‘Keeping Carbon in the Ground’ Missed the Point: How COP28 Signals End of Oil

The world has been hoodwinked at COP28. But not in the way you think. The unprecedented global consensus on ‘transitioning away from fossil fuels’ has arrived – it fell short of a ‘phase out’ agreement, but the culprits for that are perhaps not who you first suspect.

I’ve spent the last two decades investigating and exposing fossil fuel interests around the world. I’ve exposed the central role of fossil fuels in major Western military interventions; how fossil fuel lobbies have undermined democracy; how fossil fuel interests have compromised global climate negotiations; and especially the mounting economic dangers of fossil fuel dependence. I’ve done this at a cost to my own career. My investigation into the role of Gaza’s gas in radicalising the Israel-Palestine conflict got me fired from The Guardian.

Throughout this time, as a radical environmentalist, the call to keep fossil fuels in the ground has resonated deeply with me. But the more I’ve learnt about how complex systems work, the more I’ve come to realise that the environment movement’s singular obsession with this idea is, itself, symptomatic of how broken our approach is to the challenge of climate change.

Human beings like to reduce things down to simple ideas. The simpler the better – this serves many purposes. If we can explain something with a few simple ideas, we use fewer resources and it will often fit our basic assumptions about the world. It also feels comforting to reinforce what we think we already know. In a context of escalating uncertainty and anxiety, the retreat to what we think we know, often in ever-simplifying ways, has become a hallmark of our politics and culture.

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Keep it in the Ground. But How?

The danger of our current approach particularly struck me when George Monbiot, a writer whom I greatly admire and who has inspired me since I was a teenager, was invited to address an audience on BBC Question Time:

“Leave fossil fuels in the ground. It’s so simple. This is the most important predicament humanity has ever faced and by design as a result of the enormous oppressive power of the fossil fuel industry, we’re flunking it.”

But it’s not so simple at all. While we know all about how the biggest fossil fuel companies in the world deliberately lied about climate change since the 1960s, the biggest reason that fossil fuel production continues to increase is not simply because of the nefarious deception of the fossil fuel industry: it’s because the global economy remains systemically dependent on fossil fuels.

Fossil fuel production keeps growing, and investments keep expanding, not simply because fossil fuel producers are nefarious and oppressive, but fundamentally because of rising global economic demand. Yet the narrative around the COP28 climate summit has become obsessed with the idea that the only reason we can’t phase out fossil fuels is because oil producers refuse to do so.

This meme has become so embedded, so ‘obvious’ and ‘simple’ and virally communicated, amplified repeatedly, that it’s become a veritable truism. The problem is that it overlooks a far more uncomfortable reality: the entirety of our industrial civilisation is systemically entwined with exponentially increasing fossil fuel production.

To assume that fossil fuel production is increasing predominantly due to the lies and deception of fossil fuel producers is to miss the bigger picture. Fossil fuel production is actually increasing because the global economy as it’s currently structured is dependent on it. And as long as economic demand for fossil fuels exists, fossil fuel producers will remain in business.

This is why the apparent fury over the draft text at COP28 and its inclusion of fossil fuels is ultimately a misdirection.

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Al Gore’s Deception

Consider former US Vice President Al Gore’s claim that COP28 would be a “complete failure” principally due to the world’s “petrostates” scuppering a fossil fuel phase-out deal. He specifically mentions “OPEC”, but does not acknowledge that the United States is the world’s largest fossil fuel producer and consumer.

Indeed, Gore completely ignores that last year the US became the world’s biggest exporter of liquified gas, with exports set to nearly double by 2035. The United States is also leading the world’s largest planned expansion of oil and gas through 2050.

Gore also fails to criticise the US for refusing to join a Dutch coalition to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.

He fails to admit that, according to the IMF, the United States and EU are the world’s second and fourth biggest subsidisers of fossil fuels.

And he fails to point out that despite all their lip service about a fossil fuel phase-out, they refuse to make available the climate finance necessary to make an actual phase-out feasible for developing nations.

Consider leading OPEC member, Iraq, which has rejected both a phase down and phase out of fossil fuels. This is a country devastated by the impact of decades of US and UK-led military interventions that likely killed millions, both directly and indirectly while destroying the country’s infrastructure.

Iraq is now a leading global oil producer and desperately trying to use its oil production to support ongoing reconstruction and development. Western companies of course played a big role in trying to profit from this after the war. But about a quarter of Iraqis – 11 million people – still live below the poverty line. Unemployment and violent conflict continue to plague the country.

Meanwhile, oil accounts for 99% of Iraq’s exports, 85% of its federal government budget and 42% of its GDP.

So imagine expecting Iraq to commit to rapidly eliminating the one resource it has, on which its entire economy currently depends – without being offered any viable transition path to a prosperous post-carbon future.

Yet that is exactly what has been done at COP28. But it’s not Arab petrostates to blame for this, but the world’s richest industrialised countries and the world’s number one petrostate currently run by Al Gore’s own Democrat party.

You won’t hear the likes of Al Gore owning up to this travesty. Instead, the Irish environment minister, a lead EU negotiator on climate finance, had the gall to threaten that the EU could walk away from the climate talks over the lack of support for a fossil fuel phase-out.

Yet it is he, and his fellow EU negotiators, not to mention the US and UK, who have refused to set up the mechanisms needed to rapidly phase out fossil fuels by supporting countries to transform their energy systems.

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Phase it All Out – for ‘Free’

Out of 198 countries in the world at the 28^th United Nations climate summit, 98 of them are oil producers. And half of those are developing countries.

As noted by Brandon Wu, head of policy at Action Aid USA, developing countries “would rather have no fossil fuel phaseout with no finance, rather than a fossil fuel phaseout with no finance. They don’t believe finance is forthcoming, and without it many of them wouldn’t be able to meet new mitigation obligations. Only developed countries have the ability to deliver the missing ingredient to make this whole process work. Not only are they not doing it, they’re signaling that they never want to do it, by watering all new text recalling their obligations. It’s never been clearer that providing finance is not only an ethical imperative, it’s also a climate imperative. If we must play a blame game, let’s point the finger at the developed countries that have been consistently failing this imperative.”

In other words, to ask developing countries to stop producing the oil their economies depend on without a roadmap and funding to do so is to ask them to commit national suicide. A choice between economic suicide today and climate suicide tomorrow is, of course, no choice at all.

And this is the real reason why a deal to phase out fossil fuels has not been possible at COP28. It’s also why Western governments have been all too happy to pin the blame on the Arab ‘petrostates’ – because it deflects so effectively from their own deep culpability in the imposs