Oil and gas have survived another spasm of climatological anxiety at the United Nations.
Before the Climate Action Summit in New York Sept. 23, the UN asserted the urgent need to replace fossil energy with the renewable kind.
And the strongest response directly affecting oil and gas was Ireland’s commitment to ban offshore oil exploration—well, some of it.
Apparently, not all the Irish offshore will be off-limits. And the prohibition applies only to future licensing for oil exploration.
Ireland has a little gas production and might want more, you see. If the allowed gas exploration happens to find liquid hydrocarbons, money-minded authorities can call it condensate.
Oil, gas commitment
Still, Ireland’s move represents a commitment directly related to oil and gas, so the UN can call it a triumph.
And it wasn’t the only one. France and New Zealand said they’d ban oil and gas exploration.
What they really did, however, was expand prohibitions already in place. Neither country is a major oil or gas producer, so neither sacrifice amounts to much.
Producers stymied in New Zealand’s Taranaki region might feel differently, of course. But their country’s licensing clampdown began more than a year before the climate summit.
Beyond oil and gas, countries committed to ban or restrict coal use, invest in climate-related research and projects, achieve carbon neutrality by certain dates, set or meet emission targets already in place—the usual.
The most interesting pledge came from France, which said it would not enter trade agreements with countries that have policies contradicting the Paris Climate Agreement of 2015.
The UN said 77 countries committed to cut net greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050. It said 70 countries promised to boost national action plans by 2020 or reported having begun doing so.
No way exists to enforce any of this. In fact, the event itself was an effort to address undercompliance with Paris Agreement commitments.
The process has become routine. In fact, it’s tiresome.
National leaders congregate to enthuse about how they’ll address a problem they all call dire because to call it anything else invites banishment.
Then they repair to constituencies largely disinclined to sacrifice much to climate change remediation.
Regular features of this promise-and-prod cycle are frightening predictions by UN scientists.
Before the New York meeting, the organization published a report arguing that climate change is “hitting harder and sooner than forecast”—a message that might be taken to mean simply that climatological forecasts are usually wrong.
After the meeting came another UN report warning that “without radical change in human behavior, hundreds of millions of people could suffer from rising sea levels, frequent natural disasters, and food shortages.”
And at the meeting was Greta Thurnberg, the Swedish school truant leading climate protests by students around the world.
What can be said about a 16-year-old in braids who angrily scolds her elders for not responding as she would have them do to very complex phenomena that she cannot, at her age, fully understand.
“People are suffering,” she wailed. “People are dying. Entire ecosystems are collapsing. We are in the beginning of a mass extinction. And all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth. How dare you!”
The performance might have set back the climate-mitigation agenda by the 30 years during which the bold young lady mistakenly said climate science has been “crystal clear.”
Losing audience
Climate politics, led by the UN, has blown off its moorings.
It produces too much shaming, too much intolerance of dissent, too many warnings smacking of exaggeration, and too-feverish demands for costly changes that too few people are willing to make.
With each new prediction of doom, the UN loses audience and leadership. And with each drop in UN leadership, chances decline for meaningfully coordinated response to climate change.
For the climate, signs of humility at Turtle Bay might work wonders.