Friday 19th of April 2024
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oil, mon climatic amour.........

 Once a year, delegates from almost 200 countries gather for the purpose of finding ways to keep climate change from spiraling out of control. This time around, they’re meeting in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, for COP27. And the event is brought to you by the largest plastic producer in the world, Coca-Cola.

While Coca-Cola is considered a lower-tier sponsor than the conference’s “partners,” which include Microsoft, IBM, and Bloomberg Philanthropies, Coca-Cola’s role has garnered an exceptionally large amount of criticism.

 

By Kate Yoder / Grist

 

Nearly 240,000 people have signed a petition for the Egyptian government-led conference to drop the partnership with Coca-Cola, a corporate giant that makes roughly 4,000 plastic bottles from oil every second. 

Over the years, climate summits have become a branding opportunity for corporations to attach their names to high-profile efforts to save the world. One report found that the companies sponsoring the 2015 summit in Paris, for example, had paid around $18.8 million, about 10 percent of the total budget. It can be hard for organizers of an expensive-to-run conference to turn down that kind of money. But those sponsorships have become a target of protest as activists seek to show how companies like Coca-Cola have contributed to the climate crisis, the very thing COP27 is supposed to address. 

The Coca-Cola debacle inspired a recent political cartoon that contrasts the conference’s lofty goal of limiting climate change with the merch-filled expo that takes place alongside it. “Make sure you grab your COP27 gift bag,” says a comic by Australian cartoonist Andrew Marlton. The panels advertise fictional swag: a shirt that says “My environment minister went to COP27 and all I got was this lousy t-shirt,” an “economy-size bottle of greenwash,” and the new book by Swedish activist Greta Thunberg (“no need to read it, just be seen with it”). Thunberg, for her part, decided to skip the conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, in part because of the corporate-friendly atmosphere.

All the logos on display at COP27 hint at what’s going on behind the scenes: Companies have been influencing the global climate negotiations since their inception in Rio de Janeiro 30 years ago, working to make sure that the final agreement would not force them to cut emissions from fossil fuels. Instead, they began volunteering “net-zero” pledges to cancel out their emissions at some later date. They’ve also started to shape the conversation at every summit. When COP27 attendees talk about “net-zero” and the need for ever-better climate data, for example, they are talking about climate change in a language that businesses helped develop, and one that experts say distracts from the true goal: the need to reduce fossil fuel emissions.

The Coca-Cola sponsorship “seems outrageous to me,” said Adam Rome, an environmental historian at the University at Buffalo. “But if you’re in a world where pretty much everything is voluntary and everything has to make, ultimately, business sense, then you’re going to get net-zero pledges, and you’re going to get corporate sponsorships of government or civil society.”

Even though oil companies haven’t been allowed to sponsor the talks, the fossil fuel industry still has a huge presence: By one count, it sent more than 630 lobbyists to Sharm el-Sheikh, a larger delegation than sent by any country except the United Arab Emirates, the host of next year’s climate summit. (It wasn’t until last year that the conference’s final agreement mentioned the phrase “fossil fuels” at all — and even then, the language got watered down.) COP27 has also been criticized for hiring a public relations firm, Hill+Knowlton Strategies, that has represented oil companies such as ExxonMobil, Chevron, Shell, and Saudi Aramco, to manage communications.

Climate advocates often justify corporate involvement by saying that companies have a role to play in financing the changes that are needed, said Jennie Stephens, a professor of sustainability science and policy at Northeastern University. But she believes that corporate influence at negotiations is preventing “more transformative action” from resulting. Instead of denying the problem or undermining science, those who oppose reducing emissions are now focused on delaying climate action, Stephens said. “Part of delay is to acknowledge the problem and then present corporate interests as if they’re doing something to mitigate problems, when in fact, they’re not.”

Despite talking about fixing climate change more than ever, for instance, all major oil companies are on track to increase oil production by 2026, according to a report earlier this year. “If they are still planning to extract all these fossil fuels in perpetuity,” Stephens said, “there’s no way we’re ever going to meet any of the goals that all the countries have committed to in this whole long, expensive process that so much time and effort has gone into.”

So how did corporations become such major players in climate politics? It goes back to an old public relations strategy. In the 1960s and ’70s, environmental activists brought attention to how polluters were setting rivers on fire, spilling oil into the ocean, and spraying pesticides everywhere. Companies were branded as villains and were forced to get in line with new regulations to prevent pollution. 

Around that time, a young PR rep named E. Bruce Harrison figured that the key to avoiding future regulations was all about compromise. Calling for “balance” between the “Three Es” — the environment, energy, and the economy — would make the industry’s position look reasonable and responsible, and leave environmentalists looking like they wanted to ruin the economy. By working with environmentalists, companies could appear to be doing the right thing — and get a seat at the table where decisions got made. 

That’s exactly what businesses did leading up to a major U.N. climate agreement in 1992. The first order of business of the Global Climate Coalition — a group of utilities, oil drillers, automakers, and other companies assembled by the National Association of Manufacturers a few years earlier — was to influence the international treaty that would be signed in Rio de Janeiro. At negotiating sessions, industry representatives argued for a voluntary approach to reducing emissions, in the hopes of avoiding a binding one. They got what they asked for. A National Association of Manufacturers business activity report in 1992 congratulated itself on a “strong and effective presence” during the Rio negotiations.

After that, the Global Climate Coalition “actively lobbied” ensuing climate conferences to make sure companies wouldn’t be forced to cut emissions, according to a report by Robert Brulle, a sociologist at Brown University. It also lobbied Congress and the White House to make sure that the United States, the biggest emitter in the world in the 1990s, would not ratify any binding climate treaties that managed to pass anyway. In 2001, when President George W. Bush withdrew from the Kyoto Protocol, which would have required countries to cut carbon emissions, White House staff met with the Global Climate Coalition to congratulate them. “POTUS rejected Kyoto, in part, based on input from you,” read the talking points prepared for Paula Dobriansky, the lead negotiator on U.S. climate policy at the time.

The coalition disbanded in 2002, with its mission accomplished, but companies never left the scene of climate negotiations. They gradually took on more of a sponsorship role and began setting up official-looking side events.

Corporations’ high level of involvement in the negotiations is a natural outcome of people’s lack of faith in government to take action on climate change, and the belief that businesses can help fill in the gap, Rome said — an idea that’s been in force since around 1990. “There’s obviously still a lot of people who are skeptical of what corporations will do,” he said. “But a lot of other people, whether grudgingly or not, have thought, ‘Well, government isn’t going to do anything. Businesses are usually powerful institutions. If anybody can do something, it’s business.’”

Companies and governments often pledge to go “net-zero” — meaning that they’ll suck up as much carbon dioxide as they emit — but such plans are often light on the details. The United Nations says it wants to crack down on these wishy-washy climate promises. Last week, it issued a new report offering guidelines to make “net-zero” pledges more meaningful. The report was perceived as taking companies to task — the U.N. secretary-general, António Guterres, said there must be “zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing.” 

But experts told Grist that the bigger issue was that the United Nations was spending so much time talking about “net-zero.” While the concept of zeroing out emissions could work, in theory, critics say it is too ambiguous to be meaningful and easily gets exploited by policymakers and companies. A recent study analyzing public pledges from hundreds of large global companies found that 93 percent of them were on track to miss their emissions goals.

For those who see “net-zero” as bogus, talking about it might end up perpetuating the problem. Rome thinks that the U.N. report’s focus on getting companies to follow through on their pledges seemed to be dodging a real solution: requiring companies to cut emissions. The report “only guarantees that we’ll spend a lot more time talking about the details, when the whole idea of it is the problem,” he said. 

Squabbling over details has become a feature of U.N. climate conferences as well as discussions around corporate sustainability, said Matthew Archer, a professor of sustainability at the University of York in the United Kingdom. Archer is writing a book arguing that “endless discussions” about metrics and measurements can distract from the real work that needs to be done on climate change. He argues that, while accurate data is needed, the search for ever-more-accurate numbers has become a form of delaying action itself. 

“The whole conversation [around net-zero] is turning toward, ‘Oh no, you’re measuring it wrong, you haven’t considered this aspect,” Archer said. The debates “end up just becoming technical squabbles and people fighting over very minor methods and methodological questions,” while ignoring the bigger questions about power in politics — such as whether net-zero is a helpful way to achieve climate goals at all.

Rome says that voluntary action from corporations will never be enough to solve the climate crisis. “The whole last 30 years has been this vast experiment in what they are willing to do voluntarily,” he said, with lackluster results. The world doesn’t need more “good” companies to make more net-zero pledges, Rome explained: It needs rules that force all companies to cut their emissions.

Coca-Cola may be in the spotlight for greenwashing with its sponsorship of the latest climate summit, but the problem is much bigger than one company. The U.N. has been “trying to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys in the corporate world,” Rome said. “That’s important, but it’s not nearly as important as pointing out that at the end of the day, we need something beyond more good guys.”

 

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/15/its-not-just-coca-cola-corporations-have-co-opted-the-un-climate-talks/

 

 

 

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Poland plans to continue buying Russian oil in 2023 via the “Druzhba”(Friendship) pipeline, despite vows from the country’s authorities to abandon imports from the sanctioned country, the Moscow daily Kommersant reported on Wednesday.

Major Polish oil refiner and retailer Orlen has sent a bid to Russian oil and gas transportation company Transneft to receive three million tons of oil through the Druzhba pipeline in 2023, the outlet reported, citing a source in Poland.

Transneft has confirmed the order without specifying which companies it came from and the requested volumes.

On December 5, an EU embargo on Russian crude oil and petroleum products comes into force. And even though it will not be applied to deliveries via the Druzhba pipeline, Germany and Poland, which receive oil through the northern branch of the pipeline, have officially announced that they will voluntarily give up Russian oil from the beginning of 2023.

Kommersant has pointed out that the Polish oil company has active long-term contracts with Transneft and rnoted that the country’s foreign minister Zbigniew Rau had said on November 14 that Orlen risks paying a penalty in case of a unilateral withdrawal from the agreement.

 

READ MORE:

https://www.rt.com/business/566650-poland-russian-oil-imports/

 

MEANWHILE:

 

BY Salman Rafi Sheikh

 

The decision of OPEC+ to introduce a deep cut to its oil production definitely came as a shock to the West (the US and the EU). Democrats, including Joe Biden in the US, were quick to point fingers to Saudi Arabia as the culprit. In fact, many Democrats are already demanding that the Kingdom be penalized for its actions. A bill has already been introduced in the US Congress by some Democrats suggesting Washington to remove US troops from Saudi Arabia “amid drastic cut in oil production.” But the fact that the Democrats, including Biden himself, are signaling out Saudi Arabia is nothing more than a political tactic helping the ruling party to shift the attention away from the Biden presidency’s diplomatic failure to improve US ties with Saudi Arabia. In fact, as it stands, the Biden administration stands squarely responsible for pushing Saudia away in the first place by directly implicating Muhammad bin Salman (MBS) in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.

But Biden realized, soon after the beginning of the Russia-Ukraine conflict, that Washington needs Riyadh’s help against Moscow. With that in mind, he paid a visit to Saudia in July and reported to have a cordial chat with MBS. But that chat, as is evident now, failed to yield any meaningful result, leading many in the US to question Biden’s diplomacy, including his decision to make the murder report public, claim to make Saudi a “pariah” state and then ending up visiting Saudi Arabia to enlist it as an ally against Russia. The failure of this massive u-tun has now led Democrats and some White House allies to deny that the purpose of Biden’s visit was oil production. They now say, as a means to mask Biden’s failure, that the purpose of the visit was ‘the Middle East’ and relations with Israel.

Masking this failure was/is crucial insofar as this failure – and the subsequent increase in energy prices – was feared to cause significant damage to the Democrats in the Mid-term elections. In other words, the Biden administration now believes that the Saudis are deliberately creating conditions for the Democrats to lose majority in the US Congress and for Biden to eventually lose the presidential elections. Many in the White House believe that the Saudis are doing this as a result of Riyad joining the ‘Russian nexus.’

In other words, the Democrats, instead of realizing their own folies, are using the deeply embedded Russophobia in the US to explain ‘energy crisis.’ But this strategy is unlikely to work, at least in terms of whether or not it will have an impact on Saudi policies. In fact, Riyadh is not holding back. There is a reaction from them, making it a lot more complicated and difficult for the Washington to manage the crisis than it has been the case.

On October 13, Saudi officials rejected the US allegations that Riyadh was necessarily working in tandem with Moscow. The Saudi official was quick to point out that the decision of OPEC+ was the unanimous opinion of the members of the group and that purely economic, rather than geo-political, considerations were behind it. The Saudi official also made a startling disclosure that the Biden administration did in fact try to convince Riyadh to postpone the OPEC+ decision by a month, thus exposing the White House’s lie that the purpose of Biden’s visit was not ‘oil’ and that the visit was not a failure.

Saudi revelations not only reveal that the US-Saudia ties, at least in the current scenario, are underpinned by oil but that Washington has failed completely to make one of its erstwhile and closest allies to toe its foreign policy line. This failure, in other words, shows the ongoing rapid disappearance of the US global clout. A decision to withdraw from Saudia and the Middle East, in this particular context, will only accelerate this downfall.

But Biden is squarely on course to contribute to this downfall, as he aims to become a bit more aggressive towards the Saudis. In fact, this is what he said in a recent interview to the CNN: “There’s going to be some consequences for what they’ve (Saudis) done, with Russia. I’m not going to get into what I’d consider and what I have in mind. But there will be — there will be consequences.” A White House official later clarified that the Biden administration was going to take another look at the US ties with Saudia to evaluate whether these ties were serving the US national security interests or not.

The failure, however, to convince the Saudis has repercussion elsewhere as well, especially in Europe. Many European states are already buying gas from the US to reduce/end their dependence on Russia. But this has not ended their ‘energy crisis’ insofar as the US companies are charging extremely high prices. The German Minister for Economy accused the US of charging “excessive” price of the gas they are importing. This has led many in Europe to believe that the US actually played them.

While Europeans were happy to pay the high price to have enough gas to supply for residential use during the upcoming winter season, they still do not have enough gas to supply to the industry. This industrial downturn is going to have a strong impact on the European economy, with political consequences to follow inevitably. Economic instability is driving political instability in the UK already. If that spreads, Europe could be forced to review terms of its alliance with the US and/or its stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Such a review can also take place as and when Europeans realize that the Biden administration used their support only to sell them expensive gas and keep the US industry running at their expense.

In other words, Biden’s diplomatic failure in Saudia could translate into a much broader failure of his presidency to keep allies with Washington.

 

 

Salman Rafi Sheikh, research-analyst of International Relations and Pakistan’s foreign and domestic affairs, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook.”

 

READ MORE:

https://journal-neo.org/2022/11/16/joe-biden-and-the-energy-crisis-in-the-west/

 

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atmospheric dreams......

By Mitchell Beer | The Energy Mix

One of the most important moments in this year’s COP 27 climate conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, may have happened 9,550 kilometres away in Indonesia, when U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese President Xi Jinping agreed to restart formal climate cooperation during a side meeting at this year’s G20 summit in Bali.

China had suspended all bilateral relations with the United States, including climate cooperation, after House of Representatives Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) visited Taiwan in August. The world’s two biggest carbon polluters have had frosty dealings since.

But this week, “while the warmth of Bali did not thaw relations enough for a joint statement, both presidents agreed climate action was a priority,” a development that will “unshackle COP 27 climate teams to formalize talks,” Climate Home News reports.

 

READ MORE:

https://scheerpost.com/2022/11/16/the-most-important-climate-talk-happened-thousands-of-miles-from-cop27/

 

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climate change leaders......

 

By Geoff Dembicki

 

For the past two weeks, delegates from Canada’s tar sands have been spreading a deceptively reassuring message at the United Nations COP27 climate talks in Egypt: the oil and gas producers responsible for causing the climate crisis are also capable of fixing it.

“There’s a recognition that there’s a massive decarbonization challenge ahead of us as Canadians and globally. No one party can do that on their own, we have to be working together,” Kendall Dilling, president of an industry organization known as the Pathways Alliance, told the Canadian Press. Alliance companies, which represent 95 percent of tar sands production, are promising to slash the industry’s annual emissions by 22 million tonnes within the decade.

But a key Pathways Alliance member is telling a much less inspiring story in its communications to investors, according to disclosures reviewed by DeSmog.

Suncor, the top producer in the tar sands and a founding member of the Pathways Alliance, says in those disclosures that even as it attempts to reduce its emissions the company “supports initiatives to gain access to new international markets in the next 5-10 yrs for our crude oil and refined products.”

The Canadian oil and gas giant, which also operates a notoriously polluting oil refinery in Colorado, expresses skepticism about whether “adoption of alternative energy vehicles will accelerate” and assures investors that its climate-harming products are “easily transported into global markets” if oil alternatives take off in North America.

As a result of these fossil fuel expansions, there is a very real chance that Suncor will completely fail to meet the aggressive climate targets that it’s been promoting at COP27 through the Pathways Alliance: “Planned growth projects to meet global energy demand may increase Suncor’s absolute emissions in the next decade.”

And while the Pathways Alliance says it is responding in good faith to decarbonization pressure from green investors — “the financial community is demanding it,” Dilling told Canadian media — Suncor waved off that pressure in its CDP disclosure.

“Notwithstanding the efforts of those few to divest from oil & gas, some new investors have entered oil and gas positions and some remaining investors have been willing to increase their investment in oil and gas, so the net impact on Suncor is negligible at this time,” it says.

Neither Suncor nor the Pathways Alliance responded to a request for comment from DeSmog.

“This is another example of how the oil and gas industry is knowingly lying,” Julia Levin, who has been attending the COP27 talks with the group Environmental Defence, told DeSmog. “They know that their contribution to the climate crisis is only going to increase and they still have the audacity to tell Canadians that they are climate leaders.”

 

READ MORE:

https://www.desmog.com/2022/11/16/canadian-oil-companies-lying-about-their-net-zero-targets-says-cop27-delegate/

 

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