Whereas people become instantly
upset upon hearing that someone has self-aggrandized oneself by exploiting a
conflict of interest, by, for example, embezzling funds for personal use, our
species has the tendency to ignore the institutional variety of conflicts-of-interest.
We don’t want to hear of another person incurring a privately-held benefit by ignoring
the duties of one’s office, such as fiduciary responsibility, but we are fine
with countries whose dominant industry is oil hosting the UN’s annual climate
conferences. The sheer denialism entailed in assuming that the governments of
such countries can be expected to steer a conference from the interests of the domestic
oil companies is astounding. If there were ever a case of private benefits
being at odds with the public benefit from mitigating climate change from
carbon emissions by humans, this instance would be it. As had been the case of tobacco
companies that promoted smoking even to minors while knowing that smoking kills
or at least shortens a person’s lifespan, oil companies place their own
profits, which are only a benefit to themselves, their managements, stockholders,
and their external sycophants (i.e., governments) through more tax revenue and higher
political contributions, above whether the planet warms more than 2C degrees—1.5,
the prior limit, being passed in 2024. In other words, greed (i.e., the desire
for more) can render board directors and managements oblivious to even
forecasts of catastrophic impacts from global warming. In 2024, as COP29 was in
progress in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, Al Gore, who had been the U.S. vice
president during the eight-year Clinton administration in the 1990s, was
astonished by how blatant (and undercutting relative to the conference’s goal)
the institutional conflict of interest has been in allowing petro-states to be
the hosts. I’m skeptical, given the lapse that seems to be inherent in the
human brain when it comes to assessing and even recognizing such conflicts of
interest, whether Gore’s “wake-up” call would make more than a ripple next to
the power of the oil industry, given its private wealth.
With regard to allowing oil
states to host COP conferences, Gore said, “I think it’s absurd to have, for
example, what we had last year with the CEO of one of dirtiest oil companies on
the planet serving as the president of COP.”[1]
The 2023 conference had been hosted by Dubai. As though wielding a club to knock
some sense into the cognitive ability of the species’ collective mind, he
stated, “It’s a direct conflict of interest.”[2]
Perhaps I should use only capital letters for Gore’s last point to indicate
just how incredulous the human blindness to institutional conflicts of interest
is. That the governments of Dubai and Azerbaijan, in 2023 and 2024,
respectively, would ever use their position as hosts to protect those countries’
respective oil companies is a point that seems to allude human thinking and
consciousness.
Lest there be any doubt, the
president of COP29, Mukhtar Babayev, was “very much in sync with [Azerbaijan’s]
reliance on fossil fuels,” given that 90% of the country’s balance of payments
was coming from the sale of oil and gas.”[3]
Even though Babayev had worked at the State Oil Company of the Azerbaijan
Republic (Socar) for two decades, he was chosen at the beginning of 2024 to
preside over the conference in Baku. It was really Russia’s President Putin who
“made this choice,” Gore said.[4]
He continued, “One of the reforms that I have proposed is to give the [UN]
secretary general a say in who hosts the COPs, and not just leave it to allow
voices like Valdimir Putin’s to determine who gets this one, and let the
petrostates of the Middle East decide.”[5]
At the time, Russia itself was an oil producer, so its own interests were tied
with those of the interests of oil.
How might such an institutional
conflict-of-interest skew the output of a COP conference in line with the host’s
domestic oil industry at the expense of the survival-interest of our species? “Gore
singled out carbon capture and storage (CCS), which typically involves pumping
CO2 underground or below the seabed into depleted gas fields” as being in the commercial
interest of oil companies, who could then sell as much oil and gas as they like
while counting only on technology to suck CO2 out of the atmosphere without having
to curtain CO2 emissions, and thus sales.[6]
CCS has “been proven to be completely ridiculous and totally ineffective,” Gore
asserted, before crucially adding, “Of course, the fossil fuel companies want
to pretend that that’s the solution—anything other than reducing the amount of
fossil fuels that are burned or reducing their markets.”[7]
Considering that 2024 was the first
year that the planet’s atmosphere surpassed the limit set by the Paris
Conference in 2016, a “both-and” approach was required, but this assumes that
the interests of our species are more important, even vital, than are oil profits,
which are only privately-held rather than species-as-a-whole benefits. I contend
that the good of a whole surpasses the private good, and thus interest, of a
part, especially if the latter’s good is at odds with the former. Out of
jealousy and puffed up moral outrage, we get so angry at individuals taking
advantage of, and thus exploiting their respective positions, but no one blinks
an eye when Mukhtar Babayev of Azerbaijan was steering the climate conference
in Baku in 2024 towards a climate-strategy that is in the financial interest of
the oil industry in Azerbaijan, which is state-related so there is another
institutional conflict of interest, at the expense of biting hard to reduce CO2
emissions, especially given that the world had just sailed through the limit of
warming from pre-industrial levels. With most countries having failed to reach
their own targets of CO2-emission reductions, COP29 could ill-afford to be
handicapped by being limited to means in line with the financial interests of oil
companies. Unlike the tobacco case, it might not be merely a matter of more
people dying from climate change; the species itself could conceivably go extinct.
That oil CEOs and their governmental sycophants would put the financial “health”
of oil companies above the survival of the species ought to lead the rest of us
to discredit the oil interest to the point of sidelining it at climate
conferences, which, by the way, have been inundated with oil-industry
lobbyists. That the global population looks the other way, and may not even
recognize the institutional conflict of interest, reflects very badly on our
species, and might be its undoing while God, disgusted with our species, looks
on in utter disbelief. If disbelief comes to inhabit God, then we really are in
trouble.
2. Ibid.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Ibid.
