[✔️] Dec 7, 2023- Global Warming News Digest | Climate is the top issue, Exxon knew, Strategy Loss and Damage, follow money, Methane fix, decoding, Cynical COP,

[Richard Pauli]

/*December *//*7, 2023*/

/[ António Guterres   @antonioguterres ]/
*We cannot forget about climate change, because of other crises.*
As we continue addressing the very serious wars happening in the world, 
we must also remember that the climate emergency remains an existential 
threat that we must tackle at the same time.
https://twitter.com/antonioguterres/status/1732358836336373881



[ COP showdown - ExxonKnews ]
*Exxon crashes COP28 to “fight for its life”*
ExxonMobil CEO Darren Woods is on a mission to defend fossil fuels and 
deny science during his debut at the UN climate conference.
EXXONKNEWS
DEC 6, 2023
- -
This year is Exxon’s CEO Darren Woods’ first at COP, and he has been on 
quite the press tour. Woods’ mission is like those of other major oil 
company representatives at the conference: to defend the continued 
expansion of fossil fuel production against the irrefutable scientific 
consensus calling for its end.

“This is a desperate attempt to prolong his company’s destructive, 
fossil fuel-dependent business model,” said Kathy Mulvey, accountability 
campaign director for the Climate & Energy Team at the Union of 
Concerned Scientists...
- -
International scientific bodies agree. “The uncomfortable truth that the 
industry needs to come to terms with is that successful clean energy 
transitions require much lower demand for oil and gas, which means 
scaling back oil and gas operations over time – not expanding them,” 
International Energy Agency executive director Fatih Birol wrote in the 
foreword to a report the agency published just before COP.

As has been its pattern for decades, Exxon is well aware of the science 
demanding the phase-out of its products — it’s just doing everything in 
its power to stop that science from leading to action, critics say.

“This is what they do: confuse and corrupt, deny and delay,” said Supran...
- -
“It means having your fingers in all the pies, anticipating future 
threats to your business and neutralizing them through decades of 
360-degree public affairs strategies,” he said.

Exxon has been working to shift the narrative outside of COP, too. “On 
November 30, the first day of COP 28, The New York Times included a 
full-page greenwashing ad from ExxonMobil,” Brad Johnson documented in 
Hill Heat on Monday. “Reuters coverage of Al Gore’s criticism of 
ExxonMobil’s presence at COP 28 was smothered by greenwashing ads from 
ExxonMobil. The Punchbowl News political newsletter today is Presented 
by ExxonMobil.” Yesterday’s Power Switch newsletter from Politico was 
Presented by ExxonMobil, too.

While the oil giant’s greenwashing may have ramped up around COP, it’s 
also a years-long affair — aided in large part by many of the same media 
outlets interviewing Woods at the conference. A major analysis of Big 
Oil’s advertising between October 2020 and October 2023 found that “many 
of the world’s most trusted English-language news publications help 
fossil fuel companies mislead readers about topics like the promise of 
carbon capture, the potential of ‘renewable biogas,’ and how much the 
industry contributes to the energy transition,” according to Amy 
Westervelt and Matthew Green. The analysis, published by Drilled and 
DeSmog this week, found that Bloomberg Media Studios last year created a 
video for Exxon promoting carbon capture and hydrogen; Politico 
organized 37 e-mail campaigns for Exxon; and Exxon sponsored more than 
100 editions of Washington Post newsletters in 2022 alone, as just a few 
examples.
Ultimately, it’s up to the media, policymakers, and other major 
institutions to determine whether the oil companies still responsible 
for fueling climate catastrophe are allowed to have a platform to stand 
on — or whether, like Big Tobacco, their time to influence the debate 
about their products’ harm is finally up.
https://www.exxonknews.org/p/exxon-crashes-cop28-to-fight-for

- -

/[ Understanding the long term strategy behind COP28 ]/
*Mongabay: Climate loss & damage fund ‘the furthest thing imaginable 
from a success’*
Planet: Critical
On this episode, I interview Brandon Wu of ActionAid USA about the Loss 
and Damages negotiations that took place ahead of COP28—and how the USA 
used its political weight to bully developing nations into accepting a 
deal unrecognisable from the premise of L&D.

Loss and Damages is, in effect, climate reparations—a fund paid into by 
developed nations, who are historically responsible for the emissions 
causing global warming, which developing nations can then use to respond 
to the chaos caused by climate change: floods, storms, crop failures, 
displaced populations. However, it was the vulnerable nations who were 
forced to concede at the negotiating table, walking away with a deal 
which serves the interests of the world’s most powerful.

Brandon gives an excellent overview and analysis of the situation, 
revealing how the USA used its muscle to twist the arms of developing 
nations at the final hour. I then discuss these details with my 
wonderful cohost, Mike DiGirolamo.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=epgaJvUatFk
also https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gs9VxMUtA8g



/[ Understand following the money ]/
*Climate Change's Controversial Policy: Loss & Damage*
ClimateAdam
Oct 13, 2022  #cop27 #ClimateChange #LossAndDamage
There's a climate change policy that governments have been debating for 
decades. The USA recently even tried (and failed) to have the words 
removed from the latest IPCC report (AR6 WGII). This policy is: "Loss & 
Damage".

Also called "Climate Reparations", Loss & Damage is a way of seeking 
climate justice in the face of disasters, and will be a major talking 
point at this year's climate negotiations - COP27 in Egypt. So what is 
Loss & Damage, why is it so important for climate action, and why have 
countries been arguing about it for so long?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpxrXk6l_hc

- -

[ Understanding Loss and Damage ]
INTERNATIONAL POLICY 28 September 2022
*Loss and damage: What happens when climate change destroys lives and 
cultures?*
https://www.carbonbrief.org/loss-and-damage-what-happens-when-climate-change-destroys-lives-and-cultures/

- -

/[  Intangible loss and damage ]/
*Non-economic loss and damage is often also referred to as “intangible” 
loss and damage. *According to a scientific review published in 2019, 
the term “intangible” is used because non-economic losses “cannot and 
perhaps should not be quantified”.

This review offers a much broader definition of what constitutes 
intangible loss and damage from climate change.

It says that intangible loss and damage can result from climate-induced 
harm to:

    Biodiversity and species
    Culture, traditions and heritage
    Human dignity
    Ecosystem services or habitat
    Human life
    Human mobility
    Human identity
    Knowledge and ways of knowing
    Mental and emotional wellbeing
    Order in the world
    Physical health
    Productive land
    Self-determination and influence
    Sense of place
    Social fabric
    Sovereignty
    Territory

https://www.carbonbrief.org/loss-and-damage-what-happens-when-climate-change-destroys-lives-and-cultures/



/[ Instead, how about "by 2PM today"? ]/
*The UN climate change conference in Dubai is close to a big 
breakthrough on reducing the gases heating our planet, its United Arab 
Emirates hosts believe.*
BBC report
Expressing "cautious optimism", the UAE negotiating team believes COP28 
is gearing up to commit to phasing down fossil fuels over coming decades.
Maybe even ditching them altogether.
Hosting a climate conference in a petrostate sounds like the beginning 
of a bad joke, but there are signs that it could deliver real progress 
on climate.
Surely working out how to get rid of fossil fuels is what this UN 
climate conference is all about, you are probably thinking...
The first formal debate about their future was at COP26 in Glasgow in 
2021 and the only commitment made there was a promise to "phase down" 
the dirtiest one of the lot, coal.
Let's be clear, a pledge now will not mean the world will stop using 
fossil fuels completely.
We are very unlikely to get any commitment on an expiry date, that would 
be far too controversial.
And "abated" fossil fuels will still be allowed. That is when the 
atmosphere-heating carbon dioxide they emit is captured to stop it 
causing climate change...
In short, the UAE has recognised the world has to kick its addiction to 
unabated fossil fuels and has decided to put itself decisively on the 
right side of history by trying to own the decision.
But yes, at the same time it is planning to increase capacity and sell 
even more oil.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67566443

/
/

/[ An easy win should not be ignored ]/
*Vast scale of methane leaks from fossil fuel production and landfill 
sites exposed*
Sky News
Dec 5, 2023  #climate #methane #cop28
The vast scale of methane leaks from fossil fuel production and landfill 
sites has been exposed by analysis carried out exclusively for Sky News.

Around 1,300 "super-emitters" of the potent greenhouse gas have been 
identified so far in 2023 by the monitoring company Kayrros, which uses 
satellites to detect plumes of the gas.
Read more - 
https://news.sky.com/story/vast-scale-of-methane-leaks-from-fossil-fuel-production-and-landfill-sites-exposed-13023354
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hs823eQN4To



/[ careful words - audio ]/
*Oil firms are out in force at the climate talks. Here's how to decode 
their language*
DECEMBER 5, 2023
By Camila Domonoske, Julia Simon
Just a few years ago, oil companies said they felt unwelcome at United 
Nations climate talks. Not this year.

This year's climate conference is taking place in the United Arab 
Emirates, a major oil and gas producing country that's looking to 
increase its oil production. And the oil industry has a big platform at 
the talks.

The oil cartel OPEC has its own pavilion at this meeting, known as 
COP28, and giant oil companies are playing a prominent role, to the 
dismay of climate activists.

So what are oil producers saying in their pledges and statements about 
climate change? And what does it actually mean?
Most oil companies acknowledge that climate change is real. Yet they 
also argue strongly for the world's continued use of massive quantities 
of fossil fuels, which power both the global economy and their profits.

But climate scientists say it's crucial to cut fossil fuel use sharply 
to avoid some of the worst effects of global warming.
"It's important to consider what these companies are committing to, what 
policies they support," says Paasha Mahdavi, associate professor of 
political science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, noting 
that oil companies' language can make it into policy. "Language is very 
revealing."

But this language isn't always straightforward. Here are five key, but 
sometimes confusing, phrases about climate change commonly used by oil 
companies — and why they matter.

Low carbon and lower carbon
"Carbon," short for carbon dioxide, is at the heart of climate talks. 
Most carbon dioxide emissions come from burning oil, gas and coal — and 
they heat the planet.

Many oil companies talk about their support for "low carbon energy" and 
"lower carbon energy."

"We believe the future of energy is lower carbon," Chevron, an NPR 
sponsor, frequently emphasizes in ads and speeches.

Mahdavi says the focus should be on the words "low" or "lower." It 
doesn't mean no carbon emissions, he says.
He says when companies push for more "lower carbon energy," it typically 
means continuing to produce and use oil and gas — but with somewhat 
cleaner extraction and processing methods. "You're just doing it with 
fewer emissions, but the end product still can have a lot of carbon in 
it," Mahdavi says.
For Chevron and other companies investing in "lower carbon" initiatives, 
the phrase sometimes refers to cleaner alternatives to fossil fuels, 
like getting energy from heat inside the Earth. More often, it describes 
cleaning up the production and use of fossil fuels. That includes 
reducing emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, during fossil 
fuel extraction.

This past weekend, a group of oil companies (though not Chevron) 
announced a pledge to reduce their methane emissions — but scientists 
say that is only accounting for a small fraction of overall emissions 
from oil and gas.

Or another key technology in the "low carbon" energy bucket is called 
"carbon capture and storage." That refers to capturing carbon pollution 
from fossil fuel production and industry, injecting it underground, and 
storing it before it reaches the atmosphere.

But experts say carbon capture technology isn't fully proven: projects 
often haven't reduced as much emissions as they said they would and are 
often over budget. Climate scientists say that carbon capture can't 
reduce the bulk of emissions, and really reducing carbon requires using 
less fossil fuels.
*Unabated fossil fuels*
"Unabated fossil fuels." It's a wonky phrase that will come up a lot at 
this year's climate talks. That's because much of the conference 
involves a big push from countries to reduce or get rid of "unabated 
fossil fuels." This past weekend, the U.S. joined other nations in a 
pledge to phase out "unabated" coal.

That might sound a lot like eliminating fossil fuels.

But, again, notice the word "unabated." It describes emissions from 
coal, oil or gas that go straight into the atmosphere and heat up the 
planet.
Oil companies instead focus on "abating" emissions from producing and 
using fossil fuels, which means stopping at least some of the emissions 
from entering the atmosphere.

The industry argues that carbon capture and storage — that "low-carbon" 
technology with a poor track record of success — could accomplish this. 
Experts have major concerns...
ExxonMobil, which is also a sponsor of NPR, has promos on NPR 
programming that tout carbon capture. (NPR has strict separations 
between the news division and its sponsorship unit. When asked about 
these sponsorships, an NPR spokesperson noted that "NPR has no list of 
sources from which funding will be refused. However, conflicts of 
interest or similar concerns are considered.")

What the world decides around these words — abated or unabated — has 
huge implications for oil and gas producers.

If the world's leaders decide to only phase out "unabated" fossil fuels, 
that would theoretically allow for oil production to continue 
indefinitely, if combined with new pollution trapping and storage 
technology.
Net zero
Many oil companies have spotlighted something called a "net zero" 
ambition. The whole world, in fact, set a "net zero" target at the 
climate talks in Paris eight years ago.

What "net zero emissions" means is that the pollution humans produce 
that is heating the planet would get canceled out by removing the same 
amount of emissions from the atmosphere.

That can be done by planting trees or building giant machines to pull 
carbon from the sky. But those can compensate for only a small fraction 
of the carbon dioxide people emit today.

Reaching true "net zero" requires cutting global emissions enormously, 
scientists say.
But "net zero" can be a slippery phrase. Some oil companies setting "net 
zero" targets are referring only to the emissions in their operations — 
not to the emissions from the oil they sell.

So they might use solar panels and wind turbines to power oil drilling 
rigs and consider their "net zero" goals met, even as the oil they 
produce releases vast quantities of carbon pollution when it's burned as 
gasoline or jet fuel.

Reducing emissions from oil production is an important part of the 
climate fight, and more companies need to focus on this, climate experts 
say. But it's not enough to meet the world's net zero goals – which are 
the objective of the U.N.'s climate talks happening now.

That will require using far less oil in the first place, according to 
these experts.

*Reliable and affordable energy*
Fossil fuel companies often mention "reliable and affordable energy" in 
ads and speeches.

They're not normally referring to cleaner energies like wind and solar, 
however. In fact, it's usually shorthand for oil and gas, says Bob 
McNally, president of Rapidan Energy Group, an energy consultancy with 
clients that include big oil companies. "The reason that we're 80% 
dependent on fossil fuels is because it is reliable, it's affordable, 
and it's secure," he says.

"Reliable," "affordable" and "secure" often work as digs at renewable 
energy.

Reliable: A common talking point among fossil fuel supporters is that 
the sun doesn't always shine, and the wind doesn't always blow. Climate 
groups say this is being addressed with huge power storage batteries and 
a better electric grid.
Affordable: That's often an oil industry reference to the high costs of 
transitioning to a new technology. Climate groups argue that the costs 
of renewables have been falling sharply, and failing to stop climate 
change will also carry tremendous costs.

Secure: The industry points to the scramble for fossil fuels after 
Russia invaded Ukraine as proof of how much the world still depends on 
these energy sources. And they say renewable energy relies on materials 
and manufacturing from abroad, while the U.S. has lots of oil and gas 
here. Supporters of renewable energy argue that they're actually more 
"secure" than oil, which is constantly fluctuating in price.
The oil industry also says that fossil fuels are a reliable and cheap 
way to help developing economies expand electricity access, given that 
745 million around the world are without it, according to the 
International Energy Agency.

Reached for comment about this story, an ExxonMobil spokesperson called 
NPR's analysis "simplistic," arguing that more oil and gas production is 
necessary to maintain and raise global living standards. The company 
also referred NPR to a recent speech from its CEO, Darren Woods, where 
he said, in part: "The societal benefits of oil and gas are unmatched in 
human history. ... No country has ever joined the developed world 
without access to oil and gas."
Similarly, in an online panel before the climate talks, the president of 
COP28, Sultan al-Jaber — who is also the CEO of the UAE's state-run oil 
company — said: "Show me a roadmap for a phase-out of fossil fuels that 
will allow for sustainable socio-economic development, unless you want 
to take the world back into caves."
In fact, such roadmaps exist, and many experts say renewable energy can 
be used to fuel development.

*Paris-aligned*
Eight years ago, the world set a shared target of holding global warming 
below 2 degrees Celsius, and ideally below 1.5 degrees Celsius. That's 
called the Paris Agreement. But the world did not agree on how to get there.

Working out the how is what these climate talks are all about. And as 
they join the conversations, many oil producers will say they support 
the Paris Agreement, and talk about "Paris-aligned scenarios."

Chevron, for instance, responded to NPR's request for comment on this 
story, in part, by saying: "There are many potential pathways to 
achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement, the vast majority of which 
include the continued use of oil and gas for the foreseeable future."

But how much oil? Scientists have found that every pathway for meeting 
Paris targets includes reducing the use of oil and gas.

This is what's at stake at the U.N.'s climate talks. The world is trying 
to figure out how exactly to meet the Paris goals — which experts say is 
difficult, but doable, if the world cuts the use of fossil fuels.

And the oil industry is at the talks to openly argue that the world will 
not and should not switch away from oil and gas.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/05/1215499778/cop28-uae-climate-talks-oil-exxon-mobil-chevron-climate-change-net-zero-unabated



/[  Cynical of COP ]/
*What Is Anyone Really Doing at COP?*
The UN climate summit is the one place the countries suffering most from 
climate change can face down the countries causing it.
By Zoë Schlanger
DECEMBER 5, 2023,

The size of COP28 is hard to comprehend, even from the ground. More than 
97,000 people have registered, according to the massive spreadsheet of 
expected participants, enough to populate a small city. The campus and 
its temporary denizens feel like a city too. Meetings are spread out 
across nearly 100 buildings, all with the freshly built feeling one 
expects from Dubai. During the day and into sunset, the main promenades 
look like the sidewalks of Midtown Manhattan at rush hour; they spoke 
outward from a giant geodesic dome that emits spa-like tone sounds and 
glows different colors at night.

Thousands of the people here are country delegates, and thousands more 
are climate experts in various capacities—representatives from 
Indigenous communities in full traditional regalia, policy people, 
activists, nonprofits, journalists. At least 2,400 of them are 
fossil-fuel lobbyists, according to one estimate. Milk lobbyists are 
evidently also here, because two dairy-trade organizations held a side 
event on Tuesday to extoll the virtues of animal-sourced food. The 
aviation industry, the banking industry, the computer industry, and 
surely many others are also present. Only a fraction of those gathered 
here will be in the closed-door negotiating rooms where the 
international agreements are born. The rest will jostle at the 
sidelines, hold panels, and raise topics that will perhaps slither onto 
the official agenda at some future COP.

And so it has gone, since the very first, much smaller COP. The 28 years 
of COPing have produced a culture and acronym-heavy language specific to 
this gathering, an ecosystem that arises fully formed each year, like a 
crisp-dried resurrection fern doused in water. “Is this your first COP?” 
“I’ve been doing this since Madrid.” “Ah, I’ve been here since 
Marrakech” is a common way of starting conversations. Most people here 
have devoted their life and career to climate policy, and the 
overwhelming sense is that the efforts of this ephemeral city are in 
absolute earnest. People sit in groups of two or five on the carpeted 
floors, drinking coffee and talking intensely. Tiny, cash-strapped 
nations have sprung for official pavilions. The mood is serious and 
concentrated, the days long and exhausting.

Yet all of this earnestness has gotten the world very little. After a 
couple of days of watching tens of thousands of people go about this 
business, one might feel like shouting: What is everyone doing here? 
After nearly 30 years of COPs, we are globally in our worst position 
ever. The collective impetus toward self-preservation has been at least 
partly eclipsed by other interests. Emissions and fossil-fuel use are 
still going up. The United Nations declared this year the hottest on 
record as the meeting began. This COP in particular risks being 
overshadowed by its incongruous host: a national-oil-company executive 
in a petrostate who called an emergency press briefing on the meeting’s 
fifth day to explain away his two-week-old comment that phasing out 
fossil fuels would not get the world to its stated goal of keeping 
warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius. (Climate science disagrees.) A few 
buildings down from that auditorium, the OPEC pavilion—housed in the 
same building as the Indigenous People’s Pavilion—gave out the 
organization’s monthly oil-market report to passersby. “Global oil 
market fundamentals remain strong despite exaggerated negative 
sentiments,” the cover read. Sunday was “Health Day” at COP, and at the 
pavilion’s entrance, someone had propped a small chalkboard on an art 
easel, with the words health and oil written in childlike block letters. 
I wondered about the art direction: Was it suggesting a connection 
between children’s health and oil, and, if so, what? A scathing article 
in the medical journal The Lancet had just called any COP28 agreement 
that did not include the phaseout of fossil fuels “health-washing” and 
“an act of negligence.”

Getting language about phasing out all fossil fuels into this year’s 
final agreement would be a major coup, but the bigwig countries are 
leaning against that outcome—or at least they were when negotiations 
began this week. But the people cloistered in the negotiating rooms 
still have seven days to work that out. I was reminded why we were all 
still doing this at a press conference on Monday with the Association of 
Small Island States, or AOSIS, an important negotiating bloc at COP that 
was instrumental in pushing for the loss-and-damage fund, which was 
launched on the first day of this meeting. The fund can be understood as 
a form of reparations, infusing the countries suffering the worst 
consequences of climate change with cash from those most responsible. 
Researchers estimate that losses and damages so far in 55 of the most 
climate-vulnerable economies total more than $500 billion; initial 
pledges into the fund were in the hundreds of millions. The U.S. said 
that it intends to give $17.5 million.

Michai Robertson, one of the lead negotiators for AOSIS and an 
environmental official for Antigua and Barbuda, told reporters that 
someone—he didn’t say who—had asked about his feelings on the fund; he 
replied that he was still waiting for follow-through. “That doesn’t 
sound like you’re being grateful,” the person replied. This was in a 
“diplomatic setting,” so Robertson gave a diplomatic answer, he said. 
But he was shocked enough that he spent the next two days thinking about 
the exchange and what it meant—that inside negotiating rooms, larger and 
wealthier countries were now tacitly saying to small islands and the 
least-developed states: “You got what you want. Now be quiet.”

But, he said, “we don’t want a loss-and-damage fund”; it is just simply 
necessary. In places such as Antigua and Barbuda, life is becoming more 
expensive and treacherous due to damage from climate-juiced storms, 
flooding, and drought. Robertson spent seven years of his career pushing 
for the creation of the fund, a depressing job at best. “No one chooses 
this out of wanting to do it,” he said. You just don’t have any other 
choice when you’re representing a place that may cease to be livable if 
the world breaches 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming. “And then to be told 
that you should be grateful for it?”

“At this COP the message has to be not that we’re grateful, not that 
we’re going to be quiet, but that we’re going to ramp up the fight, 
because we absolutely cannot give up now,” Robertson said. For the many 
low-lying islands that make up AOSIS, the threat is truly existential, 
about basic survival. It’s also a preview of what the rest of the world 
is likely to face, only much later.

COP is the only venue where the tiniest nations can sit beside the 
world’s giants—the U.S., China, and the European Union—and be taken 
seriously on climate change. “The current process is not perfect, but is 
the only one available for us,” Fatumanava-o-Upolu III Dr Pa’olelei 
Luteru, the permanent representative of Samoa to the UN and the chair of 
the alliance, told me after the press conference. At the same time, he 
finds it ridiculous that issues are constantly pushed to the next COP, 
to the next year, when the threats that island states face are 
time-limited and always getting worse. “We always seem to be talking,” 
he said. “When you go home they say, ‘What the hell did you do there?’” 
he added. “Sometimes you feel embarrassed.”
This COP may be the last chance for the world to make commitments to 
keep warming at a threshold where many of these island states could 
survive. Already, some islands are planning to need to relocate people. 
Tuvalu made a deal with Australia to accept 280 Tuvaluans a year. The 
Marshall Islands surveyed its citizens and found that very few of them 
had any interest in leaving; the country released a national adaptation 
plan at COP today and is asking for $35 billion to give people a chance 
at being able to stay. If warming is permitted to accelerate, plans like 
these would only become more expensive. And, eventually, the people 
living in these places would all have to go somewhere else.

On Tuesday, a draft text of a document that will guide all countries’ 
climate policies for the next several years was released from inside 
those same negotiating rooms that Robertson was referring to. In its 
section on fossil fuels, it listed three options:

    Option 1: An orderly and just phase out of fossil fuels;

    Option 2: Accelerating efforts towards phasing out unabated fossil
    fuels and to rapidly reducing their use so as to achieve net-zero
    CO2 in energy systems by or around mid-century;

    Option 3: no text

Arguably, only the first option, which the U.S. and several other major 
oil-producing countries currently oppose, offers any measure of 
protection for small island states. Saudi Arabia has said it would 
“absolutely not” accept that language, and that stance alone would block 
it, given COP’s requirement for consensus. The oil producers generally 
prefer the second option, which is understood to codify abatement 
technologies such as carbon capture and storage to be essentially 
attached to oil and gas drilling. That technology has yet to be proven 
to work at scale and would deal with only a small portion of emissions 
from fossil fuels, even if it could be scaled up to its maximum 
potential. Over the next week and a half, the final text will be 
hammered out. That’s why this conference exists, in the end—not for the 
panels, not for the side discussions, but for the talks happening in the 
closed rooms, where Samoa or Palau or Vanuatu or the Marshall Islands 
can make a case that they not be collateral damage in a world seemingly 
intent on ensuring the opposite.

Zoë Schlanger is a staff writer at The Atlantic.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2023/12/un-cop28-climate-summit-fossil-fuel-industry/676240/


[The news archive - the obvious structure of lobbying changed  ]
/*December 7, 1999 */
December 7, 1999: The New York Times reports:

    "In a concession to environmentalists, the Ford Motor Company said
    today that it would pull out of the Global Climate Coalition, a
    group of big manufacturers and oil and mining companies that lobbies
    against restrictions on emissions of gases linked to global warming.

    "Ford's decision is the latest sign of divisions within heavy
    industry over how to respond to global warming. British Petroleum
    and Shell pulled out of the coalition two years ago following
    criticisms from environmental groups in Europe, where there has been
    more public concern than in the United States. Most scientists
    believe that emissions from automobiles, power plants and other
    man-made sources are warming the Earth's atmosphere.

    "British Petroleum and Shell were so-called general, or junior,
    members of the lobbying group. Ford is the first company belonging
    to the board that has withdrawn, and the first American company to
    leave the coalition, said Frank Maisano, a spokesman for the coalition."

http://www.nytimes.com/1999/12/07/business/ford-announces-its-withdrawal-from-global-climate-coalition.html 




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