Why Egypt's COP Presidency was an Inevitable Failure
Key takeaways of flaws in the UNFCCC process
So COP27 ended much as it was predicted it would do: that whatever progress there might be on Loss & Damage would be outweighed by the collapse of Egypt’s charade as Africa’s champion when it became clear they would ultimately side with their masters in the Gulf.
That Egypt’s performance as head of negotiations was as dismal as anticipated is no cause for satisfaction, as it costs us another year'; has wasted time, resources and energy of thousands of people; and funnelled billions in new investment into questionable, unproven green technologies that will prop Egypt’s desperate autocracy up for a little longer.
Before the conference I did a talk with Friends of the Earth Scotland in which I outlined why Egypt would not be able to deliver as COP President, and now that it’s over I think it’s worth quickly looking at what happened, and why Saudi Arabia was able to keep language about the end of fossil fuels off the final agreement.
For decades the subjugated in the global south have been explaining that what happens in Egypt, Palestine, the Arab world, Africa etc. will ultimately have a negative impact everywhere else. Weapons development in Palestine; military-economic structural impositions from Chile to Egypt; electoral interference via Facebook in Trinidad and Tobago; policing techniques in Northern Ireland; concentration camps in Kenya - one catchall name is the ‘Boomerang Effect’, and the process was identified famously by Hannah Arendt as how Germany’s methods in the colonies evolved into the Nazi concentration camps.
Now, the post-colonial era has proxy rulers inserted between the international powers and the local populaces. In some cases, like Egypt, to the overwhelming detriment of the local populace. In others, such as Saudi Arabia, a more complex relationship is maintained that sees a local regime maintained by British and American interests, but that sometimes lashes out at them. Saudi Arabia is the clearest example of the failure of the Washington Consensus to provide any outcomes in the region that are beneficial to anyone other than arms companies, the oil industry and Israel. Today, we are all faced with the reality that the undiversified economy of one nation state can hold the future of the entire planet hostage.
So, welcome to our world, one in which Saudi Arabia’s petroleum tentacles penetrate and infect everything they can, carrying the polluting ‘lifeblood’ of capitalism, but with the extra Saudi benefits of religious fundamentalism and military autocracy. Saudi Arabia is a major underwriter of the Sisi regime; so when Egypt, as COP President, held the literal pen with which the agreement was written, was it any surprise the words that were written?
Egypt failed as COP President because it is beholden to powers that are opposed to a rapid energy transition. It also failed because it was inherently unable to deliver due to its very structure as a nation state – in fact, almost no nation state can effectively perform the duty being asked of them by the UNFCCC process.
Firstly, there are wildly different types of nation states out there – there are the handful that function more or less as they were designed to, many of them in Europe, in which they encase a cohesive ethnic, cultural or linguistic group (though always, of course, with those left on the outside of it) or have established democratic traditions strong enough to contain the competing groups within themselves; there are nation states that are far closer in size to empires and hold simultaneously within them a multiplicity of languages, ethnicities and cultures; and there are the nation states that were spun off the ends of empires, sliced and carved off as the Ottomans, British, French and Soviet empires collapsed at the beginning, middle and end of the 20th century, and continue to bear defining characteristics of their old rulers in their DNA (legal systems, policing structures, border demarcations, lingua francas, economic and currency systems).
Firstly, how can these entitities negotiate with each other in any meaningful way, when their existence is, by their nature, competitive with each other - let alone the obvious points about the disparities of power and privilege and the simple assessments of where the gains versus the costs of industrialisation can be counted. The establishment of negotiating blocs (the G-77, the Least Developed, the African Group etc.) clearly has not been enough. Egypt is, by its very nature as a nation state within a hierarchical network of global interests, unable to achieve the aims of the Presidency of the Conference. No country other than a joint US-Chinese Presidency ever can. It’s not only Egypt’s short-term interests, but the regime’s very survival depends on maintaining favour in Riyadh and Abu Dhabi. Sisi and his top level commanders have played the Game of Thrones, killing thousands in their seizure and maintenance of power, driving millions into anguished poverty, and there is no easy way out for them. They don’t get to cede power one day and go into retirement. So it’s all very well to talk about 2 degrees and targets by 2050, these guys are the current custodians of an economy at its all-time lowest ebb against the dollar, that are turning off the lights to have more gas to sell to Europe, that have had their international credit rating downgraded and literally don’t have enough money in the bank for the next major debt repayment in March – so they’re not thinking about 2050, they’re thinking about how to survive until next Spring. There is no sector of the Egyptian economy that does not shrink other than oil and gas. Life for 98 million Egyptians is already shit, and they’re managing to stay in power. They are just not going act against their own self-interest in order to save the polar bears.
They only cottoned on the world’s interest in polar bears a couple of years ago anyway, and Egypt’s interest in hosting COP was never anything more than a PR exercise, a bid for some industrial investment and another outing for their schizophrenic cosplaying as a normal country. For those of us who have been thinking and writing about the transformative potential of the energy transition, it was also a warning sign. Before the pandemic, governmental interest in the transition was pretty close to zero. Back then, I wrote a piece on the potentially exciting effects the energy transition might have on destabilizing regional autocracies and it was met with one wing of responses on Facebook about how climate change was a northern problem and a northern issue. But the pandemic changed all that, and as oil collapsed briefly to negative prices money poured into renewables and countries like Egypt woke up to the possibility of some cheap money. The government issued a green bond and when that was five times oversubscribed they started to get really excited and a few months later they had secured the COP. Around the same time, Iberdrola, the Spanish energy giant, was completing years of industrial development of green hydrogen as a potential fuel source using solar power, and Egypt – always open for business for foreign adventurism – declared its intention to become a green hydrogen hub. We shall see if anything ever comes of it.
But even if you took a more stable, non-petroleum-dependent nation state it would face similar problems. A conference of negotiating nation states is simply not the mechanism needed to deliver transformative change. If we’re thinking in terms of technocratic and financial solutions, then supra-national structures have to be created, rapidly, and empowered with financing and constructing renewable infrastructure. This will fall short of the transformative power of a just transition, but it will at least deliver on rapidly reducing emissions – if nothing else at least by pricing fossil fuels out of the market. As it stands, nation states – be they nation states with revolving democratically elected representatives or nation states stamped and bound by the needs of empire – are uniquely incapable of acting with the speed and scale needed to bring the major polluting corporations to heel.
But that’s more for another time.
For now it’s enough just to say that there was never any doubt that Egypt would fail to deliver – they were incapable of doing otherwise. And if the UNFCCC process doesn’t understand that, or adapt to it, then there is very little to be expected from the next three decades of COPs.
Some would argue that COPs are always destined to fail. But I’ll say here there’s not much point in that kind of nihilism. COPs are happening, they may not be ideal, but they are a forum with power and every forum that it’s possible to fight in, should be fought in. While emissions alone are not the only measure of the transformation needed away from a globalised system of extraction, they are a key metric, and this graph is a useful visualisation - not of that COPs only have achieved, but of the overall global process of decarbonization.
What those of us writing from Egypt, Turtle Island, Chile and other places have been arguing is that if this process was twinned with one of decolonization then it would accelerate exponentially. For that, for now, let me just link to an old piece of mine that explains that process of mutual acceleration - though it will no doubt need updating and re-evaluating in this post-pandemic era.