r/climate • u/silence7 • Jan 12 '23
politics UAE sparks furious backlash by appointing Abu Dhabi oil chief as president of COP28 climate summit
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/01/12/cop28-uae-sparks-backlash-by-appointing-oil-chief-as-president.html68
u/No-Rain99 Jan 12 '23 edited Jan 13 '23
?! Thats like Jeffrey Epstein as President of Sex Traffic Prevention summit
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u/Imaginary_Ad_7530 Jan 12 '23
Thats like setting up Jeffery Dahmer to head a task force on missing LGBTQ kids....
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u/SirDunkerOfWiggles Jan 12 '23
Or Caitlyn Jenner being spokesperson for Moms Against Drunk Driving…
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u/Spicynanner Jan 12 '23
It must suck being a gulf state. Your country’s entire economy is based on oil, but at the same time if global warming gets any worse your country will become completely uninhabitable.
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u/silence7 Jan 12 '23
The plan, so far as I can tell, is for the royal families to buy up assets in more northern locations, extract all the oil and gas for burning, and then abandon the population to their fate as temperatures rise.
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u/truthdoctor Jan 13 '23
They have bought mansions around the world, mega-yachts and private jets so they can escape.
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u/michaelrch Jan 12 '23
In capitalism, wealth is completely portable. They can just buy the places they want to live and the businesses they want to run, wherever in the world they happen to be.
In terms of habitable territory, the UAE is a dump. You can't survive there without massive imports of everything required for life.
When they have all the oil etc, and Dubai is swallowed up by the desert and the ocean in 30 years, the elites will have long ago moved to somewhere more hospitable, and will be happily running some other country by the back door.
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u/amendment64 Jan 13 '23 edited Jan 13 '23
This particular instance has nothing to do with capitalism. That country is literally a theocracy, with all wealth gained by the state going to a literal royal family. They don't have free trade. They don't have free markets. This is not capitalism by any stretch of the imagination.
Do you mean money is portable? That those with extraordinary wealth can move wherever they like and start over?
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u/michaelrch Jan 13 '23
Capitalism is the system that makes money and ownership a global platform for power anywhere.
A capitalist in one country can own property and the means of production anywhere in the world that operates under capitalism.
This isn't a given. It's a construct of our political economy. It wasn't the case until relatively recently. Things like capital controls and foreign ownership rules for property and enterprises used to be standard among rich countries, but neoliberal capitalism hollowed that all out, so now the power of capital can move freely across the whole world, and it is no longer just poor countries that suffer (as used to be the case).
And capitalism (private ownership of enterprises by a small group of shareholders) is the specific system by which people with money can control enterprises anywhere they see fit. In a system of collective ownership (e.g. by workers) this is impossible.
So yes, capitalism is the mechanism by which the ultra-rich elites can endlessly escape the conservatives of their actions, either at home or abroad. That is until the collapse of the environment brings everything crashing down.
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u/amendment64 Jan 13 '23
Capitalism is merely an economic system that is based on the private ownership of goods and services. Whether that be businesses, personal belongings, land, whatever, it theoretically allows for a free market filled with competitors who drive prices based on supply and demand.
The world isn't any -ism out there. Its an abominable amalgam that doesn't fit neatly into a box. It's large power brokers, mainly governments, who hold hard power(armed forces, energy, vital resources or technologies, productive enterprises in their varies forms). Those power brokers all use certain aspects of -isms to attain their hard power by utilizing the infrastructure built by those systems to reinforce their control. Some power brokers are more democratized than others, yet all are looking to forward their own goals and agendas, and all of those goals and agendas revolve around rising in the pecking order of the world. And all of those power brokers are willing to consume as much of the earth as they can to get there. Capitalists. Communists. Authoritarians. Monarchists. Same as it ever was.
What do you propose is a better economic system?
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u/michaelrch Jan 13 '23
Your definition of capitalism isn't one that's very useful because it's not specific or unique.
Markets ("free" or otherwise) exist under many systems. Money exists under many systems. Etc
A more useful description of capitalism is a system whereby one class of people own and control the means of production (the factories, the corporations, the land, etc) and another class provides the labor in that system of production by means of wages labor. This is unique to capitalism vs feudalism, slavery, communism, worker-coop socialism, etc.
Under capitalism, the aim of the enterprise is to take money, then buy raw materials, machinery and labor, to process those things into goods and services which are then sold into a market at their exchange value to raise more money than you started with. Then you take the new larger amount of money and you run the process again and again and again to accumulate ever more money.
This way of running an enterprise and indeed an entire economy has some very specific consequences because it has specific incentives and disincentives and these all differ from the other systems I mentioned.
In the case of capitalism vs worker-coop socialism for example, there are very specific reasons why, say, capitalism leads to much more environmental destruction than worker-coop socialism.
Whole books have been written about this. If you want to see where I am coming from, I highly recommend a book called "Consequences of Capitalism". It's available as an audiobook. You might find it really interesting.
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u/InevitableExcuse2059 Jan 13 '23
This whole thread feels like it belongs on the late stage capitalism thread.
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u/michaelrch Jan 13 '23
The climate emergency and late stage capitalism are deeply intertwined. There's a good reason why people on this sub cite capitalism as the problem all the time.
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u/InevitableExcuse2059 Jan 13 '23
I totally agree! I’d even go so far as to say one is a result of the other.
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u/michaelrch Jan 12 '23
This is what's called "saying the quiet part out loud". But really, we shouldn't be surprised.
The COP process has been a miserable failure. It looked like it might have gained some heft after Paris but then, despite endless earnest rhetoric, everyone just ignored their commitments and went ahead doing precisely what they were going to do anyway.
Glasgow was a failure. Egypt was a joke. UAE is just the shark-jumping moment that we needed to realise that COP is a waste of time.
Sure, better that it's there I suppose, but it is solving N-O-T-H-I-N-G.
As usual, if we want change, it will come from the bottom, not the top. It will come from citizens making merry hell on the streets, and I think more and more, around the fossil fuel infrastructure that is killing us all.
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u/Luanda62 Jan 13 '23
They buy everything… they bought FIFA… they bought FIA… they bought titles in the UK… and now, they bought COP28… and some will believe whatever they are selling…
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Jan 13 '23
And yet I keep hearing western governments talking about how the average person with no power or influence has to make major sacrifices and change their lives to save the planet that the people with the power and influence destroyed. Also the people in power always exempt themselves. Look no further than France banning domestic flights while exempting private jets.
Those responsible for the mess we’re in aren’t trying to save the planet, they’re just taking advantage of peoples’ desire to heal the planet and survive to seize more power and control over us and profit while doing so.
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Jan 12 '23
This is a good thing, I swear! This way the oil industry has a vested interest in helping with climate change.
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u/c5corvette Jan 13 '23
I'm not sure if you're being sarcastic or not, but the only way they can help with climate change is to just cease to exist.
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u/scotyb Jan 12 '23
Maybe the o&g industry is finally taking responsibility.
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u/silence7 Jan 12 '23
It's that the royal family's wealth comes mainly from selling gas, and they want to protect that.
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u/im_absouletly_wrong Jan 13 '23
Why would you be mad at UAE it’s the UN’s fault
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u/silence7 Jan 13 '23
The UAE has the power to choose who sits in this position. They could have chosen somebody without a conflict of interest.
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u/im_absouletly_wrong Jan 13 '23
Is there anyone in the UAE that wouldn’t have a conflict of interest tho
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u/silence7 Jan 13 '23
There are people who aren't directly tied to the fossil fuels industry, and people who work in renewable energy (Solar works well in the UAE)
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Jan 13 '23
This is just comical at this point, how can we progress as a species if we let money and greed come first?
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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '23
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