Dear Reader,
We are between major UN conferences.  COP27 on Climate just concluded in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt.  COP15 on Biodiversity opens in Montreal, Canada in a few days.  This edition of CO2 Rangers gives a brief assessment of COP27.  We will leave COP15 for a later report.   Many of us are now in a holiday season, especially for those keeping Christian feasts and solemnities.   Sadly, the changes at work in our climate systems do not respect the human calendar of celebrations but continue to accelerate the multiple threats we now begin to understand.  Right at the top, we are fortunate to have the wisdom of Tom Athanasiou giving his perspective on how we might view COP27 as a turning point in this very long and vexing saga.  I hope you read more of him whenever you can.

Some Good News will be found here. Some sobering notes will also be on display, especially as regards the infiltration of transnational corporations in the UN negotiating processes.  Global Witness has been sounding an alarm for many years about the corrosive influence of large amounts of money in these conversations. And the very egregious example of Coca-Cola being a major sponsor of the conference will make you wonder, I hope, about the chances of ever getting the world off plastic packaging so long as our "partners" continue to work at cross purposes in these struggles. 

The Laudato Si Movement released a statement following COP27 and celebrated the "loss and damage" decision as the negotiations ran overtime: We celebrate the long awaited framework on loss and damage and the limited window of progress to establish a Ministerial work programme for urgently scaling up mitigation ambition through a just transition work program.  Together with Pope Francis, we note that, “The failure of global summits on the environment makes it plain that our politics are subject to technology and finance. There are too many special interests, and economic interests easily end up trumping the common good and manipulating information so their plans will not be affected” (LS 54). We therefore acknowledge that much more can be done, and we continue the struggle to put real mitigation at the heart of climate negotiations through a fossil fuel non proliferation treaty and divestment from fossil fuels. 

Bill McKibben notes:  "The talks produced one real success: civil society had focused on getting the rich nations to agree to a ‘loss and damage’ fund, and at the last minute they did just that. It was a triumph for movement organizers from the global south—for groups like the Climate Action Network—that made the issue the unrelenting focus of their efforts in the lead-up to this COP, and for good reason: as Reuters reported 55 vulnerable countries estimated their combined climate-linked losses over the last two decades totalled $525 billion, or 20% of their collective GDP. Some research suggests that by 2030 such losses could reach $580 billion per year.  Read those numbers again—they are astonishing (a fifth of GDP!) and there is no doubt where justice lies: the iron law of global warming is, as always, those who did the least to cause it suffer first and most."

World Bank Reform.  Reform of the kind widely discussed at Cop27 could involve a recapitalisation of the development banks to allow them to provide far more assistance to the developing world. Nicholas Stern, a climate economist and peer, has calculated the developing world will need $2.4tn (£2tn) a year from 2030. But this is only about 5% more than the investment they would require anyway, much of which would go into high-carbon infrastructure. The World Bank could provide about half of those funds, he estimates.  Mia Mottley , Prime Minister of Barbados  (photo: Amazons Watch) has been  the leading figure for this effort. Mottley has n0w partnered with President Macron (France) to work on a solution.  The Bridgetown Initiative floated by  Prime Minister Mottley has garnered a terrific amount of attention and demonstrated just how great the desire for visionary pragmatism actually is. If the elites can actually come up with something real—some quasi-Keynesian mechanism that can actually mobilize hundreds of billions in climate finance—it would be widely welcomed. And, yes, a global tax on fossil energy profits would be a great place to start.

CAUTION: It seems almost impossible to get these COPs to concentrate on more than one thing at a time. Last year in Glasgow there was a big push to get banks and financial institutions to take climate change seriously—the jet parking lot at Glasgow Airport was filled with planes from the planet’s biggest capitalists—and so we got the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. But in the course of the year GFANZ’s aspirations began to wither; very few of the banks have managed to even stop funding coal-fired power, which is the most obvious first step. The big American banks threatened to walk away this summer when it appeared GFANZ rules might restrict their ability to keep financing fossil fuel expansion (something that climate science has said clearly and repeatedly should be verboten), and so…the rules were changed.

Bill McKibben again:  "And the bank story is emblematic. With the focus on loss and damage, this year’s COP did not manage to push harder for new climate targets, or even to call for an (undated) “phase out” of fossil fuel—which, after all, is what is required to have some hope of bringing climate change under control."

"... What I’m trying to say is: inertia is becoming an enormous factor. Because Big Oil cost us three decades, we have to move with unheard-of speed. As Vaclav Smil has pointed out, big energy transitions (wood to coal, say) normally play out over a century. Since physics is allowing us a decade or two instead, we have to constantly goose this process. Movements have done a good job—without them we’d be nowhere—but we’re not managing to push things fast enough. "  

This section is taken verbatim from the work of Tom Athanasiou (Photo)
I have found him to be one of the really thoughtful observers and very important participant in the struggle to care for our Common Home.  
There is something in the modern radical mind that wants the climate negotiations to fail. Such a failure, after all, would seem to prove that this wretched system cannot be reformed, that only a revolutionary break can re-open the human future.

COP27, the climate conference in Sharm El Sheik in Egypt, was not, however, a failure. In the 11th hour, the United States, greatest of the COP’s miscreants, finally stood down and allowed the plenary to create the Loss and Damage fund. But the stalling had taken its toll. It allowed the Egyptian presidency, no friend of humanity and nature, to play out an end-game gambit in which, finally, the core mitigation text—which is far too weak—could not be challenged without putting the new fund at risk.

That’s the story, but it’s not the whole story. In fact, it’s fair to say that COP27, in its dismal way, was a turning point. For one thing, the creation of the Loss and Damage fund queues up the real financing battle, in which the need for international public finance takes center stage. It does so because it’s simply not possible to convincingly pretend that private capital flows will adequately support the efforts now before us: adaptation, loss and damage, a global just transition. 

Further, this great clarification came while, simultaneously, the battle to phase out fossil fuels was raised to a new level. That battle was lost at COP27, but keep in mind that this was still just an opening skirmish. Indeed, at COP27, the government of India, which will soon hold the G20 Presidency, came out, again and unambiguously, for the “phase down” (not “out”) of all fossil fuels, not just coal. Not that this is just about to happen, but neither is this business as usual. 

COP27 was a Childhood’s End moment, not least because – in the face of a broad push to abandon 1.5C for lost – it saw a countervailing push to rather infuse the 1.5C goal with real and visceral meaning. 

The key pivot here was actually marked last year by the International Energy Agency, which has taken to emphasizing the fact that, to achieve 1.5C, we must more or less immediately cease all investment in fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere in the world. COP27 then dropped the second shoe, for it spotlighted the fact—and it is a fact—that this cannot and will not happen unless we center the equity challenge. That, at least, is how it seemed to me, for I have never heard the term “fossil phase out” so often preceded by the word “fair.”

Amy Westervelt Deep Dive : Climate Denial Still a Threat
Amy has been a ferocious reporter on the threats from the coal and fossil fuel lobby in the USA for several years.  This segment looks closely at the struggles in the USA around the Environmental Protection Agency and the regular attacks from right-wing critics.  Recently in a long post in her newsletter she summed up some of the more disturbing campaigns being waged behind the scenes by these bad actors.   I recommend you read her piece in the link here.  But if you are pressed for time, here is a capsule version:    Amy is investigating a number of climate denial groups and has identified some key players. 

(Westervelt Photo: Rocky Mountain Institute) Here is how she frames the problem.  "What I see are the fingerprints of a guy who predates both of them in the anti-climate battle: Steve Milloy. Which is interesting because Milloy also happens to be the highest-paid staffer at the same organization where Martis is a senior fellow: Energy & Environment Legal Institute (E&E Legal), previously known as the American Tradition Institute—the organization that went after climate scientists like James Hansen, Michael Mann, and Katharine Hayhoe in the early aughts, trying to discredit them, and climate science in general. E&E Legal is also affiliated or sharing counsel with the Energy & Environment Action Team, the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic, and the Competitive Enterprise Institute. Droz, Martis, E&E, and CEI turn up on all sorts of documents and letters together, too, and Milloy and Droz are both frequent speakers at Heartland Institute events.

...Also on the agenda? De-funding the EPA and handing environmental regulation over to the states. Milloy says the environment in which the EPA was created 50 years ago is not the one we're living in today. "The environment is clean," he says. "We know what's dangerous and what is not, or how to quickly determine that issue when it arises. Every state has a strong environment agency. The U.S. EPA should be dramatically reduced in size and authority, with most of its responsibilities delegated to states."

...Advocates who work on environmental issues at the state level disagree. Take methane regulations: "Nobody has the staff resources to regulate methane emissions or VOCs [volatile organic compounds] from oil and gas drilling," says Sharon Wilson, who tracks methane emissions for the nonprofit Earthworks. She points to New Mexico as a recent example. "New Mexico just passed methane rules that look really good on paper. But they have five employees—five—to go out and inspect and regulate the entire state's oil and gas industry, which is expansive."

...More than anything, of course, Milloy wants to win his lifelong battle against air pollution regulations. One of his earliest jobs was running The Advancement of Sound Science Center (TASSC), which was created by Philip Morris and their PR firm APCO in the 1990s to deal with the mounting evidence that linked secondhand smoke and, more broadly, indoor air pollution, to cancer. The secondhand smoke issue brought the tobacco industry together with lots of other industries that were worried about air pollution regulation—automotive, manufacturing, and, of course, fossil fuels. Which is how Milloy, working for the tobacco industry, became one of the first leaders of the climate countermovement.

...I don't recall seeing a lot of anti-renewables rhetoric from Milloy over the years, but since his arrival at E&E in 2016, it's become a mainstay of his public presence. Just this week, in fact, he described proposed onshore wind farms in the UK with a list of Kevon Martis's greatest hits, warning that it would "junk up beautiful countryside with ugly, expensive, climatically pointless and bird-killing wind turbines."

Another sign of what's next: Milloy, Droz, E&E Legal and the Competitive Enterprise Institute have joined the fight against Environmental, Sustainability, and Governance (ESG) guidelines in the finance industry as well. Milloy says it's a "leftist scam." And E&E Legal, Droz, Heartland and CEI teamed up on a letter to the SEC recently, arguing that: "The Commission’s current proposal [to standardize climate disclosures in finance] is similar to much previous ESG activism in that it uses the language of business and financial management in order to suggest that it seeks practical, prosperity-enhancing goals, but is actually animated by environmental theory that is hostile to hydrocarbon energy and industrial development per se for moral and ideological reasons."

No surprise to see Milloy and E&E Legal hopping onboard now though: like all of their other efforts, the anti-ESG push has been led and largely funded by coal. Earlier this year, Documented published its investigation into how state treasurers in coal states became the frontline warriors in this fight. Attorneys general in those states have gotten involved now, too.

There's a small group of lone wolf climate denier dudes whose work I follow because it's a pretty decent bellwether of where the climate countermovement is headed next. Milloy is one of them, and his talking points in recent years have cycled through the following themes: climate change is a hoax, Covid (and related mitigation measures) is a hoax, ESG and renewables are a scam, and Americans should be concerned about election integrity. By connecting all of these to conservative identity, operatives like Milloy, and the various groups they work with and for, have managed to breathe new life into ideas thought to be buried in the past, from the notion that CO2 is actually good for the planet to the idea that wind turbines are dangerous for birds to plain old garden variety climate denial.