/ 30 November 2022

Conferences such as COP27 are nothing more than elite junkets

G7 To Phase Out Fossil Fuels
As expected, COP27 was an exercise in avoidance and blame-shifting, where the world’s largest fossil fuel polluters, the oil and gas industry, got away scot-free

The venue of the 27th United Nations Conference of the Parties (COP27) on Climate Change, held in the ultra-luxury Egyptian resort of Sharm-el-Sheikh, points to at least half of what is wrong with such elite junkets. 

As expected, COP27 was an exercise in avoidance and blame-shifting, where the world’s largest fossil fuel polluters, the oil and gas industry, got away scot-free. The Egyptian government was openly striking oil and gas deals on the sidelines of what is meant to be an anti-climate change conference. Other fossil fuel-dependent states did the same, each mounting spirited defences of its own poison; coal for India, oil for Saudi Arabia, gas for Russia, and so on. 

This, essentially, is the problem with elite conferencing as the primary tool to address the problems caused by the behaviour of the elites themselves.  

As the elites of national governments, business and civil society fly around the world to debate “The Climate Crisis”, it remains women in rural and peri-urban areas, who play key roles as food producers and caregivers, that ultimately face the reality of this crisis. 

Many depend on natural resources for their livelihoods, so extreme climate-related droughts, flooding and other disasters disproportionately affect women’s health, food security and livelihoods.

In places where mining and extractive industries produce greenhouse gases and associated chemicals that cause severe environmental problems, women often bear an unequal share of the social, economic and environmental risk. 

Contamination of farmland destroys their livelihoods and forces many women into dependent relationships, which exacerbate the pandemic of gender-based violence and femicide. Mining pollution also threatens women’s reproductive health, resulting in higher rates of miscarriage and children born with abnormalities. 

Emerging from all these underlying social pathologies is the realisation that the climate crisis is a direct consequence of the capitalist political economy, which produces at least four types of externalisation of costs, in a process which socialises the costs of doing business but privatises the profits.

The costs to society take the form of extraction of surpluses, both economic and thermodynamic, as: 

1) A social debt to dispossessed host communities;

2) A social debt to inadequately paid workers;

2) A social debt to women family caregivers; and 

3) An ecological debt drawn on nature.

Proceeding from the understanding that we cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them, it is reasonable to suggest that addressing these problems requires a new paradigm in which we toss out the flawed bias towards economic imperatives of privatised profits and socialising of costs in the ways we assess costs and benefits. 

The climate debate should then at the very least lay a foundation to catalyse a genuine just transformation of financing, extraction, production, transport and distribution, consumption, and disposal systems.

A corporate-led or corporate-biased, profit-oriented, renewable energy system (solar, aggro-fuel and large hydro), which does not present a real alternative to traditional fossil-based energy, is already causing large-scale land dispossession and exclusion.

The issue of climate change is integrally linked to democracy. The link between nature and society manifests through the ways in which large corporations in the minerals and energy sector have historically shaped (and continue to shape) the politics and economics of modern South Africa. The extraction of surplus value from exploration, mining, processing, distributing, subsidising and consuming of energy is often prioritised above the interests of marginalised people, leaving a legacy of destruction and poverty wherever these activities are carried out.  

The interests of large corporations are used to shape legislation that dictates the way in which we live, the way in which we are governed and the way in which we organise our economy, including the way we produce and consume.

An approach to the climate crisis that does not seek to reshape the way that societal priorities are identified and developed will inevitably lead to a continuation of the same patterns of extracting surplus value, which has devastated the planet and subjected millions to poverty.

A critical focus of our plans to address the climate crisis in a just and equitable way must ensure that global priorities and local realities are able to participate in dialogues that recognises the importance of each. Decisions taken at the local level have a significant contribution to make towards the resolution of the global crisis. But by the same token, decisions that are taken at a global level have consequences at the local level.

Informing, educating and working with people who are both marginalised and directly affected by climate change, are critical to addressing the egregious structural violence that continues to legitimise patterns of disadvantage, such as racial and gender inequality.

Despite the high-level hoopla about broad discussions on the Climate Change Bill and plans for renewable energy projects, the reality is that the process is still essentially an elitist one, which is biased towards private business interests and has failed to produce a different set of economic metrics through which the current crisis response could contribute towards a more just society.

Instead, it is clear that what is on offer now is deeply corrupted by the same old paradigms that, in South Africa, produced the most unequal society in the world. 

The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Mail & Guardian.