The Tribune

By MALCOLM STRACHAN

RIGHT now, people are sitting down to try to save the world. In theory, at least.

The COP28 international climate conference is presently being held in Dubai, but the difference between the levels of rhetoric and the levels of investment belong in two starkly contrasting worlds.

“Time has run out,” declared Prime Minister Philip “Brave” Davis at the conference – but if the grains of sand have stopped flowing, then where is the urgent action to remedy matters?

Mr Davis has been a consistent voice speaking about the urgent need to tackle climate change – the same as his predecessors, a rare bipartisan note that has rung out from The Bahamas regardless of which colour shirts a particular Prime Minister’s supporters are wearing.

Mr Davis’ speech was not quite as stirring as that of COP26 in Glasgow – not least because he contrasted his declaration that time has run out with a string of messages that pumped up what is happening in The Bahamas.

He noted the absence of a major hurricane hitting The Bahamas – “We were lucky” – though talked about tropical storms and depressions that did hit us. Our storm season was honestly mild, so we don’t need to overblow matters, particularly when talking about how it “interrupted our power supply” as if BPL doesn’t manage to interrupt our power supply regularly all on its own.

He talked about using the next six months to “strengthen our National Youth Guard”. What? That’s the first action he comes out talking about for how to build ourselves up for the next storm season? If a bunch of kids in uniform playing soldier is our solution, then heaven help us.

He talked about building more carbon-negative homes as pioneered by Rick Fox – so clearly, again, time has not run out if building homes is a priority.

And probably more usefully, he talked about raising finance using blue carbon credits, although the mechanism for doing so has not properly been established, let alone started generating funds.

The most noteworthy thing is that a loss and damage fund has been agreed for small island developing states and other territories affected by storms, with Mr Davis noting this means that “the principle has now been settled – the polluter pays”.

That’s true – but it is also where the disparity between what is being said about the urgent need to deal with climate change runs headlong into a lack of commitment from major nations.

As Mr Davis says, “it has taken 30 years to agree that there should be a fund for loss and damage”.

That said, is there a determination to rush to assistance of others now that it has been agreed? Hardly.

An initial goal of $400m has been pledged to set up the fund – contrast that with the billions in damage that The Bahamas alone suffered from Hurricane Dorian. That is one storm in one nation in one season. That $400m is not going to go far.

Among those pledges, some are substantial – others not so much. The United Arab Emirates has pledged $100m, so has Germany. The member states of the EU will collectively provide about $245m, including Germany, while the UK is offering up about $50m.

The US, however, has offered a paltry $17.5m – a sum described as “embarrassing” by Mohamed Adow, director of Power Shift Africa.

An explanation for the sum was given by Avinash Persaud, special envoy to Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley. He said: “Because the fund was only approved today, we can’t expect to open up new budgets… so this initial money will be coming from existing budgets.”

That may be true – but nations will have known this was coming, and other nations managed to contribute a lot more and will have been in the same situation with regard to budgets. If the US truly is committed to such a compensation fund, its financial contribution will have to be much more than the rounding error in its budget that it has offered so far.

Then there is the very top of COP28 to consider – the president of the meeting, Sultan Al Jaber. Ahead of the conference, there was concern over his other role, as chief executive of the United Arab Emirates’ state oil company, Adnoc. An oil executive in charge of a climate conference? There was understandable concern as to whether there would be a conflict of interest.

And in an online discussion in November, he provided more fuel, pardon the pun, for that fire. As reported by the Guardian newspaper in the UK, in a discussion with the former Irish president Mary Robinson, also a former UN special envoy for climate change, she challenged him over a commitment on phasing out fossil fuels – rather than phasing down. Cut out completely rather than cut back.

However, Al Jaber replied: “I’m not in any way signing up to any discussion that is alarmist. There is no science out there, or no science out there, that says that the phase-out of fossil fuel is what’s going to achieve 1.5C.”

That 1.5C is the goal established in the Paris Agreement in 2015 for limiting the increase in the world’s average surface temperature to no more than 1.5C (2.7F) by the year 2100.

Al Jaber added: “Please help me, show me the roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuel that will allow for sustainable socioeconomic development, unless you want to take the world back into caves.”

That puts him in stark disagreement with not only many of the delegates and a number of scientists, but also the United Nations Secretary General, Antonio Gutteres, who told COP28 on Friday: “The science is clear: The 1.5C limit is only possible if we ultimately stop burning all fossil fuels. Not reduce, not abate. Phase out, with a clear timeframe.”

We should perhaps not be surprised – the head of a company that sells fossil fuels being in favour of the continued use of fossil fuels – but then why is he also the head of the conference being held to tackle the issue?

That same oil industry continues to net billions in profits – so the millions thrown to the loss and damage fund are really nothing more than scraps from the table.

So what happens next? We will see the outcome of the meeting – but a hard agreement on limiting the effects of climate change is needed, including working out what to do about those fossil fuels.

Without such a determined outcome, it is legitimate to feel cynical about a process that merely pats nations on the head that are experiencing the damage while failing to offer enough financial support to deal with even the effects of one major storm.

Mr Davis is right in that we have been lucky this year. Nations cannot count on being lucky every year.