China and the Gulf at COP27
The politics of COP27 ran along at least three separate tracks: First, there were the ministerial negotiations and meetings taking place in buildings with additional layers of security and all too frequently closed to the regular attendees. Second, there were the activists, NGO representatives and other state and international officials presenting on panels in the main part of the grounds and in the exhibition halls. And finally, there were businesses and their lobbyists, more numerous and including many more hydrocarbon firm lobbyists and C-suite representatives than any COP preceding it. The latter brimmed with talk of green capital and blue capital and zero carbon and carbon capture and green hydrogen and the like.
The presence of the Arab oil producers in the exhibition hall was striking. The United Arab Emirates which will preside over COP28 (scheduled to take place later this year in the Dubai Expo Centre) had by far the biggest space there, bigger even that of the hosts, Egypt. The UAE pavilion was high tech, spacious, and right in front as one entered the exhibition hall. The Qatari pavilion was tucked in a corner and the Qatari delegation must have just packed up some of their World Cup stadium models and brought them over. The Saudi pavilion was directly across from the often busy US pavilion, where representatives from the Pentagon gave presentations about how they were reducing their carbon emissions. The Saudi pavilion was not as huge as the Emirati one but Saudi Arabia had constructed two interconnected geodesic domes about a mile away from the site of COP27 in order to boast about all the technology it is using to mitigate the effects of all the carbon it produces. Of course, the focus was more on the former than the latter.
The size and placement of the pavilions echoed something of the geopolitics of the event and of global politics itself. The European Union and the United States, the Arab oil producers and major European states were in the first pavilion building, but the further a country or organisation or company’s pavilion was from the central plaza, they were deemed to be less important –at least by the hosts. It said something perhaps of the low-key presence of China at the event that their pavilion, though in the first building was tiny, innocuously placed in a far corner of the building and with little or no obvious sign –unless one looked very closely– that this pavilion represented the world’s most populous state.
The event space in the Chinese pavilion was festooned with red flags, cuddly toys of pandas and Xi Jinping’s little red book and portrait on display. In front of the event space was the model of a Chinese carbon capture technology with very little descriptive or explanatory text anywhere. People were meeting members of the Chinese delegation on the side-lines, but later I discovered that China had fewer than 70 delegates at the conference; that is in contrast to the UAE which had brought along 1,400 delegates, more than any other at any COP ever. The events the Chinese were putting on were about South-South cooperation and about technology and knowledge transfer. The events were not as well-attended as the events put on in the US pavilion, but then the Chinese did not have a representative from their security establishment giving a talk like the US did.
Photograph by Laleh Khalili
The thorniest unresolved issue arising out of the last few COP meetings has been the agreement for a fund to pay for loss and damages caused by climate disasters. In fact the ministerial negotiations at COP27 had to be extended by a couple of days after the official end of the conference to allow for some agreement to be reached. In the end, it was decided that the industrial states which had historically produced the carbon would have no liability, and the negotiations also punted the decision for exactly how to set up the fund and who its contributors should be to COP28 in the UAE. A point of contention is that the contributors to the fund should be “developed” nations and “developing nations” should be counted as recipients. An official Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson reiterated this in January 2023. When asked about the UAE presidency of COP28, the spokesperson stated that “As fellow developing countries, China and the UAE have conducted close practical cooperation on climate response, which has contributed to green and sustainable development in both countries and beyond.”[1] The buzzwords were there “developing”, “development” and of course the “sustainable” and “green” qualifiers which mean little or nothing. That said, the pressure that the US and the EU were bringing to bear on China to contribute did not take account of the fact that Chinese per capita production of carbon was still only half the US per capita carbon footprint, or that the affluence guaranteed to the Europeans on the back of oil also meant a larger share of cumulative carbon emissions, or that the US has raced ahead of the rest of the world as the largest oil producer.
The most dispiriting element of COP27 was the massive presence of fossil fuel industry representatives. As activists reported, there were more fossil fuel lobbyists at this conference than any other COP before, and in larger numbers than some national delegations. Even the president of BP was there to sign a deal with the country as whose delegate he was attending, Mauritania. Where the industry lobbyists didn’t work for the oil companies, they ecstatically presented mitigation measures and unproven technologies that would supposedly allow us to consume hydrocarbons unabated but perhaps producing less emissions or capturing those emissions. Carbon capture was on everyone’s lips. That China was also touting homegrown technologies that were supposed to mitigate, rather than stanch, the flow of carbon into the atmosphere also says something about the global impetus to accumulate capital at any cost.
Photograph by Laleh Khalili