the Port of Dover.

The protesters demand that the government improve the insulation of all social housing in the UK by 2025 and retrofit all homes with improved insulation by 2030. Improved insulation of homes would likely reduce the use of fuel, such as natural gases and oil, to adjust the internal temperature, thus improving energy efficiency in British housing and mitigating climate change.

The group has drawn support from some, but condemnation from others, including from individuals within the government.

On 17 November 2021, nine protesters were imprisoned for breaching an injunction against road blockade protests. On 2 February 2022, five protesters were imprisoned for the same reason, with eleven others receiving suspended sentences.

As Insulate Britain began its protests in September 2021 THE CONVERSATION uploaded this article by Ran Boydell, Visiting Lecturer in Sustainable Development, Heriot-Watt University, September 14, 2021. 

Five numbers that lay bare the mammoth effort needed to insulate Britain’s homes

Ran Boydell writes:

Environmental activists recently blocked junctions of the M25 – London’s orbital motorway – to protest the glacial pace at which the UK government is tackling carbon emissions and fuel poverty in Britain’s housing stock.

Arguing that the country has “some of the oldest and most energy-inefficient” homes in Europe, the group known as Insulate Britain has vowed to continue campaigning until the government “makes a meaningful commitment to insulate Britain’s 29 million leaky homes”.

The transition to net zero emissions is often framed as a race to make new stuff – such as electric vehicles and wind turbines – as fast as possible. That’s actually the easy part. The hard part will be modifying what already exists – and that includes people’s homes.

Neutralising each home’s contribution to climate change will require a range of installations, including wall insulation, double- or triple-glazed windows, a heat pump or another low-carbon form of heating, and solar panels. Making these changes is known as retrofitting. The idea is to ensure that no home emits greenhouse gases by burning fossil fuels for energy and that, eventually, each home could produce as much energy as it uses.

Sound simple enough? Here are the five numbers that explain just how big a task it really is.

1. 68 million tonnes

About 15% of the UK’s total carbon emissions – 68 million tonnes – comes directly from homes, mostly from boilers burning gas for hot water and space heating. That’s more than the entire agricultural sector at 10%, and many times the 2% from industrial processes, such as cement, steel and chemical manufacturing in 2019.

2. 26 million

Some of the UK’s existing 29 million homes will be demolished by 205O, but it’s estimated that around 26 million will still be around. These will all have to be retrofitted to net zero standard.

To put that another way, about 80% of all the houses that will exist in 2050 are the houses that people are currently living in. Only 20% of the houses will have been built from scratch to net zero standard.

3. £26,000

The cost to retrofit a typical family home to net zero standard is estimated at about £26,000. This is based on an analysis of work by the Climate Change Committee – a body of experts that advises the UK government.

Multiply those 26 million homes by £26,000 and the overall price tag is £676 billion. Averaged over the next 25 years, retrofitting Britain’s homes could amount to £27 billion a year. That is about the same as the entire annual spend on home repairs and maintenance, and more than half as big as the market for new-build homes.

A mass retrofit campaign wouldn’t just be a step-change in the construction industry, it would be an entire additional sector. But it would also be time-limited. Once all existing homes are retrofitted, it will come to an end.

4. 20 years

How quickly savings from an investment repay the initial expense is known as the payback period. In theory, a net zero house could have zero energy bills, as it would save and generate as much energy as it uses. The average annual energy bill is £1,289, so the payback period for a £26,000 retrofit would be just over 20 years.

But the payback period for each individual retrofitting measure tends to be longer. Improving window glazing tends to pay for itself after about 40 years. Roof and wall insulation is even longer at 46 years. Solid wall insulation, which will address the single biggest source of heat loss for older houses, has a payback period of 16 years.

Calculating the payback period for a heat pump is more complicated, as it typically replaces gas in a boiler with electricity. These energy sources have very different cost structures. Currently, the UK has one of the cheapest gas prices in Europe, but one of the most expensive electricity prices.

When considering the financial payback on an investment in energy efficiency, most households will struggle to look beyond five years, perhaps 15 years at most. But considering energy efficiency measures purely in terms of financial payback will never stack up. They must be considered in terms of carbon payback. Carbon payback is how quickly the reduced carbon emissions from daily life in a net zero home take to make up for the carbon emissions that went into making and building all the different parts.

For a home retrofitted to net zero standard, the carbon payback might be about six years. For individual parts it can be even shorter: solar panels have a carbon payback period of just 1.6 years.

Infrastructure, like roads and railways, is the only stuff people build which counts its payback periods in decades. The government needs to think of a mass retrofit programme for our houses in those terms: as critical national infrastructure.

5. 20%

The VAT rate applied to any work on existing homes – whether it’s maintenance, extensions, or retrofitting – is 20%. While there are some exceptions where the rate is reduced to 5%, these are only available to a small range of homeowners, such as those over 60, and only where the works are exclusively for the sake of energy efficiency, rather than as part of a broader home-improvement project. So the use of this rebate is minimal.

For private homeowners who are required to pay for retrofit measures like wall insulation or heat pumps from their own pocket, the so-called “able to pay” market, that 20% VAT might represent more than £4,000 of the estimated £26,000 cost.

By comparison, building a new home is zero-rated for VAT. This creates a financial incentive to demolish and rebuild rather than retrofit.

There have been many attempts to make the government change the VAT rules on this, including a recent one supported by the banking sector, but so far without success.

Decarbonising Britain’s housing stock is a huge challenge, but also a huge opportunity. Kickstarting the home insulation and retrofitting programme will only happen with government support, it is simply not something that normal market mechanisms can drive. Let’s hope public pressure can convince the government to change course fast. 

From "even worse" to the catastrophic?

Does a reasonable hope in 2021 turn to understandable despair in 2023? 

A sad truth according to Pier Paolo Pasolini.

In response to actions by Insulate Britain and other groups such as Just Stop Oil the UK government has announced its aim to pass through a series of new measures to restrict the ability for groups to disrupt national infrastructure as a form of protest.

An injunction effective on 22 September 2021 and lasting to 21 March 2022 was granted to National Highways. The injunction prohibited demonstrators from "causing damage to the surface of or to any apparatus on or around the M25 including but not limited to painting, damaging by fire, or affixing any item or structure thereto". Protesters who break the injunction will be in contempt of court, which could result in a prison sentence of up to two years or an unlimited fine. However, Insulate Britain figures told The Guardian that they believed an injunction, prosecutions and other legal actions were being delayed by the government until after 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). A spokesperson said: "We know that our government and institutions purport that we live in a democracy, so they don't want to have 50–100 climate protesters on remand when [the conference] starts". On 17 November 2021, nine protesters were imprisoned: one for six months, six for four months and one for three months. Emma Smart, one of the protestors imprisoned, started a hunger strike after sentencing and was moved to the hospital wing of HMP Bronzefield on the 13th day of her strike. 

A "reactionary" reaction?

Steve Bell on Priti Patel, the home secretary, and her law and order agenda, with an acknowledgement to George Cruikshanks' cartoon of "Peterloo" (1819).

The Massacre of Peterloo or Britons Strike Home is Cruikshank's take on the charge of the Manchester Yeomanry on the unarmed populace in St. Peter's Fields, Manchester. The yeomanry are depicted as butchers armed with axes reeking with the blood of the victims. In the speech balloon top left it reads:

Down with 'em! Chop em down my brave boys: give them no quarter they want to take our Beef & Pudding from us! ---- & remember the more you kill the less poor rates you'll have to pay so go at it Lads show your courage & your Loyalty

In 2021 figures within the British government, including the Home Secretary Priti Patel, Transport Secretary Grant Shapps and Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the protesters' actions. The protests are supported by Green Party MP Caroline Lucas, and House of Lords members Natalie Bennett[ and Jenny Jones. On 4 October, Johnson said that Insulate Britain, who were not "legitimate protesters", were "irresponsible crusties". At the 2021 Conservative Party Conference, Patel announced increased penalties for motorway disruptions, criminalisation of infrastructure disruption and "stop and search" powers for the police. Patel named Insulate Britain specifically in her announcement. The Guardian opposed this policy as it would "remove even more rights from political protesters".

Just over a month ago this troubling story appeared in the Guardian in the aftermath of the trial of three non-violent Insulate Britain activist protesters.

Sandra Laville reporting for the Guardian (Wed 8 Mar 2023) writes under the headline and subheading:

Court restrictions on climate protesters ‘deeply concerning’, say leading lawyers

Three non-violent Insulate Britain activists have been jailed for telling juries why they were protesting

Restrictions placed on non-violent climate protesters who have been tried in criminal courts were part of a “deeply concerning” “pincer movement” narrowing their rights to free expression, leading lawyers have told the Guardian.

Three Insulate Britain activists are serving jail terms for contempt of court for breaching rulings made by a judge that they were not to mention the climate crisis, fuel poverty or the history of the peaceful civil rights movement to juries.

The three – David Nixon, Amy Pritchard and Giovanna Lewis – were jailed after addressing the juries at separate trials to explain their motivation for taking direct action.

They were on trial for public nuisance for taking part in a roadblock in the City of London in October 2021 as part of a campaign by Insulate Britain which says it wants to pressurise the government to insulate UK homes to reduce carbon emissions. Nixon was convicted of public nuisance. The jury failed to reach verdicts in the trial of Lewis and Pritchard and a decision is due on 31 March on whether a retrial will take place.

The rulings were made by Judge Silas Reid at Inner London crown court. Addressing the juries, the judge said the trials were not about climate change, or whether the actions of Insulate Britain and similar organisations were to be applauded or condemned, but whether or not the protesters caused a public nuisance. The defendants’ motivations for acting the way they did had no relevance, he said.

The Guardian understands similar rulings restricting freedom of expression defences available to peaceful protesters have been made at trials in other courts.

Katy Watts, a lawyer at advocacy organisation Liberty, said it was “deeply concerning” to see protesters imprisoned just for mentioning the reason for their actions. “We all have the right to stand up for causes we believe in. But we have seen a kind of pincer movement going on over the scope of convention rights in protest cases, which [is] increasingly narrowing our rights,” she said.

“The way that some protest trials, in particular those involving climate activists, have been managed has interfered with defendants’ rights to freedom of expression.”

Nixon, a care worker from Barnsley, was jailed for eight weeks for contempt of court after trying to explain to the jury at his trial the connection between insulation and tackling the climate crisis. Before being stopped by the judge, he said: “You’ve not been able to hear these truths because this court has not allowed me to say them.”

Nixon said later in court he had found the inability to explain to the jury why he had taken direct action “soul-destroying”. He was told he would serve half of his term in prison.

Reid told him the criminal courts were solely there to establish whether the prosecution had proven the guilt of defendants. “You said the court is not upholding what it is there to uphold,” he said. “You were wrong about that. This court is here to determine whether people have committed crimes.”

Pritchard and Lewis were each jailed last Friday for seven weeks for contempt. Lewis, a councillor from Dorset, told the court why she had breached the judge’s ruling. “There are thousands of deaths every year in the UK from fuel poverty, and thousands of deaths around the world due to climate change. There is no choice but to give voice to truth and to not be silenced,” she said.

Pritchard said: “Lack of political action means that ordinary people have to act.”

But the judge said the women each had disdain for the judicial process and had breached his ruling. “You have each been given the opportunity to apologise. Neither of you took that opportunity,” he said.

“My ruling was made because there was no relevance to the matters that the jury needed to decide. The public have rights as well as protesters.”

Tom Wainwright, a barrister from Garden Court chambers, said the growing concern being expressed at the removal of defences for protesters indicated the law may not have got the position right.

“The concerns raised about people’s ability to explain their motivations, and the consequences when they did, will, I think cause people to look again at this,” Wainwright said.

He went on: “A lot of protest cases all come down to the big question of where the boundary of freedom of expression lies.

“It is not a trump card which overrides the rights of others. A balance needs to be struck and I think it is one of the things a jury is ideally suited to consider.”

Insulate Britain hold a press conference outside the Home Office, London (22/9/2021).

As Extinction Rebellion shifts away from radical action and the UK government restricts the right to protest, the climate movement is asking tough questions. An opinion piece by Jack Shenker (Mon 6 Mar 2023) considers the existential question for climate activists: 

Have disruption tactics stopped working?

On a bright, chilly morning in January, seven women – some young, some older, all condemned as guilty by the state – gathered at Southwark crown court.

The group had already been convicted of criminal damage following an Extinction Rebellion (XR) action in April 2021 that involved breaking windows at the headquarters of Barclays Bank: a financial institution responsible for more than £4bn of fossil fuel financing during that year alone. “In case of climate emergency break glass”, read stickers they stuck to the shattered panes. Now they were being sentenced. After a long preamble, the judge eventually handed down suspended terms, sparing the defendants jail for the time being. But he used his closing remarks to condemn their protest as a “stunt” that wouldn’t help to solve the climate crisis. “You risk alienating those who you look to for support,” he warned.

Is he right? Outside the courtroom, that’s a question XR has been pondering for some time. Two months ago, we received an answer of sorts: the movement released a statement on New Year’s Eve, dramatically titled “We Quit”, in which it announced it would “temporarily shift away from public disruption as a primary tactic” and promised that its next major action would “leave the locks, glue and paint behind”. Instead, it called upon anyone concerned about climate change to gather peacefully outside parliament on 21 April as part of a mobilisation that will “prioritise attendance over arrest and relationships over roadblocks”. In response, Just Stop Oil and Insulate Britain – the high-profile environmental action groups that have outflanked XR in recent years when it comes to disruptive public protests – both reasserted their commitment to direct civil resistance.

Debates over the pros and cons of different forms of activism are nothing new within the climate movement; see, for instance, fierce disagreements among supporters of Earth First! – arguably Britain’s first direct action environmental group – over the relative merits of sabotage nearly 30 years ago. What lends this one a particular urgency is the scale and pace of planetary destruction under the status quo (last year, the IPCC issued its “bleakest warning yet” regarding humanity’s future), as well as the specific conjunction of social, political and economic forces in the UK. After 13 years of Conservative rule, multiple and intersecting crises – from low pay and soaring inflation to unaffordable housing and a broken NHS – are engulfing the country, pushing more than a million people on to picket lines.

Rather than tackle the root causes of popular discontent, the government is seeking to criminalise those who give voice to it via new legal restrictions on the right to protest or take industrial action. Against a backdrop of both creeping authoritarianism above and collective fightbacks below, this feels like a moment of real possibility for climate campaigners, albeit one fraught with dangers.

Little wonder, then, that XR’s statement has heightened some existing tensions within the wider environmental movement, a landscape that ranges from militant tunnel-diggers to the philanthropic arm of corporate giants such as Ikea. When it first burst into the public consciousness back in 2018, bringing parts of London to a standstill in a nonviolent riot of music, dance and colour, XR was described in the mainstream press as a radical force, particularly as its political strategy rested on maximising arrests of its supporters. The fruit of its first “rebellion” included a formal declaration by the British parliament acknowledging the climate emergency, but subsequent mass actions delivered diminishing tangible returns and fuelled mounting concerns in some quarters about the nature of the group’s work.

One notoriously ill-advised intervention at London’s Canning Town station in 2019, which resulted in an ethnically diverse and largely working-class group of commuters dragging XR protesters from the roof of a tube train, seemed to visually embody the movement’s blind spots and failure to engage local communities.

In recent years, as prime-time news footage of pink boats at Oxford Circus has been supplanted by shots of protesters blocking the M25 or soup being hurled at (unharmed) Van Gogh masterpieces, other organisations have become the media face of supposedly extreme activism. Many of their supporters were once XR activists who have since broken away; at the same time, other prominent XR figures have moved in the opposite direction, calling for a less confrontational set of tactics that can command the broadest possible support base among the public. On the face of it, XR’s We Quit declaration looks like a big win for the latter, including the former XR spokesperson Rupert Read, who argues against “polarising” forms of activism and now co-directs an incubator dedicated to growing the environmental movement’s “moderate flank”.

The reality is more complicated. In truth, few believe that when it comes to the climate emergency there is a binary choice between radical protests and less confrontational forms of activism. Whether acknowledged or not, the former often depend upon the latter to make themselves and their demands appear more palatable to powerbrokers. There is already evidence of a positive symbiotic relationship between the “extreme” and “moderate” wings of the UK environmental movement, with Just Stop Oil interventions being found to increase public support for Friends of the Earth.

A more salient faultline – and one that runs right through the middle of many climate groups, including XR – concerns what exactly is being named as the enemy here, and therefore what sort of changes are needed to vanquish it. It’s easy enough to recognise that the environment is being devastated by human activity, but who is responsible: is it a generalised failure on the part of an entire species – or the result of specific actors, and specific political and economic systems built to enrich and protect them? If so, can we really expect concessions granted from within those systems to durably and meaningfully change our relationship with the natural world?

This question matters because alongside a healthy diversity of tactics and movement entry points, what the climate struggle needs is a clear, coherent narrative that knits together the many different ways in which those with enormous wealth are dispossessing the rest of us – including their war on the ecosystems that form the basis of our shared survival – and calls out the extractive, undemocratic structures that enable that process.

Yes, there absolutely must be room in the movement for people who would never dream of blocking a road or smashing a window, just as there must be for those willing to take on such risks. But there should be no space here for a “beyond politics” framing of the climate crisis (a slogan often and problematically espoused by XR, though its supporters insist that it has been misunderstood), because that would root the climate struggle in a fundamental lie. Without a compelling story that links rising sea levels with attacks on the right to strike, environmentalists will allow governments and businesses to pursue a slow, inadequate and ultimately ineffective decarbonisation programme.

Researching this article, I’ve spoken to people hailing from very different parts of the environmental movement, and what struck me most was the degree of mutual respect on display, rather than rupture. Rupert Read, for example, had positive things to say about some of Just Stop Oil’s past interventions; Indigo Rumbelow, a co-founder of Just Stop Oil, encouraged anyone who criticises her group’s tactics but supports their cause to join the XR mobilisation on 21 April. “The debate is not between those who want to take ‘moderate’ or ‘radical’ action,” she told me. “It’s between those who are standing by doing nothing at all, and those who are doing something. That’s where the line is drawn.”

The article's author Jack Shenker is a writer based in London and Cairo and a former Egypt correspondent for the Guardian. He is author of Now We Have Your Attention.

Just Stop Oil activists glue their hands to the wall after throwing soup at the Van Gogh painting Sunflowers at the National Gallery in London on 14 October 2022.

Following this Just Stop Oil tomato soup incident a suggestion that The National Gallery in London create a "cordon sanitaire" against potential activist attack with a banner declaring "Just Stop Oil" disregards a long backstory of art museums and questionable sponsorship arrangements. 

Whilst the Guardian, in a rare example amongst global media organisations, has shown which side it's on when banning advertising from fossil fuel firms from January 2020, by contrast, management and board members interests among major art museums in the west have long been beneficiaries of funds from "big oil" and "big pharma" to "artwash" their brands and names, regardless of the catastrophic damage they continue to cause, both to the environment and society.

At last, but only recently in May 2022 last year, the National Gallery decided to remove the name of one of its largest donors from its walls, the Sackler family who profited from the opioid epidemic scandal in the US. 

Meanwhile, the oil giant BP has directly sponsored the recent exhibition The World of Stonehenge at the British Museum, as well as its current Hieroglyphs: Unlocking Ancient Egypt. The British Museum's Chair of the Trustees is George Osborne, the instigator of the Tory governments austerity measures for the UK from 2010 onwards, and until recently an advisor to the world's largest asset manager, BlackRock, with US$10 trillion in assets under management as of January 2022.

Part of the "artwash/greenwash" backstory is the "oil barons" connection to the founding of the Museum of Modern Art NY as a vehicle for their scions to upgrade their social status. In 1939, on the eve of the opening of the new building for the Museum of Modern Art on New York’s 53rd Street, an intrepid museum employee Frances Collins and a friend had concocted an invitation sent to seven thousand distinguished persons to the opening of the “Museum of Standard Oil.” Inside the invitation packet was a small card that read “Oil That Glitters Is Not Gold”. The overt allusion to then MoMA president Nelson Rockefeller’s deep entanglements in the world of oil did not amuse everyone. Collins promptly lost her job. But have things changed since then? Recent protests by Just Stop Oil are more remarkable in that they have been funded in part by an oil heiress. Aileen Getty, a philanthropist whose grandfather was the tycoon J Paul Getty, and who co-founded the Climate Emergency Fund, gifting it a very welcome $1m to be used by activists. But only $1m. Plus ça change!

Bad COP? Worse COP! 

"Art-washing", "sports-washing", "green-washing", and now . . .

. . . COP-washing?

The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference or Conference of the Parties of the UNFCCC, more commonly referred to as COP27, was the 27th United Nations Climate Change conference, held from November 6 until November 20, 2022 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt. It took place under the presidency of Egyptian Minister of Foreign Affairs Sameh Shoukry, with more than 92 heads of state and an estimated 35,000 representatives, or delegates, of 190 countries attending. It was the fifth climate summit held in Africa, and the first since 2016.

The conference was sponsored by Coca-Cola. Several environmental campaigners suggested this was greenwashing, given the company's contribution to plastic pollution. Coca-Cola is the largest plastic polluter in the world with 1.9 billion consumptions of Coca-Cola products per day around the world. This has led to three million tons of plastic packaging used by the Coca-Cola Company in one year. These plastic bottles are not biodegradable and are fabricated from toxic chemical compounds. For example, plastic Coca-Cola bottles demonstrated high levels of phthalate ester leaching. It is recommended to avoid drinking from plastic bottles that leach these chronic and highly toxic chemicals. Lack of proper disposal causes these bottles to be released into the environment. This has harmful consequences to animals if they ingest plastics and in environments such as degradation into microplastics. Coca-Cola is a multinational litter brand meaning its single-use plastic packaging has various consequences dependent on regional and national plastic regulations and/or laws. The company also has very high water usage despite its water neutrality pledge.

Al Jazeera's Federica Marsi published this story on 16 Nov 2022:

The first sign that something was amiss was in the bowl of rice. Residents in the town of Plachimada, in India’s state of Kerala, watched the grains swirl in gluey yellow water before taking a spoonful that left a metallic aftertaste.

Soon, they noticed that water had to be fetched deeper and deeper into the well. Crops withered and decreased in yield as stomach illness and skin rashes spread like a plague.

Eighteen years after their popular uprising shut down a Coca-Cola bottling plant accused of discharging toxic waste, Plachimada’s residents have taken to the streets again to denounce the company’s sponsorship of this year’s UN Climate Change Conference.

“Criminal Cola polluted our water and the same company is now sponsoring COP27,” a 50-year-old resident who identified himself as Thankavelu told Al Jazeera. “That’s why we are extremely angry.”

Thankavelu was among a group of protesters who burned the company’s symbols in front of the defunct plant run by Hindustan Coca-Cola Beverages Limited – the Indian subsidiary of the Atlanta-based company – as the annual climate summit kicked off in Egypt last week.

For the past 20 years, their popular action group – the Anti-Coca Cola Struggle Committee – has demanded compensation from the company to no avail, despite the extent of environmental damage documented in several scientific studies.

In 2010, a High Power Committee mandated by the Kerala government found evidence of over-extraction of groundwater and indiscriminate disposal of sludge containing cadmium and lead.

“It is evident that the damages caused by the Coca-Cola factory at Plachimada have created a host of social, economic, health and ecological problems,” the report concluded.

The group sent a letter to UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres on November 4 to request the company’s removal from the COP27 sponsorship.

“This conference is for environmental protection and Coca-Cola are the polluter, not only here but in many places in India,” Biju said. “We are requesting that the UN take the reasonable step of removing the company from the climate negotiations.”

The government of Egypt announced on September 30 that it signed an agreement with Coca-Cola, introducing the company as a COP27 sponsor in Sharm El-Sheikh.

During the signing ceremony at the foreign ministry in Cairo, Ahmed Rady, Coca-Cola’s vice president of operations for North Africa, said it was the company’s “firm belief that working together through meaningful partnerships will create shared opportunities for communities and people around the world and in Egypt”.

A Coca-Cola spokesperson told Al Jazeera “in all our business activities, our bottling partners and we ensure compliance with all applicable laws as stipulated by the Government”.

The company also stated its sponsorship of COP27 was “in line with our science-based target to reduce absolute carbon emissions 25 percent by 2030, and our ambition for net zero carbon emissions by 2050”.

Watchdog organisations, however, argue its involvement runs counter to the United Nation’s frameworks and principles.

“Plachimada is one of many heart-wrenching examples of how Coca-Cola has historically exploited communities and further exacerbated struggles [caused by] the climate crisis,” Ashka Naik, the research director at Corporate Accountability, told Al Jazeera.

“The fact that our most vital intergovernmental forum for addressing the climate crisis is being sponsored by big polluters and its enablers makes a mockery of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC),” Naik added. 

This global beverage company markets itself as sustainable and environmentally friendly while being the largest plastic polluter in the world!

Washington, D.C. (June 8, 2021) — On the grounds of false and deceptive advertising, Earth Island Institute today filed a lawsuit against the Coca-Cola Company, the American multinational beverage corporation that portrays itself as sustainable and environmentally friendly while generating more plastic pollution than any other company in the world. The filing coincides with World Oceans Day, in recognition of the devastating impacts plastic pollution has on marine life, oceans, and coastal communities, and the dire need for companies like Coca-Cola to take responsibility for those impacts.

On its website and in advertising campaigns on television, in print, and across social media platforms, Coca-Cola claims that “our planet matters.” “Scaling sustainable solutions . . . and investing in sustainable packaging platforms to reduce our carbon footprint,” the company asserts. A “World Without Waste” declares the headline in one marketing campaign. Yet almost anywhere you look there’s a plastic Coca-Cola bottle trashing the public park, washed up on the beach, or piled in a mountain of plastic at a waste processing facility. What these advertising campaigns ultimately amount to is a mountain of greenwashing.

In fact, Coca-Cola was named the number one corporate plastic polluter for the past three years according to the Break Free From Plastic Global Cleanup and Brand Audit report. According to the report, 13,834 branded Coca-Cola plastics were recorded in 51 countries in 2020, reflecting more plastic than the next two top global plastic polluters combined.

“Coca-Cola has long been in the business of portraying itself as stewards of the environment while pointing to consumers as the source of plastic pollution. But it is Coca-Cola, not consumers, that chooses to use chart-topping amounts of plastic for its products. It is time this company is held accountable for deceiving the public,” said Earth Island Institute General Counsel Sumona Majumdar. “The more consumers become aware of plastic pollution, the more the company doubles down on its purported commitment to the environment to appease those concerns, but the actual results of their efforts tell a very different story. The company needs to come clean and be honest with consumers.”

Earth Island Institute has filed the case in the District of Columbia Superior Court, alleging that Coca-Cola is in violation of the District of Columbia’s Consumer Protection Procedures Act (CPPA). The CPPA is a consumer protection law that prohibits a wide variety of deceptive and unconscionable business practices. The statute specifically provides that a public-interest organization, like Earth Island, may bring an action on behalf of consumers and the general public for relief from the unlawful conduct directed at consumers. If successful, this lawsuit will prevent Coca-Cola from falsely advertising its business as sustainable, among other things.

“For 12 years we have advocated for a more just, equitable world free of plastic pollution and its toxic impacts, driving corporate responsibility to stop plastic pollution at the source,” said Julia Cohen, MPH, co-founder and managing director at Plastic Pollution Coalition, a project of Earth Island Institute and a global alliance of more than 1,200 organizations, businesses, and thought leaders in 75 countries. “We want the Coca-Cola company to stop the greenwashing and false claims, be transparent about the plastic they use, and be a leader in investing in deposit and refill programs for the health of humans, animals, waterways, the ocean, and our environment.”

As a fiscally sponsored project of Earth Island Institute, Plastic Pollution Coalition is at the organization’s core of educating consumers about plastic pollution, including in the District of Columbia, and engaging in advocacy related to environmental and human health impacts from plastic.

Plastic pollution is a global problem and threatens human and environmental health on a massive scale, from the plastic-producing petrochemical plants that disproportionately impact communities of color and low-income communities to the plastic waste that is often dumped in developing countries to the toxic microplastics invading our bodies, which have been shown to contribute to cancer, neurotoxicity, reproductive issues, endocrine disruption, and genetic problems. Consumers are becoming increasingly aware of these issues and are too often deceived by companies like Coca-Cola, which claims that they are reducing their plastic footprint on the earth.

From Earth Island to The Trash Isles 

The Great Pacific garbage patch (also Pacific trash vortex and North Pacific Garbage Patch) is a garbage patch, a gyre of marine debris particles, in the central North Pacific Ocean. It is located roughly from 135°W to 155°W and 35°N to 42°N. The collection of plastic and floating trash originates from the Pacific Rim, including countries in Asia, North America, and South America.

Of the five gyres on this map, all have significant garbage patches.

Despite the common public perception of the patch existing as giant islands of floating garbage, its low density (4 particles per cubic metre (3.1/cu yd)) prevents detection by satellite imagery, or even by casual boaters or divers in the area. This is because the patch is a widely dispersed area consisting primarily of suspended "fingernail-sized or smaller" — often microscopic — particles in the upper water column known as microplastics. Researchers from The Ocean Cleanup project claimed that the patch covers 1.6 million square kilometres (620 thousand square miles) consisting of 45–129 thousand metric tons (50–142 thousand short tons) of plastic as of 2018. The same 2018 study found that, while microplastic dominate the area by count, 92% of the mass of the patch consists of larger objects which have not yet fragmented into microplastics. Some of the plastic in the patch is over 50 years old, and includes items (and fragments of items) such as "plastic lighters, toothbrushes, water bottles, pens, baby bottles, cell phones, plastic bags, and nurdles."

Research indicates that the patch is rapidly accumulating. The patch is believed to have increased "10-fold each decade" since 1945. The gyre contains approximately six pounds of plastic for every pound of plankton. 

A similar patch of floating plastic debris is found in the Atlantic Ocean, called the North Atlantic garbage patch. This growing patch contributes to other environmental damage to marine ecosystems and species.

The South Pacific garbage patch

The South Pacific Gyre can be seen in the absence of oceanic currents off the west coast of South America.  

The South Pacific garbage patch is an area of ocean with increased levels of marine debris and plastic particle pollution, within the ocean's pelagic zone. This area is in the South Pacific Gyre, which itself spans from waters east of Australia to the South American continent, as far north as the Equator, and south until reaching the Antarctic Circumpolar Current. The degradation of plastics in the ocean also leads to a rise in levels of toxicity in the area. The garbage patch was confirmed in mid-2017, and has been compared to the Great Pacific garbage patch's state in 2007, making the former ten years younger. The South Pacific garbage patch is not visible on satellites. Most particles are smaller than a grain of rice. A researcher said: "This cloud of microplastics extends both vertically and horizontally. It's more like smog than a patch".

Re:LODE Radio - Oceans and their boundaries along the LODE Zone Line

This video is part of the Re:LODE Radio Project that identifies a number of shoreline locations along the LODE Zone Line along a "great circle" that links the maritime cities of Hull and Liverpool. The animated imagery shows the zone along this "great circle". The video imagery includes unedited Super 8 clips of the shoreline locations where the LODE cargo of questions was created in 1992. The sequence begins with Friedrichskoog in Germany, and is followed by Puri in India: Glodok in Java; Pangandaran in Java; Port Hedland in Western Australia; Port Adelaide in South Australia; Port Melbourne and Port Albert in Victoria, Australia; Buenaventura and Santa Marta in Colombia; Slea Head, Dingle and Wicklow in Eire.  The LODE and Re:LODE art projects of 1992 and 2017 point to the way increases in productive power press on population, and the way that capitalism as a system is the stumbling block to taking effective action against global warming.

So, from Port Albert in Victoria, Australia along the LODE Zone Line to Buenaventura in Colombia, includes this floating island mass of grain of rice sized particles of plastic called the South Pacific garbage patch. 

DeSmog's article on Nov 16, 2022 by Stella Levantesi raises the concern that: 

From software giants to soft drinks makers, the vast majority of partners at climate talks in Egypt are enmeshed with the oil and gas industry, researchers find.

Fossil Fuel-Linked Companies Dominate Sponsorship of COP27

Coca-Cola was the lead sponsor of the COP27 climate talks in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt.

Eighteen of the 20 companies sponsoring U.N. climate talks in the Egyptian resort of Sharm El-Sheikh either directly support or partner with oil and gas companies, according to a new analysis shared with DeSmog. 

The findings underscore concerns over the role of the fossil fuel industry at the negotiations, known as COP27, which have become a focal point for deals to exploit African natural gas. 

“These findings underline the extent to which this COP has never been about the climate: It’s been about rehabilitating the gas industry and making sure that fossil fuels are on the agenda,” said Pascoe Sabido of Brussels-based Corporate Europe Observatory, which co-produced the analysis with Corporate Accountability, a nonprofit headquartered in Boston. 

“These talks are supposed to be about moving us away from fossil fuels, phasing them out,” Sabido told DeSmog. 

A previous analysis by the two organisations and research and advocacy group Global Witness identified at least 636 fossil lobbyists who have been granted access to COP27 – an increase of more than 25 percent compared to the previous COP26 talks held in Glasgow a year ago; and twice the number of delegates from a U.N. body representing indigenous peoples.  

“This is part of the bigger problem which is linked to the overall corporate capture of the U.N. climate talks,” Sabido said. “We need to kick big polluters out.” 

Fiona Harvey in Sharm el-Sheikh and Ruth Michaelson in Istanbul report (Tue 22 Nov 2022) on: 

Fears over oil producers’ influence with UAE as next host of Cop climate talks

And estimating that: 

More than 630 fossil fuel lobbyists attended Cop27, and the Emirates, where Cop28 will be held, is a major oil and gas exporter.

Fears are growing among climate experts and campaigners over the influence of fossil fuel producers on global climate talks, as a key Gulf petro-state gears up to take control of the negotiations.

The United Arab Emirates, one of the world’s biggest oil exporters, will hold the presidency of Cop28, the next round of UN climate talks that will begin in late November next year.

Decisions taken at the Cop27 climate summit in Egypt, which finished on Sunday, showed the clear imprint of fossil fuel influence, according to people inside the negotiations. They said Saudi Arabia – an ally of Egypt outside the talks – played a key role in preventing a strong commitment to limiting temperature increases to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels.

Many countries, including the UK and the EU, were bitterly disappointed. Alok Sharma, the UK president of last year’s Cop26 summit, said in visible anger at the conclusion of Cop27 on Sunday morning: “Those of us who came to Egypt to keep 1.5C alive, and to respect what every single one of us agreed to in Glasgow, have had to fight relentlessly to hold the line.”

There were also at least 636 fossil fuel lobbyists attending the Cop27 talks in Egypt, of whom 70 were linked to UAE oil and gas companies.

This has raised questions over what will happen next year. Yamide Dagnet, director for climate justice at the Open Society Foundations, warned: “We expect the theme for Cop28 to include energy, alongside resilience [to the impacts of climate breakdown], finance and the global stocktake. So we should not be naive and assume that fossil fuel lobbyists will relent.”

Matthew Hedges, an expert on the Emirates’ political economy, who was imprisoned and tortured for almost six months in the UAE capital, Abu Dhabi, during his doctoral research, said there could be a conflict of interests.

“The Emirates is a country with some of the world’s largest oil reserves, with a desire to continue to expand and enhance fossil fuel production. There will be an effort to illustrate their engagement in renewables, particularly solar and nuclear, but there are questions to be asked about how you can engage in such conflicting actions,” he said.

About 13% of the UAE’s exports come directly from oil and gas, which represent about 30% of the country’s GDP. Many of its other industries, including construction and travel, are also financially linked to fossil fuels.

At Cop27, Saudi and other Gulf states, along with Brazil and China, are also said to have stymied attempts to include a resolution to phase down fossil fuels in the final outcome. Hedges said: “The UEA and Saudi Arabia have a very similar view on fossil fuels. Both depend on their ability to process and export oil.”

Alden Meyer, senior associate at the E3G environmental thinktank, said the final stages of Cop27, where negotiations ran more than 30 hours beyond the final deadline and were severely criticised by participants as “untransparent, unpredictable and chaotic”, should provide a lesson in what can happen when a Cop host nation allows fossil fuel interests to wield too much influence.

“It’s hard to imagine running a worse process than the Egyptian presidency,” he said. “The spotlight at Cop28 is going to be on 1.5C, and UAE are going to have to deal with that. Hopefully they will be more neutral than the Egyptian presidency.”

Nick Mabey, a founding director of E3G, was more optimistic. “UAE is not Egypt, and not Saudi Arabia. They have very different interests and wish to position themselves differently,” he said. “They’ve said very different things about fossil fuels. That hopefully means they will have a more balanced approach.”

UAE also has close relations with Russia, which is another source of concern. Since Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in February, there has been a steady flow of Russian cash to UAE, including partnerships on energy and an increase in imports of Russian oil to enable UAE to export more of its own.

Russia, a leading oil and gas producer, is the world’s fourth biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and has gas production facilities so leaky that they are a big source of the powerful greenhouse gas methane.

Paul Bledsoe, a former Clinton White House climate adviser now with the Progressive Policy Institute in Washington DC, said: “Russia is one of the nations that should be facing our opprobrium over Cop27. They should be ashamed of themselves, but I think Vladimir Putin is beyond saving. He has weaponised oil and gas for cash and for his geopolitical ends.”

Simon Stiell, the UN climate chief, is said to be scrutinising the Cop processes, with a view to ensuring their transparency and smooth running. He will be under pressure to ensure that the process of negotiation is less susceptible to fossil fuel interests.

The Guardian approached the UAE multiple times at Cop27 without response. UAE had a large pavilion at Cop27, and a delegation of about 1,000 members, which was twice as many as the next biggest delegation, that of Brazil.

The UAE government has declared its intention to reach net zero by 2050, and has invested heavily in renewable energy. The International Renewable Energy Agency is headquartered in Abu Dhabi.

From The Trash Isles to the tourism "bubble" of Sharm El Sheikh

Sharm El Sheikh commonly abbreviated to Sharm, is an Egyptian city on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula, in South Sinai Governorate, on the coastal strip along the Red Sea. The city and holiday resort is a significant centre for tourism in Egypt, while also attracting many international conferences and diplomatic meetings.

Sharm El Sheikh has, since the 1980's, been geographically connected to the rest of Egypt and the wider world by air transport. Sharm is a geographic outlier when it comes to the rest of Egypt, situated on a promontory overlooking the Straits of Tiran at the mouth of the Gulf of Aqaba. Its strategic importance led to its transformation from a fishing village into a major port and naval base for the Egyptian Navy. It was conquered by Israel during the Suez Crisis of 1956 and returned to Egypt in 1957. A United Nations peacekeeping force was stationed there until the 1967 Six-Day War when it was reoccupied by Israel. Sharm El Sheikh remained under Israeli control until the Sinai Peninsula was returned to Egypt in 1982 after the Egypt–Israel peace treaty of 1979. Egypt's then-president Hosni Mubarak designated Sharm El Sheikh as The City of Peace in 1982 and the Egyptian government began a policy of encouraging the development of the city. Egyptian businessmen and investors, along with global investors contributed to building several mega projects, including mosques and churches. The city is now an international tourist destination, and environmental zoning laws limit the height of buildings to avoid obscuring the natural beauty of the surroundings.

Naama Beach in Sharm and Tahrir Square 8 February 2011

As a tourism "refuge", somewhat removed from Egyptian general society and population, it is telling that amidst the 2011 Egyptian protests, the then-president Mubarak chose to escape the revolutionary turmoil in Cairo by reportedly flying to Sharm El Sheikh where he resigned the Presidency on 11 February 2011.

'Like Vegas, but worse'

Oliver Milman writing for the Guardian (Fri 11 Nov 2022) under the heading:

On first week of summit there have been traffic jams, water shortages – and an atmosphere of state repression

With its jarring mix of sun-drenched luxury resorts, overt authoritarianism, apocalyptic climate warnings and sub-Arctic air conditioning, Sharm el-Sheikh has so far proved a challenging and confounding venue for the Cop27 climate talks.

The Egyptian resort town, perched on the edge of the Sinai peninsula overlooking the Red Sea, has long been a draw for tourists and there are still groups of Italian and Russian holidaymakers relaxing to thumping Europop, in a place studded by gaudy hotels and attractions that include a fake Roman amphitheatre, large model dinosaurs and a replica pyramid. “It’s like being in Las Vegas, but somehow worse,” muttered one Swedish Cop delegate.

For Cop delegates, however, the experience has often been bewildering as they funnel into the cavernous venue, the Tonino Lamborghini International Convention Center, a place that has at various times lacked food, water, internet connection or a bearable temperature between the blazing sunshine outside and the frigid temperatures generated indoors by hulking air conditioning units that resemble plane engines.

For the first two days, more than 30,000 delegates at the climate summit had to get by on nuts or bread smuggled in from hotels, with kiosks only selling overpriced coffees or the odd ice-cream to long lines of people waiting in the heat. By the third day, however, the smell of cooked food finally wafting across the convention centre was met with near jubilation. “I just haven’t eaten much here, it’s been hard,” said Jean Su, an American climate activist.

There have been other oddities. There is a dearth of maps and signage at the venue, leading to long, confused treks in search of national pavilions, or a toilet. Organisers’ good intentions in promoting recycling and a fleet of electric buses to transport delegates has resulted in rubbish being piled into recycling bins and lengthy traffic jams.

More serious issues abound outside the venue. The authoritarian regime of Abdel Fatah al-Sisi has sought to quell any sort of dissent that may erupt at Cop beyond generalised climate protests, with a small army of police, security guards and state Mukhabarat agents found throughout Sharm. Delegates travelling by road have been treated to the strange sight of Mukhabarat operatives in suits, sunglasses and earpieces standing alone every 100 metres or so in the middle of the broad, dusty fields that fringe the venue.

Climate activists hold a demonstration in Sharm el-Sheikh on Thursday 10 November 2022

Some activists have found this presence overbearing, with reports of surveillance, harassment and intense questioning of attendees to ascertain whether they are perceived troublemakers. Downloading the official Cop27 app, it turned out, required giving the Egyptian government access to users’ location and emails. Hotels, meanwhile, have hiked up their prices to astronomical levels, sometimes demanding more money from arriving delegates than was previously agreed.

Egyptians themselves have to deal with much worse and for far longer than a two-week conference, of course. Sanaa Seif, the sister of the jailed British-Egyptian hunger striker Alaa Abd el-Fattah, was a major focus of this security operation when she arrived at Cop27 on Tuesday to demand the release of her brother. Suspected plainclothes members of the Egyptian security services have tracked her movements and one pro-government MP, Amr Darwish, attempted to disrupt Seif’s press conference.

The atmosphere of barely concealed repression has hung over a conference that is, by its nature, a rather tortuous affair at the best of times. There was little optimism of a positive breakthrough by governments to act on the climate crisis beforehand and activists have again expressed frustration at the dawdling pace of progress by major polluters, particularly around the vexed issue of “loss and damage”, or payments from the wealthiest countries to developing nations that are bearing the brunt of heatwaves, drought, floods and other impacts. Loss and damage has been put on the agenda for the first time, in a win for developing countries.

There have been some notable rhetorical flourishes, not least from António Guterres, the UN secretary general, who has turned climate speeches into something of an art form. The world is on a “highway to climate hell with our foot still on the accelerator”, he warned. “Humanity has a choice: cooperate or perish.”

Some of the leaders on the frontline of climate disasters cut through the diplomatic niceties that have pervaded a three-decade long process that has struggled to confront the gravity of the problem it was set up to solve. “You might as well bomb us, that might well have been an easier fate,” Surangel Whipps, the president of the Pacific nation of Palau, told fellow leaders. “The climate crisis is tearing us apart limb by limb.”

Mia Mottley, the prime minister of Barbados, has emerged as a major star of these summits and was afforded a seat alongside Sisi and Guterres at the opening ceremony of a summit that drew more than 100 world leaders. Mottley acts as a sort of conscience to the wealthy countries that have yet to provide the climate funding promised to ease the pain of island nations like hers.

“We were the ones whose blood, sweat and tears financed the industrial revolution,” she said in a lacerating speech that invoked colonialism. “Are we now to face double jeopardy by having to pay the cost as a result of those greenhouse gases from the industrial revolution? That is fundamentally unfair.”

'Shameful'

Nina Lakhani Climate justice reporter for th Guardian (Fri 18 Nov 2022) writes under the heading:

Campaigners who interrupted US president’s speech had passes revoked after they put ‘lives in danger’

Four US activists who had their Cop27 accreditation revoked after briefly interrupting the US president, Joe Biden, in Sharm el-Sheikh have described the UN as “shameful” and say it has silenced Indigenous voices.

Big Wind, Jacob Johns, Jamie Wefald, and Angela Zhong missed the second week of the climate conference after being suspended for standing up with a “People vs Fossil Fuels” banner during Biden’s speech last Friday. The Indigenous activists, Wind and Johns, gave a war cry to announce themselves and draw attention to the fossil fuels crisis before security officials confiscated the banner. The group then sat down and Biden continued.

The activists appealed against the suspension to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), but the case has not yet been resolved.

“We’ve been locked out, our voices silenced,” said Johns, 39, a Washington state-based community organiser from the Akimel O’otham and Hopi tribe. “The climate collapse is coming, we are literally fighting for our lives. If we’re not allowed to advocate for our future, who will? It’s shameful.”

Wind, 29, an Indigenous conservation associate for Wyoming Outdoor Council and member of the Northern Arapaho tribe, said: “This is a clear example of radical Indigenous people and youth being silenced, we’re muted when we try to express our frustration in these spaces. It shows the UN’s true colours.”

Cop27 has been one of the most repressive – and expensive – UN climate summits on record. The Egyptian regime banned any unsanctioned protests or actions taking place inside or outside the conference centre. A handful of summit delegates have been arrested, deported and harassed, while hundreds of Egyptian civilians were arrested in Cairo amid rumours of brewing political protests. Price gouging has left grassroots activists struggling to raise funds to cover accommodation and food.

International spaces have been historically off limits to indigenous peoples, one of the activists said. 

Inside the conference centre, known as the blue zone, plainclothes security officials have monitored the small authorised protests demanding climate justice and an end to fossil fuels. Government stooges interrupted panel events drawing attention to the plight of hunger striker Alaa Abd el-Fattah and Egypt’s 60,000 other political prisoners.

Ukrainian activists who earlier this week interrupted a Russian delegation event with shouts of “Russia is guilty of war crimes” were also suspended.

The four US activists, who had secured hotly sought-after tickets for Biden’s speech, said they wanted to call out false market solutions being pushed by the US and other western economies.

“Joe Biden is no climate hero. We wanted to create a moment on behalf of all frontline communities in the global north and south to demand real climate solutions,” said Wefald, a 24-year-old climate activist from Brooklyn.

After the brief interruption, they sat quietly through the remainder of the speech before being escorted out by UN security staff. John said: “The UN security said that our war call had put people’s lives in danger, and we were now deemed a security threat. Our badges were pulled and we had to leave.”

According to an email from the UNFCCC observer relations team, Biden’s speech was a US government event, and they only learned about the suspension from the Guardian’s live blog. The appeal, which was supported by the Indigenous Peoples’ Caucus and several nonprofits, remains unresolved.

Wind, who had been closely following negotiations on article 6, in which Indigenous people are fighting to ensure protections are built into carbon markets, said: “We are scared that carbon markets will take our lands away, and I should have been there making our concerns heard to the US delegation. I am worried about future Cops. It’s easy to label us as troublemakers so that our voices are not heard.”

Johns, who raised money through small individual donations to participate in Cop27 and was following loss and damage negotiations, is also part of the international Earthrise Collective of Indigenous wisdom keepers and thought leaders conducting prayers and meditations inside the blue zone.

“The world is falling apart but inside the destruction there is creation and a healthy liveable future, and we try to bring this energy to the chaotic negotiations. International spaces have been historically off limits to indigenous peoples, but different perspectives can hold a lot of power. I’ve been denied that basic right.”

A UNFCCC spokesperson said no advocacy actions were allowed inside plenary and conference rooms and that the four were suspended for breaking the code of conduct. “A final decision on the suspension shall be made after further inquiry of the issue,” they said.

The US delegation have been approached for comment.

These climate conferences just aren’t working

Bill McGuire's Opinion piece on Cop27 (Sun 20 Nov 2022) offers a critical but practical suggestion:

Rather than a bloated global talking shop, we need something smaller, leaner and fully focused on the crisis at hand

In the end, the recent shenanigans at the Cop27 meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh at least ended up making modest progress on loss and damage: high-emissions nations agreeing to pay those countries bearing the brunt of climate mayhem that they had little to do with bringing about.

But, yet again, there was no commitment to cutting the emissions accelerating this crisis, without which this agreement is nothing more – as one delegate commented – than a “down-payment on disaster”. No seasoned observers are of the opinion that the world is any nearer tackling the climate emergency. Indeed, the real legacy of Cop27 could well be exposing the climate summit for what it has become, a bloated travelling circus that sets up once a year, and from which little but words ever emerge.

It really does beggar belief, that in the course of 27 Cops, there has never been a formal agreement to reduce the world’s fossil fuel use. Not only has the elephant been in the room all this time, but over the last quarter of a century it has taken on gargantuan proportions – and still its presence goes unheeded. It is no surprise, then, that from Cop1 in Berlin in 1995, to Egypt this year, emissions have continued – barring a small downward blip at the height of the pandemic – to head remorselessly upwards.

Expectations were never especially high over the course of the 12 months since Glasgow’s Cop26. Even so, COP27 has to be a new low – held in a country cowed by a malicious dictatorship, the world’s biggest plastic polluter on board as a sponsor, and hosting more than 600 fossil fuel representatives and many others who are there to prevent, rather than promote progress and action. Some old hands have labelled it the worst COP ever, and I doubt many would argue.

I would never question the sincerity of those working within the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), established way back in 1992, nor those embedded in the Cop climate apparatus, who I know are desperate to find a solution to our predicament. I do, however, seriously wonder whether an annual extravaganza in the full glare of the world’s media is the way to do this. In all honesty, it is becoming increasingly difficult to view these events as anything other than photo opportunities for presidents and prime minsters who turn up simply to make the world think they care. The reality is that, in most cases, they have no inkling of how bad climate breakdown is set to be and little interest in finding out. In this respect, Sunak’s 24-hour flit to the Red Sea resort, to see and be seen, says it all.

And there is another huge and growing problem too. The all-encompassing nature of the annual Cop climate conference provides one enormous open goal for fossil fuel representatives; an unprecedented opportunity to kettle ministers and heads of state from every corner of the planet, but particularly the majority world, to browbeat them into handing over their untouched fossil fuel reserves for exploitation. At Cop27, the sharks were circling around African nations, desperate to persuade them of the urgent need for a “dash for gas” and looking for a very large piece of the action.

In retrospect, it does seem that the whole idea of annual climate carnivals was probably not the best means of promoting serious action on global heating, but their hijacking by the fossil fuel sector, and failure, year on year, to do the job they were set up to do, surely means that Cop is no longer fit for purpose. The whole apparatus is simply too moribund to come up with any measures effective enough, and with sufficient clout, to bring about the changes needed to avoid climate chaos.

I don’t claim to be an expert in negotiation policy and procedure. I can, however, spot when something clearly isn’t working and needs a serious reboot. But if the annual Cop climate conferences go then what would replace them?

What is needed is an apparatus that is less cumbersome and more manageable – something leaner and meaner that zeros in on the most critical aspects of the climate crisis, that does its work largely hidden from the glare of the media, and which presents a less obvious honey pot to the busy bees of the fossil fuel sector. One way forward, then, could be to establish a number of smaller bodies, each addressing one of the key issues – notably energy, agriculture, deforestation, transport, loss and damage, and perhaps others.

Such bodies would operate full-time, liaising with one another and perhaps coming together a few times a year. Ideally, they would be made up of representatives from both developed and majority-world countries. In direct contact with representatives of national governments, part of their remit would be to negotiate agreements that are workable, legally binding, and which actually do the job – whether reversing deforestation, cutting methane emissions, or drawing down coal usage. As and when all terms and conditions are agreed, these could be validated and signed off by world leaders as a matter of course and without the need for the ballyhoo of a global conference.

Back in the 1970s the economist and early environmentalist, EF Schumacher, wrote that in respect of economics, small is beautiful. It is a phrase that today could equally well apply to our international negotiating efforts to bring global heating to heel. After the abject failure of Cop27 it’s worth a try, surely.

Bill McGuire is Prof Emeritus of Geophysical & Climate Hazards at UCL. His latest book is Hothouse Earth: an Inhabitant’s Guide

From a tourism "bubble" to Dante's circles of Hell!

In this drawing and watercolour by William Blake, Dante passes through the gate of Hell, which bears an inscription ending with the famous phrase "Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate", most frequently translated as: 

"Abandon all hope, ye who enter here."

Dante and his guide hear the anguished screams of the Uncommitted. These are the souls of people who in life took no sides; the opportunists who were for neither good nor evil, but instead were merely concerned with themselves.

After passing through the vestibule, Dante and Virgil reach the ferry that will take them across the river Acheron and to Hell proper. The ferry is piloted by Charon, who does not want to let Dante enter, for he is a living being. Virgil forces Charon to take him by declaring, Vuolsi così colà dove si puote / ciò che si vuole ("It is so willed there where is power to do / That which is willed"), referring to the fact that Dante is on his journey on divine grounds.  

Dante and Virgil visit the first two bolge of the Eighth Circle

In this illustration of Dante's Inferno by Sandro Botticelli we are shown the first two bolges of the Eighth Circle of Hell. 

In Dante Alighieri's Inferno, part of the Divine Comedy, Malebolge is the eighth circle of Hell. Roughly translated from Italian, Malebolge means "evil ditches". Malebolge is a large, funnel-shaped cavern, itself divided into ten concentric circular trenches or ditches. 

Each trench is called a bolgia (Italian for "pouch" or "ditch"). Long causeway bridges run from the outer circumference of Malebolge to its center, pictured as spokes on a wheel. At the center of Malebolge is the ninth and final circle of hell. 

Canto XVIII 

Dante now finds himself in the Eighth Circle: the upper half of the Hell of the Fraudulent and Malicious. The Eighth Circle is a large funnel of stone shaped like an amphitheatre around which run a series of ten deep, narrow, concentric ditches or trenches. Within these ditches are punished those guilty of Simple Fraud. From the foot of the Great Cliff to the Well (which forms the neck of the funnel) are large spurs of rock, like umbrella ribs or spokes, which serve as bridges over the ten ditches. Dorothy L. Sayers writes that the Malebolge is, "the image of the City in corruption: the progressive disintegration of every social relationship, personal and public. Sexuality, ecclesiastical and civil office, language, ownership, counsel, authority, psychic influence, and material interdependence – all the media of the community's interchange are perverted and falsified".

In Bolgia 1 Dante places the Panderers and seducers: 

These sinners make two files, one along either bank of the ditch, and march quickly in opposite directions while being whipped by horned demons for eternity. They "deliberately exploited the passions of others and so drove them to serve their own interests, are themselves driven and scourged". In the group of panderers, the poets notice Venedico Caccianemico, a Bolognese Guelph who sold his own sister Ghisola to the Marchese d'Este. In the group of seducers, Virgil points out Jason, the Greek hero who led the Argonauts to fetch the Golden Fleece from Aeëtes, King of Colchis. He gained the help of the king's daughter, Medea, by seducing and marrying her only to later desert her for Creusa. Jason had previously seduced Hypsipyle when the Argonauts landed at Lemnos on their way to Colchis, but "abandoned her, alone and pregnant".

In Bolgia 2 Dante places the Flatterers: 

These also exploited other people, this time abusing and corrupting language to play upon others' desires and fears. They are steeped in excrement (representative of the false flatteries they told on earth) as they howl and fight amongst themselves. 

A Comedy? 

The work was originally simply titled Comedìa; so also in the first printed edition, published in 1472), Tuscan for "Comedy", later adjusted to the modern Italian Commedia. The adjective Divina was added by Giovanni Boccaccio, due to its subject matter and lofty style, and the first edition to name the poem Divina Comedia in the title was that of the Venetian humanist Lodovico Dolce, published in 1555 by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari. 

Erich Auerbach has said that Dante was the first writer to depict human beings as the products of a specific time, place and circumstance as opposed to mythic archetypes or a collection of vices and virtues; this along with the fully imagined world of the Divine Comedy, different from our own present, but fully visualized, suggests that the Divine Comedy could be said to have inaugurated modern fiction. 

The 1.5C climate goal died at Cop27 - but hope must not

Every fraction of a degree increases human suffering, so the fight to end the fossil fuel industry must ramp up 

Damian Carrington's plea when it comes to this contemporary situation at COP27, a version akin to a modern entrance to Hell, is NOT to abandon HOPE. As Environment editor of the Guardian his take on COP27 is both informed and realistic. He writes (Sun 20 Nov 2022): 

When the history of the climate crisis is written, in whatever world awaits us, Cop27 will be seen as the moment when the dream of keeping global heating below 1.5C died.

Does that mean giving up? Absolutely not. The 1.5C target is not a threshold beyond which hope also dies. Every fraction of a degree means an increase in human suffering and must therefore be fought for. How? With everything we have, to tear down the barrier between us and climate stability: the fossil fuel industry.

The 1.5C target, beyond which the most disastrous climate impacts lie, is not yet physically impossible to meet. To achieve that, global carbon emissions must be reduced by 50% by 2030, yet record levels of pollution are still being pumped into the atmosphere.

The scientific warnings before Cop27 could not have been louder: we are on the brink of irreversible climate breakdown. Behind closed doors at the summit, however, the fossil fuel states forced other countries to fight tooth and nail merely to preserve the inadequate status quo.

On Friday, a Saudi Arabian delegate said: “We should not target sources of energy; we should focus on emissions. We should not mention fossil fuels.” Despite the efforts of many other countries, the final decision text duly failed to mention phasing out fossil fuels.

It is extraordinary that in 30 years of UN climate negotiations, eliminating the primary cause of global heating has never been mentioned in the decisions. Given that next year’s UN 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.

The world should be sprinting to rid itself of its fossil fuel addiction as if lives depend on it, because they do, but it is jogging on the spot. The 1.5C goal may not yet be physically impossible to achieve, but Cop27 has shown it is politically impossible.

So, what now? 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.

Can the UN 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.

Instead, the fossil fuel industry and its unconscionable expansion plans will need to be fought elsewhere. The first place is in the mind. The global oil and gas industry has raked in an average equivalent of $1tn a year in unearned profits for the last 50 years by exploiting a natural resource that belongs to citizens. Imagine redirecting that financial firepower at decarbonising the world.

The fossil fuel industry can also be fought on the streets, in peaceful protest, and on the lands being despoiled by their expansion. Countries could shun petrostates by forming a “climate club”, a G7 proposal to enable the ambitious to race ahead and to penalise the laggards.

A fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty would provide a transparent way to keep remaining coal, oil and gas reserves untouched. Even a tobacco-style ban on fossil fuel advertising, already backed by the World Health Organization, would help. All of this, and more, will be needed.

Cop27 did achieve something. The new loss and damage fund promises to finance the rebuilding of poorer, vulnerable countries hit by increasingly severe climate impacts that they have done little to cause. It is a long overdue acknowledgment of the moral responsibility the big polluters have for the climate emergency. It is all the more important given that Cop27’s failure to meaningfully drive emissions cuts means even worse disasters are to come.

Is there hope? Yes, in that every climate action we take lessens the damage. As Cop27 closed, Kathy Jetn̄il-Kijiner, the poet and climate envoy for the Marshall Islands, said: “I wish we had got fossil fuel phase-out. But we’ve shown with the loss and damage fund that we can do the impossible. So we know we can come back [to Cop] next year and get rid of fossil fuels once and for all.”

I hope she is right. I fear she is wrong. 

This image of a protest banner place by climate activists on the sphinx outside the Egyptian Museum of Turin in Italy in July 2022 was used for the Guardian Long Read (Tue 18 Oct 2022) by Naomi Klein: 

Greenwashing a police state: the truth behind Egypt’s Cop27 masquerade

Sisi’s Egypt is making a big show of solar panels and biodegradable straws ahead of next month’s climate summit – but in reality the regime imprisons activists and bans research. The climate movement should not play along

She writes:

No one knows what happened to the lost climate letter. All that is known is this: Alaa Abd El-Fattah, one of Egypt’s most high-profile political prisoners, wrote it while on a hunger strike in his Cairo prison cell last month. It was, he explained later, “about global warming because of the news from Pakistan”. He was concerned about the floods that displaced 33 million people, and what that cataclysm foretold about climate hardships and paltry state responses to come.

A visionary technologist and intellectual, Abd El-Fattah’s first name – along with the hashtag #FreeAlaa – have become synonymous with the 2011 pro-democracy revolution that turned Cairo’s Tahrir Square into a surging sea of young people that ended the three-decade rule of Egypt’s dictator Hosni Mubarak. Behind bars almost continuously for the past decade, Abd El-Fattah is able to send and receive letters once a week. Earlier this year, a collection of his prison writings was published as the widely celebrated book You Have Not Yet Been Defeated.

Abd El-Fattah’s family and friends live for those weekly letters. Especially since 2 April, when he started a hunger strike, ingesting only water and salt at first, and then just 100 calories a day (the body needs closer to 2,000). Abd El-Fattah’s strike is a protest against his imprisonment for the crime of “spreading false news” – ostensibly because he shared a Facebook post about the torture of another prisoner. Everyone knows, however, that his imprisonment is intended to send a message to any future young revolutionaries who get democratic dreams in their heads. With his strike, Abd El-Fattah is attempting to pressure his jailers to grant important concessions, including access to the British consulate (Abd El-Fattah’s mother was born in England, so he was able to obtain British citizenship). His jailers have so far refused, and so he continues to waste away. “He has become a skeleton with a lucid mind,” his sister Mona Seif said recently.

The longer the hunger strike wears on, the more precious those weekly letters become. For his family, they are nothing less than proof of life. Yet on the week he wrote about climate breakdown, the letter never made it to Abd El-Fattah’s mother, Laila Soueif, a human rights defender and intellectual in her own right. Perhaps, he speculated in subsequent correspondence to her, his jailer had “spilled his coffee over the letter”. More likely, it was deemed to touch on forbidden “high politics” – even though Abd El-Fattah says he was careful not to so much as mention the Egyptian government, or even “the upcoming conference”.

That last bit is important. It’s a reference to the fact that next month, beginning on 6 November, the resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt will play host to this year’s United Nations climate summit, Cop27. Tens of thousands of delegates – world leaders, ministers, envoys, appointed bureaucrats, as well as climate activists, NGO observers and journalists – will descend on the city, their chests bedecked in lanyards and colour-coded badges.

Which is why that lost letter is significant. There is something unbearably moving about the thought of Abd El-Fattah – despite the decade of indignities he and his family have suffered – sitting in his cell thinking about our warming world. There he is, slowly starving, yet still worrying about floods in Pakistan and extremism in India and crashing currency in the UK and Lula’s presidential candidacy in Brazil, all of which get a mention in his recent letters, shared with me by his family.

There is also, frankly, something shaming about it. Because while Abd El-Fattah thinks about the world, it’s not at all clear that the world heading to Egypt for the climate summit is thinking much about him. Or about the estimated 60,000 other political prisoners behind bars in Egypt, where barbaric forms of torture reportedly take place on an “assembly line”. Or about the Egyptian human rights and environmental activists, as well as critical journalists and academics, who have been harassed, spied on and barred from travel as part of what Human Rights Watch calls Egypt’s “general atmosphere of fear” and “relentless crackdown on civil society”.

The Egyptian regime is eager to celebrate its official climate “youth leaders”, holding them up as symbols of hope in the battle against warming. But it’s hard not to think of the courageous youth leaders of the Arab spring, many of them now prematurely aged by more than a decade of state violence and harassment from systems that are lavishly bankrolled by military aid from western powers, particularly the US. It’s almost as if those activists have just been substituted by newer, less troublesome models.

“I’m the ghost of spring past,” Abd El-Fattah wrote about himself in 2019. That ghost will haunt the coming summit, sending a chill through its every high-minded word. The silent question it poses is stark: if international solidarity is too weak to save Abd El-Fattah – the symbol of a generation’s dreams – what hope do we have of saving a habitable home?

Mohammed Rafi Arefin, assistant professor of geography at the University of British Columbia, who has researched urban environmental politics in Egypt, points out that “every United Nations climate summit presents a complex calculus of costs and benefits”. There is the carbon spewed into the atmosphere as delegates travel there, the price of two weeks in hotels (steep for grassroots organisations), and the public relations bonanza enjoyed by the host government, which invariably positions itself as an eco-champion, never mind evidence to the contrary.

Yet there are also benefits: the fact that, for those two weeks, the climate crisis makes global news, often providing media platforms for powerful voices on the frontlines, from the Brazilian Amazon to Tuvalu. And there is the international networking and solidarity that takes place when local organisers in the host country stage counter-summits and “toxic tours” to reveal the reality behind their government’s green posturing. And, of course, there are the deals that get negotiated and funds that are pledged to the poorest and worst affected. But these are non-binding, and as Greta Thunberg so memorably put it, much of it has amounted to little more than “Blah, blah, blah”.

With the upcoming climate summit in Egypt, Arefin tells me, “The usual calculus has changed. The balance has tipped.” In addition to the carbon and the cost, the host government – who will get the chance to preen green before the world – is not your standard double-talking liberal democracy. “It is,” he says, “the most repressive regime in the history of the modern Egyptian state.” Led by Gen Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who seized power in a military coup in 2013 (and has held on to it through sham elections ever since), the regime is, according to human rights organisations, one of the most brutal and repressive in the world. Since taking power less than a decade ago, it has built more than two dozen new prisons.

Of course, you’d never know it from the way Egypt is marketing itself ahead of the summit. A promotional video on the Cop27 official website welcomes delegates to the “green city” of Sharm el-Sheik and shows young actors – including men with scruffy beards and necklaces clearly meant to look like environmental activists – enjoying non-plastic straws and biodegradable food containers as they take selfies on the beach, enjoy outdoor showers and drive electric vehicles to the desert to ride camels.

While I was watching the video, it struck me that Sisi has decided to use the summit to stage a new kind of reality show, one in which actors “play” activists who look remarkably like the actual activists who are suffering under torture in his rapidly expanding archipelago of prisons. This summit is going far beyond greenwashing a polluting state – it’s greenwashing a police state.

The Egyptian communities and organisations most affected by environmental pollution and rising temperatures will be nowhere to be found in Sharm el-Sheikh. There will be no toxic tours, or lively counter-summits, where locals get to school international delegates about the truth behind their government’s PR. Organising events like this would land Egyptians in prison for spreading “false news” or for violating the protest ban.

International delegates can’t even read up much on current pollution and environmental despoliation in Egypt in academic or NGO reports because of a draconian 2019 law that requires researchers to get government permission before releasing information considered “political”. (The whole country is gagged, and hundreds of websites are blocked, including the indispensable and perennially harassed Mada Masr.) Human Rights Watch reports that groups have been forced to rein in and scale back their research under these new constraints, and “one prominent Egyptian environmental group disbanded its research unit because it became impossible to work in the field”. Tellingly, not a single one of the environmentalists who spoke to Human Rights Watch about censorship and repression was willing to use their real name because reprisals are so severe.

Arefin, who conducted extensive research on waste and flooding in Egyptian cities before this latest round of censorious laws, told me that he and other critical academics and journalists “are no longer able to do that work. Egypt’s environmental harms now happen in the dark.” And those who break the rules and try to turn on the lights end up in dark cells – or worse.

Abd El-Fattah’s sister Mona Seif, who has spent years lobbying for her brother’s release and for the release of other political prisoners, wrote recently on Twitter: “The reality most of those participating in #Cop27 are choosing to ignore is … in countries like #Egypt your true allies, the ones who actually give a damn about the planet’s future are those languishing in prisons.”

So, unlike every other climate summit in recent memory, this one will have no authentic local partners. There will be some Egyptians at the summit claiming to represent “civil society”. And some of them do. The trouble is that, however well-intentioned, they too are bit players in Sisi’s beachside reality show; in a departure of usual UN rules, almost all have been vetted and approved by the government. That same Human Rights Watch report, published last month, explains that these groups have been invited to speak only on “welcome” topics.

What, for the regime, is welcome? “Trash collection, recycling, renewable energy, food security, and climate finance”. What topics are unwelcome? “Those that point out the government’s failure to protect people’s rights against damage caused by corporate interests, including issues relating to water security, industrial pollution, and environmental harm from real estate, tourism development, and agribusiness,” according to the report. Also unwelcome: “The environmental impact[s] of Egypt’s vast and opaque military business activity … are particularly sensitive, as are ‘national’ infrastructure projects such as a new administrative capital, many of which are associated with the president’s office or the military.” And definitely don’t talk about Coca-Cola’s plastic pollution and water use – because Coke is one of the summit’s proud official sponsors.

In short, if you want to put up solar panels or pick up litter, you can probably get a badge to come to Sharm el-Sheikh. But if you want to talk about the health and climate impacts of Egypt’s coal-powered cement plants, or the paving over of some of the last green spaces in Cairo, you are more likely to get a visit from the secret police – or from the Ministry of Social Solidarity. And if, as an Egyptian, you question Sisi’s credibility to speak on behalf of Africa’s poor and climate-vulnerable populations, given the deepening hunger and desperation of his own people, you had better do it from outside the country.

So far, hosting the summit has proved nothing short of a bonanza for Sisi, a man Donald Trump reportedly referred to as my “favourite dictator”. There is the boon to coastal tourism, which crashed in recent years, and the regime is clearly hoping its videos of outdoor showers and camel rides will inspire more. But that’s just the beginning of the green gold rush. Late last month, British International Investment (BII), which is backed by the UK government, giddily announced that it was “investing $100m to support local startups” in Egypt. It is also the majority owner in Globeleq, which ahead of Cop27 has announced an $11bn deal to build up green hydrogen production in Egypt. At the same time, the BII stressed its “commitment to strengthen its partnership with Egypt and increase climate finance to support the country’s green growth”.

This is the same government that appears to have done very little to secure the release of Abd El-Fattah, despite his British citizenship and his hunger strike. Unfortunately for him, Abd El-Fattah’s fate was for months in the hands of Liz Truss who, before becoming Britain’s spectacularly callous and inept prime minister, was its spectacularly callous and inept foreign secretary. She could have used some of those billions in investment and development aid to leverage the release of a fellow citizen. (Last week, Gillian Keegan, minister for Africa at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, reported that she had met Egypt’s ambassador to the UK for the first time, and “raised the case of Alaa Abd El-Fattah”.)

Germany’s moral failures are equally dismal. When Green party co-leader Annalena Baerbock became the country’s first female foreign minister last December, she announced a new “values-based foreign policy” – one that would prioritise human rights and climate concerns. Germany is one of Egypt’s major donors and trading partners, so, like the UK, it certainly has a card to play. But instead of pressure on human rights, Baerbock has provided Sisi with priceless propaganda opportunities, including co-hosting the Petersberg Climate Dialogue with him in Berlin in July, at which the ruthless dictator was able to rebrand himself as a green leader.

And given the difficulties caused by Germany’s reliance on Russian gas, Egypt is eagerly positioning itself to provide replacement gas and hydrogen. Meanwhile, German giant Siemens Mobility has announced a “historic” multibillion-dollar contract to build electrified high-speed trains across Egypt.

The international injections of green cash are flowing just in time for Sisi’s troubled regime. Facing a tsunami of global crises (inflation, pandemic, food shortages, increased fuel prices, drought, debt) on top of its systemic mismanagement and corruption, Egypt is on the edge of defaulting on its foreign debt – a volatile situation that could well destabilise Sisi’s rule. In this context, the climate summit is not merely a PR opportunity – it is a lifeline.

Though reluctant to give up on the process, most serious climate activists readily concede that these summits produce little by way of science-based climate action. Year after year since they began, emissions keep going up. What, then, is the good of supporting this year’s summit when the one thing it is set to absolutely accomplish is the further entrenchment and enrichment of a regime that, by any ethical standard, deserves pariah status?

As Arefin asks: “At what point do we say ‘enough’?”

For months, Egyptians in exile in Europe and the US have been pleading with NGOs to put their country’s political prisoners on the agenda of negotiations leading up to the summit. But that was never prioritised.

They were told that this is “Africa’s Cop” (Cop stands for Conference of the Parties, or signatories to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change); and that, despite all the prior failures, this Cop, the 27th, would finally get serious about “implementation” and “loss and damage” – UN-speak for the hope that the wealthy, high-polluting countries will finally pay what they owe to poor nations, like Pakistan, that have contributed next to nothing in carbon emissions, yet are bearing the bulk of the soaring costs.

The clear implication has been that the summit is too serious and too important to be sidetracked by the supposedly small matter of the host country’s human rights record. But is Cop27 really going to champion climate justice? Is it going to bring green energy and clean transit and food sovereignty to the poor? Will the summit truly confront climate debt and reparations, as many are claiming? If only.

The case for climate reparations is obvious, writes Egyptian journalist, film-maker, and novelist Omar Robert Hamilton, in a magisterial essay. “The harder question is how to design a system of reparations that does not entrench authoritarian state powers” – one that ensures that the funds actually contribute to genuinely post-carbon policies. “This should be at the core of Cop negotiations between southern and northern countries – [but] the ones doing the negotiating for the south tend to be authoritarian state powers whose short-term interests are even more graspingly fragile than those of oil executives.”

In short, despite the talk in climate circles of this being the “implementation” Cop, Egypt’s summit will probably achieve as little by way of real climate action as all the others before. But that does not mean it won’t achieve anything: when it comes to propping up a torture regime, showering it with cash and image-cleansing photo ops, Cop27 is already a lavish gift.

Abd El-Fattah has long been a symbol of Egypt’s violently extinguished revolution. But as the summit approaches, he is becoming symbolic of something else, too: the “sacrifice zone” mentality at the heart of the climate crisis. This is the idea that some places and some people can be unseen, discounted and written off – all in the name of progress. We’ve seen the mentality at work when communities are poisoned to extract and refine fossil fuels and minerals. We’ve seen it when those communities are sacrificed in the name of getting a climate bill passed that does not protect them. And now we are seeing it in the context of an international climate summit, with the rights of the people living in the host country sacrificed and unseen in the name of the mirage of “real progress” in the negotiations.

If last year’s summit in Glasgow was about “blah, blah, blah”, this one’s meaning, even before it starts, is more ominous. This summit is about blood, blood, blood. The blood of the roughly 1,000 protesters massacred by Egyptian forces to secure power for its current ruler. The blood of those who continue to be assassinated. The blood of those beaten in the streets and tortured in prisons. The blood of people like Abd El-Fattah.

There may still be time to change that script, and for the summit to become a searchlight that illuminates the connections between surging authoritarianism and climate chaos around the world – like the way far-right leaders such as Italy’s Giorgia Meloni stoke fear of refugees, including those fleeing climate breakdown, to fuel their rise, and how the EU showers brutal leaders such as Sisi with cash so that he continues to prevent Africans from reaching their shores. There is still time to make the case that climate justice is impossible without political freedoms.

“Unlike me, you have not yet been defeated.” Alaa Abd El-Fattah wrote those words in 2017. He had been invited to deliver a speech to RightsCon, the annual confab about human rights in the digital age sponsored by all the big tech companies. The conference was taking place in the US, but because Abd El-Fattah was behind bars in the notorious Tora prison (it had been four years at that point), he sent a letter instead. It’s a brilliant text, about the imperative to protect the internet as a space of creativity, experimentation and freedom. And it is also a challenge to those who are not (yet) behind bars, who have the freedom to do things like travelling to conferences to talk about justice and democracy and human rights. In that freedom lies responsibility. A responsibility not just to be free, but also to act free, to use freedom to its full transformational potential, before it’s too late.

As tens of thousands of relatively free Cop27 delegates prepare to fly to Sharm el-Sheikh, checking the average November temperatures (highs of 28C), packing appropriately (light shirts, sandals, a bathing suit – because you never know), Abd El-Fattah’s words about the responsibilities that come with being undefeated take on a new urgency. Given the intensive surveillance and threat that Egyptians attending the summit will be facing, how will the foreigners attending deploy their freedom? Their state of being not yet defeated?

Will they behave as if Egypt is merely a backdrop, not an actual country where people just like them have fought and died for the same freedoms they have, and against the same economic interests that are destabilising our planetary and political climates? Or will they find ways to bring some of the gruesome truths of Egypt’s prisons into the green glitz of the conference centre? Speak some of the names of the prisoners? Will they search out the few remaining civil society organisations in Cairo – such as those who came together under copcivicspace.net – and see how they can help?

Abd El-Fattah would be the first to say that what’s needed is neither pity nor charity. Rather, as a committed internationalist who has stood in solidarity with many struggles, from Chiapas to Palestine, he called for comrades in a battle that has fronts in every nation. “We reach out to you,” he wrote in that RightsCon letter from prison, “not in search of powerful allies but because we confront the same global problems, and share universal values, and with a firm belief in the power of solidarity.”

Anti-democratic and fascistic forces are surging around the world. In country after country, freedoms are precarious or slipping away. And all of this is connected. Political tides move in waves across borders, for better and for worse – which is why international solidarity can never be sacrificed in the name of expediency for some greater goal of “progress”. Egypt’s revolution was inspired by Tunisia’s, and in turn, “the spirit of Tahrir” spread around the world. It helped inspire other youth-led movements in Europe and North America, including Occupy Wall Street, which in turn helped birth new anti-capitalist and eco-socialist politics. In fact, you can draw a pretty straight line from Tahrir to Occupy, to Bernie Sanders’s 2016 US presidential campaign, to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s election to Congress and her championing of the Green New Deal.

Where human rights are under attack, so too is the natural world. After all, the communities and organisations facing the most severe state repression and violence around the world – whether they live in the Philippines or Canada or Brazil or the US – are overwhelmingly made up of Indigenous peoples trying to protect their territories from polluting extractive projects, many of which are also driving the climate crisis. Defending human rights, wherever we live, is therefore inextricable from defending a liveable planet.

Moreover, the extent to which some governments are finally introducing meaningful climate legislation is also bound up with political freedoms. The US Senate and the Biden administration have finally been dragged into passing the Inflation Reduction Act – flawed as it is. This happened as a direct result of public pressure, investigative journalism, civil disobedience, sit-ins in legislative offices, lawsuits and every other tool available in the nonviolent arsenal. And, ultimately, lawmakers got together to pass the act because they feared what would happen when they faced voters in November if they came to them empty-handed. If US politicians did not have to fear the public, because the public had a greater fear of them, none of this would have happened at all.

One thing is certain: we will not win the kind of change that the climate crisis demands without the freedom to demonstrate, sit in, shame political leaders and tell the truth in public. If demonstrations are banned and inconvenient facts are criminalised as “false news”, as they are in Sisi’s Egypt, then it’s game over. Without the strikes, the protests and the investigative research, we would be in far worse shape than we are. And any one of those activities would be enough to land an Egyptian activist or journalist in a dark cell next to Abd El-Fattah’s.

When news came that the next UN climate summit would be taking place in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egyptian activists, inside the country and in exile, could have called on the climate movement to boycott it. They chose not to, for a variety of reasons. But they did ask for solidarity. The Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies, for instance, called on the international community to use the summit “to shed more light on the crimes being committed in Egypt and urge the Egyptian authorities to change course”. There were high hopes that North American and European activists would push their governments to make their attendance and participation conditional on Egypt meeting basic human-rights requirements – including amnesty for prisoners of conscience in jail for “crimes” such as organising a demonstration, or posting an unflattering statement about the regime, or receiving a foreign grant.

So far, with less than a month before the summit starts, the response from the global climate movement has been muted. Many groups have added their names to petitions; a handful of articles about the human rights situation during the summit have appeared; climate activists in Germany, many of them Egyptian exiles, have held small protests with signs saying “No Cop27 Until Alaa is Free” and “No Greenwashing Egypt’s Prisons”. But we have seen nothing like the kind of the international pressure that would worry Egypt’s rulers.

It’s hard to overstate the totalising nature of Sisi’s war on civil society. Human Rights Watch reports that, “In 2014… Sisi amended, by decree, the penal code to punish with life in prison or death sentence anyone requesting, receiving, or assisting the transfer of funds, whether from foreign sources or local organisations, with the aim of doing work that harms a ‘national interest’ or the country’s independence or undermining public security or safety.” The death sentence for receiving a grant. And yet all of the major US and European foundations will be in Sharm el-Sheikh, meeting with groups that they fund, and others that they might consider funding, inside a country where taking any of that money to tell the truth about environmental despoliation in Egypt can cost you your life.

This is all a bit baffling. Why invite funders and green groups to Egypt when the regime has such obvious hostility toward these very activities domestically? The truth – uncomfortable for all who will be in attendance – is that nothing would serve Sisi more than to turn Sharm el-Sheik into a kind of nonprofit petting zoo, where international climate activists and funders can spend two weeks shouting about north-south injustice before the cameras, with a few state-approved local groups thrown in for authenticity’s sake. Why? Because then Egypt would look like something it most emphatically is not: a free and democratic society. A good source for your natural gas. Or a country suitable to entrust with a new IMF loan.

By all accounts, the Egyptian government is frantically building a bubble in Sharm el-Sheikh, where it will impersonate something that looks sort of like a democracy. The question facing civil society groups is: will you play along – or will you do what you can to disrupt the show?

In all the plans for next month’s Coca-Cola-sponsored climate summit, the most chilling detail is surely the announcement that this will be the first such gathering to have a Children and Youth Pavilion inside the official venue: a dedicated space that “will provide a convening place of talks, education, creativity, policy briefings, rest and relaxation, bringing together the voices of young people across the world”. This will allow youth to – get this – “speak truth to power”.

I have no doubt that many young people in that pavilion will deliver powerful speeches, as they did in Glasgow and at climate summits before. Young people have become true climate leaders, and they have injected desperately needed urgency and moral clarity into many official climate spaces. That same moral clarity is needed now.

A decade ago, young Egyptians didn’t have a state-sanctioned pavilion. They had a revolution. They flooded Tahrir Square demanding a different kind of country, one without the ever-present shadow of fear, one where teenagers didn’t disappear into police dungeons and reappear dead, their faces swollen and bloodied. That revolution overthrew a dictator who had ruled since before they were born. But then their dreams were crushed by political betrayals and violence. In one of his recent letters, Abd El-Fattah wrote of how painful it is to share his cell with teenagers who were arrested when they were children: “They were underage when they were put in prison and are fighting to get out before they reach legal adulthood.”

One of the teens who helped take over the square in 2011 was Abd El-Fattah’s extraordinary younger sister Sanaa Seif. Just 17 at the time, Sanaa co-founded a revolutionary newspaper, Al Gornal, which published tens of thousands of copies and became a kind of voice of Tahrir. She also was an editor and camera person on the Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary film The Square. She has herself been imprisoned multiple times for speaking out against human rights abuses and for demanding her brother’s release. In an interview, she told me that she has a message for the young activists headed for that pavilion: “We tried. We did speak truth to power.” Now, she says, many activists are spending their 20s in prison. “When you go, remember that you can be the voice of other young people … Please, let’s maintain that heritage. Please do actually speak truth to power. It will have impact … eyes are on you.”

But as the climate summit draws near, and Abd El-Fatah’s hunger strike wears on, Sanaa is losing patience with the large green groups that have so far been silent, seemingly out of fear of losing their badges or being stopped at the border. “Honestly I’m fed up with the hypocrisy of the climate movement,” she wrote on Twitter last week. “Outcries have been pouring from Egypt for months warning that this #COP27 will go far beyond greenwashing, that the ramifications on us will be horrible. Yet most are choosing to ignore the human rights situation.”

This, she pointed out, is why climate activism is often seen as an elite exercise, disconnected from people with urgent daily concerns – such as getting their family members out of jail. “You’re guaranteeing that #ClimateAction remains an alien notion exclusive to the few who have the luxury to think beyond today,” she wrote. “Mitigating climate change and fighting for human rights are interlinked struggles, they shouldn’t be separated. Especially since we’re dealing with a regime that is propped up by companies like BP and Eni. And really, how hard is it to raise both issues? #FreeThemAll #FreeAlaa.”

It isn’t hard – but it does take courage. The message activists should bring to the climate summit, whether they travel to Egypt or engage from afar, is simple: unless political freedoms are defended, there will be no meaningful climate action. Not in Egypt, nor anywhere else. These issues are intertwined, as are our fates.

The hour is late, but there is still just enough time to get this right. Human Rights Watch argues that the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, which sets the rules for these summits, should “develop human rights criteria that countries hosting future Cops must commit to meeting as part of the host agreement”. That’s too late for this summit, but it’s not too late for all of those who are concerned about climate justice to show solidarity with the revolutionaries who inspired millions around the world a decade ago, when they toppled a tyrant. There might even be time to scare Sisi enough with the prospect of a green PR nightmare by the Red Sea that he could decide to open the doors of some of his dungeons before all those cameras arrive. Because, as Alaa Abd El-Fattah reminds us from the desperation of his cell, we have not yet been defeated.

This article first appeared in The Intercept

From pollution in the River Nile in Cairo and the circles of Hell . . .

. . . to the circle of the Palm Jumeirah in the United Arab Emirates

The Palm Jumeirah is an archipelago of artificial islands on the Persian Gulf in Jumeirah, Dubai, United Arab Emirates. It is part of a larger series of developments called the Palm Islands, including Palm Jebel Ali and Palm Deira, which, if completed, will together increase Dubai's shoreline by a total of 520 kilometres (320 mi). It has an estimated population of at least 10,000 as of 2017.

The islands were created using land reclamation. In 2009, The New York Times reported that NASA's laser altimeter satellites had measured the Palm as sinking at the rate of 5 mm (0.20 in) per year.

After launching the project, it was revealed that the developer increased the number of residential units on the island (with a concomitant reduction in the amount of physical space between individual properties) from the originally announced 4,500 (comprising 2,000 villas purchased early in the expectation of greater separation between properties). This increase was attributed to the developer miscalculating the actual cost of construction and requiring the raising of additional capital, although they had never commented publicly on the matter. The New York Times reported in 2009 that many people had bought houses before they were built and are furious about the space available now and the way they seem to be living on top of each other.

The outer breakwater was designed as a continuous barrier, but by preventing natural tidal movement, the seawater within the Palm became stagnant. The breakwater was subsequently modified to create gaps on either side, allowing tidal movement to oxygenate the water within and prevent it from stagnating, albeit less efficiently than would be the case if the breakwater did not exist.

According to a study published in the journal Water in 2022, the construction of this island has had an effect on increasing water-soluble materials, changing the spectral profile of water and also increasing the temperature of the water surface around the island.

Dubai’s architecture was recently condemned by UK property developers and architects as “a sprawling mess”, as part of a development row currently taking place in Liverpool. Bill Maynard, director of Urban Splash’s Liverpool office said: “Dubai is a sprawling mess of hotchpotch architecture-we shouldn’t compare ourselves to it. We should be comparing ourselves to Manhattan or Paris.”

Maynard was speaking in response to comments made by Martin Wright, development director of Liverpool Vision. Wright had defended a Liverpool tower project in an interview with UK magazine Building Design, saying: “It [the tower] is not of the quality you’d find in Dubai, but what is proposed is not out of place in Liverpool.”

Wright was slammed by Liverpool architect Patrick Lynch, who said, “It’s a problem if Liverpool Vision’s director of development doesn’t realise Dubai is hell on Earth…the quality in Dubai is palpably not of a high standard.”

Hell on Earth?

The United Arab Emirates' oil and natural gas reserves are the world's sixth and seventh-largest, respectively. Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, ruler of Abu Dhabi and the country's first president, oversaw the development of the Emirates by investing oil revenues into healthcare, education, and infrastructure. The United Arab Emirates has the most diversified economy among the members of the Gulf Cooperation Council. In the 21st century, the country has become less reliant on oil and gas and is economically focusing on tourism and business. The government does not levy income tax, although there is a corporate tax in place and a 5% value-added tax was established in 2018.

The Ruwais Refinery is operated by the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC). The complex can process up to 837,000 barrels of crude oil and condensate per day, making it the fourth-largest single-site oil refinery in the world and the biggest in the Middle East. The refinery is situated in the city of Ruwais, in Abu Dhabi’s western region. It is highly integrated with ADNOC’s other plants in the Ruwais industrial area.

Human rights groups, such as Amnesty International, Freedom House and Human Rights Watch, regard UAE as generally substandard on human rights, with citizens criticising the regime imprisoned and tortured, families harassed by the state security apparatus, and cases of forced disappearances. Individual rights such as the freedoms of assembly, association, the press, expression, and religion are also severely repressed. 

The UAE's carbon dioxide emissions per capita are high, ranking sixth among countries globally. 

Hell for the Earth?

In the Environment section of the print edition of the Guardian Saturday 8 April Fiona Harvey reports on her conversation with Sultan Al Jaber, the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology, and better known as a businessman who is chief executive of the UAE national oil company, Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC).

Fiona Harvey writes under the headline and subheading:

Cop28 president: world needs business mindset to tackle climate crisis

Exclusive: Sultan Al Jaber aims to use UN talks to set out how private sector can limit greenhouse gas emissions

She writes:

The world needs a “business mindset” to tackle the climate crisis, the president of the next UN climate summit has said.

Sultan Al Jaber, the president-designate of the Cop28 summit to be hosted in the United Arab Emirates later this year, said he aimed to use the UN talks to set out how the private sector can limit greenhouse gas emissions and give businesses and governments a clear set of tasks and targets.

“We need a major course correction and a massive effort to reignite progress. This cannot be done by governments alone,” Al Jaber told the Guardian in a rare interview, his first with a global newspaper since taking on the Cop28 role.

“The scale of the problem requires everyone working in solidarity. We need partnerships, not polarisation, and we need to approach this with a clear-eyed rationale and executable plan of action,” he said.

“Cop28 is committed to building on the progress made at Cop26 and Cop27 to inject a business mindset, concrete KPIs [key performance indicators, a cornerstone of most commercial strategies] and an ambitious action-oriented agenda.”

Al Jaber, as well as being the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology, is better known as a businessman, chief executive of the UAE national oil company, Adnoc, one of the world’s biggest oil and gas producers, and the founding chief executive of its renewable energy company Masdar.

He was a deeply controversial choice to chair these crucial talks, at which governments will assess progress made on cutting greenhouse gas emissions since the 2015 Paris agreement, a process known as the “global stocktake”. They must then try to find ways to limit global heating to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels, a target rapidly slipping beyond reach. The conferences have traditionally been dominated by policymakers, ministers and politicians, and civil society activists.

Adnoc is planning a massive expansion of oil and gas, the Guardian revealed last week. Climate activists from around the world have attacked Al Jaber for not renouncing his Adnoc role.

Romain Ioualalen, the global policy manager at the campaign group Oil Change International, said: “This is a truly breathtaking conflict of interest and is tantamount to putting the head of a tobacco company in charge of negotiating an anti-smoking treaty.”

But Al Jaber said no one should prejudge his presidency, as he was committed to safeguarding the 1.5C limit and ensuring that all countries, and the private sector, would act to achieve the massive emissions cuts necessary.

He vowed to turn his business background into an asset for the talks, saying that no previous Cop president had come with such entrepreneurial and management experience. He pointed to the UAE’s achievements in renewable energy, overseas development aid, in diversifying beyond oil so that 75% of its GDP was now non-oil based, and said that would enable him to motivate other oil-producing countries to come up with similar plans.

“The UAE intends to build this same business case for climate action at Cop28,” he said. “We know we need to engage the private sector fully and unlock the trillions of dollars that are needed. This requires a business plan that outlines key deliverables with concrete KPIs; it requires reliable and sufficient capital, and it requires coordinated collective action.”

He wants the private sector to play a significant role at the summit, arguing that companies – including oil and gas firms – will be pivotal to tackling the climate crisis.

“The energy sector must work as a partner with other sectors to help decarbonise entire economies,” he said.

One longtime attender of Cop summits and adviser to governments said Al Jaber’s plans to take a more businesslike approach to Cop28 were “very much how his mind works”. They said: “I think it works up to a point. But for some issues like adaptation and loss and damage [the key issue of providing funds to rescue countries afflicted by climate breakdown] the business plan analogy may only get you so far.”

His plans are unlikely to find favour with climate activists at the talks. Tasneem Essop, the director of Climate Action Network, accused Al Jaber of fundamentally misunderstanding his role, despite having been a longtime member of the UAE’s diplomatic team attending Cops.

“This is a UN conference, and a separate process from any engagement with businesses,” she said. “If he wants to convene ‘stakeholders’ and engage with fossil fuel companies, he can do that in his own time. He must do that separately from the UN process.”

She said activists were prejudging Al Jaber based on his probable handling of the Cop president role, as an oil industry chief executive, and on his eagerness to engage with business. “There needs to be a firewall between his role as CEO and role as Cop president,” she said. “He doesn’t seem to understand his role as Cop president, and that’s what our prejudgment is based on.”

Al Jaber also spoke to the Guardian of the need to invest in new technologies such as hydrogen and carbon capture and storage (CCS), which some activists are likely to find controversial. “I want to make sure that Cop28 becomes a rallying point for partnerships across every region to commercialise hydrogen production, transportation and industrial use,” he said.

CCS technologies have been seen by many climate scientists and experts as a distraction, and one championed by the oil industry to keep its operations going. Al Jaber disagrees, pointing to the recent findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in its comprehensive report last month noted that carbon capture would be needed in some form, particularly in the likely event of an overshoot of the 1.5C limit.

“We also need to exponentially expand carbon capture technologies,” said Al Jaber. “The IPCC has been saying since 2016 that carbon capture is an essential tool for keeping temperature rises in check. Yet there is only 44m tonnes of carbon captured annually. We need to multiply that amount by 30. This is a huge undertaking that is currently just not affordable. We need progressive, smart government regulation and policies to incentivise private investment on an industrial scale.”

Al Jaber also called for overhaul of the World Bank and other international financial institutions, a push that could be widely supported before Cop28, as many governments of developed and developing countries and civil society groups are clamouring for fundamental change to the way public financial institutions deal with the climate crisis.

David Malpass, the outgoing World Bank president, appointed by Donald Trump in 2019 and accused of being a climate denier, resigned in February. He is being replaced by Ajay Banga, a former banker who is expected to usher in sweeping changes to expand climate finance, to be prefigured at the World Bank spring meetings next week.

Both public finance and private will be needed, to shift the global economy to a low-carbon footing, Al Jaber said. “The common threat to all the progress I am talking about is capital,” he said. “Last year $1.4tn was invested in clean technology globally. We need four times that amount. And we need to make sure that investment reaches the most vulnerable communities across the global south.

“The bottom line is finance needs to be much more available, accessible and affordable. We need to stop talking about a just transition for the global south, and start delivering.”

In February Ben Stockton and Lawrence Carter reporting for the Guardian (Fri 3 Feb 2023) found that:

UAE oil company employees given roles in office hosting Cop28, and at least 12 officials at the body hosting Cop28 appear to have come straight from fossil fuel industry.

They write: 

At least a dozen employees from the United Arab Emirate’s state-owned oil company have apparently taken up roles with the office of the UAE’s climate change special envoy, who will host this year’s Cop28 UN climate summit.

The revelation adds to growing concerns over the potential for blurred lines between the team hosting this year’s crucial summit and the oil-rich country’s influential fossil fuel industry.

The officials were apparently working in the UAE’s oil and gas industry immediately before taking up roles in the Cop28 team, according to an analysis of LinkedIn accounts by the independent investigative group Centre for Climate Reporting (CCR), and seen by the Guardian.

Among the officials are two former Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (Adnoc) engineers who will act as negotiators on behalf of the UAE at the conference, despite their LinkedIn profiles suggesting they may not have a background in international climate diplomacy.

Two of the employees have been seconded from their roles at Adnoc, according to LinkedIn accounts reviewed by CCR. Meanwhile, senior executives at the oil company have been “tasked with supporting” the UAE’s role as hosts of this year’s conference.

The findings follow the recent announcement that Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, the chief executive of Adnoc, will preside over the conference in November while retaining his role at the oil company. Climate campaigners and some politicians have called for Jaber to give up his oil role while hosting the summit, to avoid any conflict of interest.

“If we don’t make some dramatic changes, Cop28 is going to be the lost climate summit,” said the US congressman Jared Huffman, who in a letter last week called on the special presidential envoy for climate, John Kerry, to push the UAE to remove Jaber from his post as Cop28 president. “To somehow pretend that all of these fossil fuel personnel and all of these connections are not a massive threat to the entire conference goes beyond naive.”

Sami Joost, a spokesperson for the UAE climate change special envoy, said: “The individuals who are being hired have come from a variety of backgrounds and sectors … Once in post, these individuals are entirely focused on the job of delivering Cop28 and have no obligations to their former employers.”

Adnoc did not respond to questions about its ties to the envoy.

Records also suggest at least some members of the Cop28 team may be working in the same building as the oil company. Filings with the US justice department last year listed Adnoc’s headquarters as the address for the UAE climate change special envoy. The United Nations, which organises the annual conferences, has questioned the UAE delegation about its independence from Adnoc, according to a recent Politico report.

“Staff are currently based in several different locations,” said Joost, adding that they would be moving into permanent offices in February. “In the meantime, there are clear governance guidelines in place to ensure that the team can operate entirely independently from any other entity where they may be situated.”

The UAE has said this year’s climate change conference, during which representatives from across the world will travel to Dubai to assess progress in tackling the climate emergency, will be an “inclusive Cop which brings all perspectives to the table”. The UAE has invested heavily in renewable energy but has continued to increase oil production.

Adnoc has also sought to bring on board someone with experience in international climate talks to help with “diplomatic engagement” during the conference, according to a job description seen by CCR and the Guardian. On a document headed with the Adnoc logo, the job description said the candidate would “liaise between Cop28 office and relevant UAE embassies abroad”.

One person approached for the job claimed they were told by the recruiter that Adnoc was involved in hiring for the position, even though the role appears to be entirely focused on Cop28. The recruiter also reportedly said the oil company was in the process of hiring about 100 climate policy staffers ahead of the conference.

Joost would not say whether the “diplomatic engagement” position would be part of the UAE climate change special envoy, saying he “would not comment on specific roles”.

“The aim is to bring together a team with the best possible skills and experience to allow Cop28 to deliver on all of its objectives,” he said.

The US senator Sheldon Whitehouse, who co-signed the letter to Kerry last week, said: “Time is getting short to solve the climate crisis and Cop is the only venue for finding international agreement on how to get it done. These conversations need to happen free from the malign influence of the fossil fuel industry.”

Shortly after Jaber was announced as the Cop28 president last month, the US public relations agency Edelman emailed scores of journalists touting the UAE’s investment in renewable energy. “Last year, we made a commitment to be the agency of choice for organisations dedicated to climate action,” said Michael Bush, a spokesperson for Edelman. Bush said the agency had been hired to work on Cop28 through its engagement with the Emirati renewable energy company Masdar.

Masdar is owned by Adnoc, another state-owned fossil fuel company called Taqa and an Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. Edelman has not disclosed how much it is being paid for the work.

The former UK prime minister Tony Blair was another source of praise for Jaber’s appointment. Blair has previously worked on behalf of the UAE, and a number of staff at his government advisory non-profit, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, are based in the country. Blair also gave the keynote speech at Adnoc’s investor forum in 2019.

Julie Crowley, a spokesperson for the institute, told CCR Blair was not paid for the appearance and that he has no role with Adnoc. She did not answer questions about whether Blair or his organisation had any current contracts with the UAE government and if it was formally involved in Cop28.

“This is a pivotal year in the fight against climate change and we will continue to support the drive towards energy transition and the practical measures necessary to meet the Paris targets, however we can,” she said.

NOT much COP!

Associated Press reports in Abu Dhabi were posted on the Guardian website (Mon 16 Jan 2023) claiming that John Kerry, the US climate envoy, backs the UAE appointment of oil chief to oversee UN climate talks saying that this pick is a ‘terrific choice’. But activists equate pick to; 

asking ‘arms dealers to lead peace talks’

Earlier at the World Economic Forum in Davos (January 2023) Greta Thunberg said it was; 

“completely ridiculous” 

that Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), will preside over the next round of global climate talks in Dubai in November.

Graeme Wearden reporting for the Guardian in Davos (Thu 19 Jan 2023) writes under the headline and subheading:

‘Ridiculous’: Greta Thunberg blasts decision to let UAE oil boss chair climate talks

Climate activist at Davos says lobbyists have been influencing conferences ‘since forever’

Four years after taking the World Economic Forum by storm, Greta Thunberg returned to Davos on Thursday to blast the United Arab Emirates for appointing the head of its state-owned oil company to chair the Cop28 climate talks later this year.

Thunberg said it was “completely ridiculous” that Sultan Ahmed al-Jaber, chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), will preside over the next round of global climate talks in Dubai in November.

She told an event on the sidelines of the WEF’s annual meeting in Davos that lobbyists have been influencing these conferences “since, basically, forever”.

“This just puts a very clear face to it,” she added. “It’s completely ridiculous.”

Luisa Neubauer, a German climate activist, also called the move “ridiculous”, but not a new development, as lobbyists had flocked to the last Cop meeting in Egypt.

Helena Gualinga, from an Indigenous community in the Amazon rainforest in Ecuador, said UAE’s move sent the message that the climate issue was not being taken seriously.

“I just think it sends a message of where we’re headed right now, if we’re putting the heads of fossil fuel companies to lead climate negotiations,” Gualinga said.

In November, ADNOC’s board decided to bring forward its goal to expand its oil production to 5m barrels a day to 2027 from 2030 to meet rising global energy demand.

In response to the activists comments, a Cop28 spokesperson insisted al-Jaber – who founded renewable energy firm Masdar in 2006 – was “uniquely qualified to deliver a succesful Cop28”.

The Cop28 spokesperson said: “Dr Sultan is an energy expert and founder of one of the world’s leading rewnewable energy companies, a senior business leader, a government minister and a climate diplomat with over 20 years of experience of taking climate action.”

Thunberg also demanded fossil fuel bosses immediately stop opening any new fossil fuel extraction sites.

A “cease and desist” order, signed by Thunberg, and fellow activists Gualinga, Neubauer and Vanessa Nakate from Uganda, said Big Oil has known for decades that fossil fuels cause climate breakdown, and has misled the public and deceived politicians.

“You must end these activities as they are in direct violation of our human right to a clean, healthy and sustainable environment, your duty of care, as well as the rights of Indigenous people,” the notice says.

The people who are mostly fueling the destruction of the planet, who are at the very core of the climate crisis, investing in fossil fuels, are in Davos, Thunberg said.

“And yet somehow these are the people that we seem to rely on solving our problems, where they have proven time and time again, that they are not prioritising that,” she said. “They are prioritising self greed, corporate greed and short term economic profits above people and above planet.”

Thunberg said it was “absurd” to be listening to these people, rather than to those in the frontline in the climate crisis.

Nakate said the climate crisis is evident in the areas that are most affected, such as the horn of Africa, where children are suffering from severe, acute malnutrition.

The quartet were joined by Fatih Birol, head of the International Energy Agency.

In 2021, the IEA said that exploitation and development of new oil and gas fields had to stop that year, if the world was to meet the goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

On Thursday, Birol said he was “very happy” that the activists were pushing the climate agenda forwards.

Birol warned it might not make sense for banks to fund new fossil fuel projects.

Asked about the banks who fund new oil and gas generation, despite their net zero pledges, Birol said it was “their money”, not the IEA’s. But added there was a risk that demand might not be there when new oilfields come online, perhaps six or seven years after the decision is taken to drill.

In 2019, Thunberg warned Davos delegates that “our house is on fire”, after travelling by train to the ski resort in a 32-hour journey, and camping with climate scientists on the mountain slopes – where temperatures fell to -18C.

Meanwhile along the LODE Zone Line . . .

. . . ‘Slipping through our fingers’: New Zealand scientists distraught at scale of glacier loss according to the  Research institute NIWA predicting that many of the country’s most important glaciers will be gone within the decade. 

This is the story told by Tess McClure, Aotearoa New Zealand correspondent for the Guardian (Fri 31 Mar 2023).

The plane’s engine groans, and its small frame rises. Through a thin membrane of cloud, the spine of the southern alps rises like a dark sawblade.

“I’m wondering if my favourite glacier is going to be there,” says principal climate scientist Dr Andrew Lorrey. “We’ve had a really, really hot one this summer. It’s hard to say. We’ll just have to see how they’ve gone.”

In the pre-sunrise darkness of Sunday morning, the small group of six scientists had gathered on the asphalt of a small Queenstown airfield, packing cameras into backpacks as a wash of colour leaked over the mountains. For most of the next eight hours, they would sit twisted in their seats, spines cramping, lenses trained to the windows to capture the peaks of the southern alps as they emerged from thickets of cloud. This is New Zealand’s annual snowline survey, a single annual charter flight run by climate research institute Niwa that attempts to capture the state of the country’s glaciers before winter sets in. Today, on the back of two record-breakingly hot years, the scientists are bracing for the worst.

As the tiny plane curls around the peaks, the pilot flicks between different maps on a tablet, comparing notes with the science team through a headset to try to track the precise location of glaciers through the cloud cover.

Out the far window, the blue-grey expanse of Brewster glacier looms to the right. The larger glaciers, like Fox and Franz Josef, are shrunken but still confront you as huge rivers of ice, wrinkled and cracked by the pressure of their downhill flow, a thick ribbon of crumpled pale blue crepe. Across others, however, veins of dark rock are emerging, eating deeper and deeper into the glaciers’ pale centres. Brewster’s layers of ice look like a slice of quartz, rippled with thin ribs of black scree and apricot sediment. The thick snow and ice that might once have covered it has retreated, replaced with the dark sheen of newly exposed rock.

“It’s really dramatic,” says prof Andrew Mackintosh, the lead scientist on the exhibition, turning back over his headrest to yell over the roar of the engine. “I wouldn’t have imagined to have seen changes like that in my lifetime – it’s quite profound.”

Brewster glacier, New Zealand. Scientists say it ‘won’t be with us much longer’.

Mackintosh, a glaciologist now based at Monash University in Australia, helped launch the monitoring programme at Brewster glacier in New Zealand in 2004. At the time, it was thick and healthy. “It’s 20 years later, and I just wonder how … ” he trails off. “It will take a while to fully waste away, but it doesn’t have the characteristics of a happy, living glacier any more. It looks like something that is just decaying, and won’t be with us much longer.”

A confronting sight

There is a grief in watching the ice melt. Some of these scientists have been monitoring these glaciers for decades, returning every year to take their pictures. They know each by name, and have their personal favourites. Some of the glaciers they used to record have vanished over the last decade. Mackintosh and Lorrey occasionally lean over their grey vinyl seats to exchange observations, gazing out the shuddering windows. “She looks like shit,” one of them says.

“It’s interesting as a scientist, and a bit challenging as a human being to see that change,” Mackintosh says. “There’s a kind of conflict: of fascination in how the system can change so rapidly, combined with the emotional response of seeing the loss of ice that’s such an important part of the landscape, and so beautiful and so culturally important.”

“The scale of retreat is confronting, even to a glaciologist.”

Over winter, the snow should coat the glaciers and slopes with a thick, smooth slab of marzipan. That snow feeds and protects the glacier, adding to the ice’s volume before the warmer months can strip it away. Typically, a glacier will accumulate snow at its top and slowly melt from its lower reaches, forming alpine lakes and tarns, and feeding the braided rivers below. But the extent of warming temperatures are changing that dynamic even at high altitudes, sending the ice on glaciers like Brewster contracting even at the higher reaches. “This is a glacier that’s melting all over – at the top and the bottom and the sides, just bringing the whole thing in,” Mackintosh says.

As the seasonal climate has warmed through spring and through summer, that snowline peels up. As the plane circles the rear of Mount Bryant, Lorrey points to where the snow has pulled back from the ice. “You see that ice here? All the bluish ice is completely bare, it’s been stripped off. … So that whole glacier, pretty much 80%, 90% of it is melting. Anytime you see blue ice, it’s naked,” he says.

He shakes his head slightly. “That’s emaciated.”

As the plane comes in to land at Lake Tekapo’s airfield, Lorrey points out the folds and drainage channels in the plains. “18,000 years ago, this whole valley was filled with ice,” he says. But if the movement of ice was once measured across hundreds or thousands of years, it is now moving far faster, retreating from rising temperatures over the course of years or decades. 2022 was New Zealand’s hottest year on record – the second year in a row the record’s been broken.

Carrington glacier, New Zealand. Dr Andrew Lorrey says rapid action is needed to save the country’s remaining glaciers.

The flight attempts to document the snowlines on more than 50 glaciers, some of which have been monitored like this for the last 46 years. But over time, some of the index glaciers have been substituted out as they disappeared, swapped for cousins in the higher reaches. Now, even some of those replacement options are looking thin, and Niwa predicts that many of New Zealand’s important glaciers will be gone within the decade.

There is still hope for the glaciers that remain, Lorrey says. A few fractions of degrees of warming are the difference between New Zealand’s glaciers clinging on, or disappearing completely.

“Rapid change is needed, rapid action is needed to change the pathway that we’re on,” Lorrey says. The damage can be done quickly, but the repair is much longer. “These abrupt and absolutely rapid [losses] can happen in a few shockingly warm years,” he says, “But it’s a glacially slow process to replenish that ice and rebuild it to its full glory.”

Fox glacier, New Zealand. The movement of ice was once measured in hundreds or thousands of years – now it is years or decades.

“We know what’s driving the loss of glaciers,” Lorrey says. “We know that there’s an intimate connection between temperature change, and the changes that we’re seeing in our glaciers. … We know that that pathway is very much dictated by CO2 emissions.”

“It is a bit emotional to see an amazing, pristine part of our natural environment, slipping through our fingers. I would like to share it with my family and my friends and especially my daughters, and I don’t know if I’m going to have that opportunity … It’s going so fast.

“We need to confront this in a much more direct way, in a faster way.”

In the end, Lorrey’s favourite, Llawrenny Peaks, was impossible to document this year – wrapped by thick cloud, impossible to see from the plane’s windows.

“In a way I’m kind of glad,” he says. “Because I suspect I might’ve cried if it was not there”.

"climate trauma"

The psychological impact for the scientists witnessing the loss of ice in the glaciers of New Zealand's South Island is another consequence of the climate crisis. 

Clea Skopeliti and Sammy Gecsoyler of the Guardian listen as young people in the UK tell how the climate emergency is affecting their psychological wellbeing and how they are coping (Thu 30 Mar 2023).

They write:

Jem, 24, has started losing sleep over the climate emergency. “Over the last two years, I have felt growing anxiety at the state of the environment. It keeps me up at night,” Jem, who works in nature conservation in Somerset, says. “I worry about what future I should be planning for.”

Jem says it has contributed to them taking medication for their mental health. “I am on antidepressants but I don’t think this is a solution. Things like antidepressants can’t fix things when it’s an external problem. It’s the world we have created that is causing these issues.

“Our mental health is so intrinsically tied to everything around us that we constantly see on the news. Even if you try and tune it out, you’re not going to be able to. It’s so out of our control. I know the science and the stark realities of it. There’s no fix to the anxiety because you know [the climate] is going to get worse.”

Jem is one of scores of young people who shared their distress over the climate emergency with the Guardian. In a recent survey by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), almost three-quarters (73%) of 16- to 24-year-olds reported that the climate crisis was having a negative effect on their mental health, compared with 61% of all people in the UK. The figures were up from 61% and 55% respectively in 2020.

Dr Gareth Morgan, a clinical psychologist and co-chair of the Association of Clinical Psychologists’ climate action network, acknowledges that terms such as “climate anxiety” or “eco-distress” can be helpful for some people, but cautions against pathologising distress over the climate crisis.

“These terms risk locating the problem within the person – that they’re too sensitive or having irrational thoughts. When we regard climate anxiety as an individual problem, it positions not being concerned about the climate crisis as the healthy norm. And this supports the continued societal silence on discussing the emotional impact of climate breakdown.”

Morgan says more young people are “understandably” reporting an impact on their mental health because the climate crisis is going to affect them, but it will also affect older people. He also notes that many parents and grandparents, too, are worried about the effects on their loved ones, and he says society collectively is experiencing many psychological responses to “climate trauma”.

While therapy and medication may be helpful for some, it does not address the root causes, Morgan says. “I think there is a space for therapy but it’s secondary to a bigger political response,” he says.

There is research suggesting that “one of the things people find helpful is participation, activism and connection with other people”, he says. “When you are connected to other people, that distress, that feeling there is something wrong with you for feeling this way, dissipates because you feel you are making a difference.”

Lily Henderson, 18, knows what this distress feels like – and how activism and a sense of community can help. “At 14 I started to learn more about climate change and what I found out made me terrified for my future,” the student from Inverness says. “At first I didn’t know what to do because I felt so alone. I felt so helpless.”

She felt that others did not understand the intensity of the problem. “I remember mentioning it to my friends, who said it’s OK, someone else will solve it. But nowhere near enough is being done when you look at the news.”

She joined a protest in Inverness in 2019, and from there her involvement in the climate movement snowballed, leading her to organise climate strikes in her home city and in Glasgow. “I put my fear into action,” she says.

Henderson still feels anxious about the future of the planet, but her activism has given her an outlet to push for change and a community of people who feel the same way.

For others who feel as she does, she recommends involvement. “Things will get better because you’ll learn to deal with it. It won’t disappear but if you can, reach out to groups that can help. Take your fear and turn it into action – that’s all we as young people can do.”

Teen climate activist Greta Thunberg speaks at four school strikes in a week 

March 1, 2019

Sixteen-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg has criss-crossed the continent speaking at rallies in four countries in just eight days in a bid to spur politicians into action. She also made a brief stop at the European parliament in Brussels to address EU leaders. The Swede has become a social media sensation this year with her campaign of school strikes sweeping across dozens of countries and with tens of thousands of teenagers participating. 

What the Hell?