By Orin Gordon
ONE of the predictable slams on events such as the COP27 climate talks at Sharm el-Sheikh is the irony of many of the presidents, PMs and other ‘big-shot’ delegates generating large carbon footprints by flying in with private jets.

The size of the footprint created to talk about reducing the global footprint isn’t unimportant, but in the big scheme of things it’s the low-hanging fruit. We should resist the temptation to pick it. There are bigger criticisms to be made of these conferences. We’ll talk shortly about climate cost accounting.

First, this needs to be said. COP27 is necessary and important, and a lot of hard work and negotiating go on.

Some policy proposals are hard to swallow and can be politically disadvantageous for countries such an India and US. Phasing out carbon energy means cutting jobs. Christmas is coming, but it doesn’t mean that political leaders want to act like turkeys.

New oil economies like Guyana face different circumstances. Guyanese leaders bristle at talk of keeping the oil in the ground, especially coming from countries already built and developed on petroleum wealth. Guyana has argued that development driven by oil revenue and environmental protection don’t have to be mutually exclusive.

At COP27, the clear-eyed realisation is that the global environment has been damaged way past the point of taking small steps. We’re in a crisis. We know that the patient is in a terrible state, but who’s going to pay for the expensive medication and care that she badly needs?

Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley – arguably the world’s most eloquent articulator of the cost of climate change and fiercest advocate of the ways to fight it – has global influence beyond the size of her island. She’s not fazed about having what Aussies call “hard yakka” with the leaders of much bigger nations, to get them to increase and maintain their commitments.

Important breakthroughs were made at previous climate summits such as Paris in 2015, when delegates set numerical targets on rich nation funding and greenhouse gas reduction that went further than before towards matching the urgency and rapidity of the environmental damage being done by emissions.

Government reps, NGO reps, scientists and technocrats really go at it. COP27 is the Egypt equivalent of the smoke-filled room, with the increasingly exasperated leaders of small states bringing the smoke. These agreements aren’t easy to arrive at, and that has been reflected in the blunt and impatient language from Mottley and her small island colleagues.

As necessary as these climate conferences are, there are well-founded criticisms of them. One of the big ones is the measure of the extent to which financial targets such as the US$100 billion dollars a year from rich nations to poor ones by 2020 – extracted in Paris – have been met.

One Caribbean climate change NGO executive said last month: “The largest amount of financial aid – roughly $83 billion – was dispensed in 2020.”

Oxfam disputes this figure. In an October 19 press release that previewed COP27, it said: “Even though rich countries claim to have mobilised around $83 billion in climate finance in 2020, of which $68 billion they claim was provided as public climate finance, recent Oxfam analysis shows that the actual support provided was just a third of what the reported figures for public finance suggest.”

That, according to Oxfam, is between $21 billion and $24.5 billion. Loans and costly high-interest private financing are counted towards the grant, it says.

“There are too many loans, too much debt, too few grants, too little for adaptation, and too much dishonest and misleading accounting”, Oxfam said in its report.

It’s not the first time that Oxfam has said that the climate sums don’t add up. It did so ahead of COP26 in Glasgow last year. I haven’t seen pushback on that. What I did see a year ago was the same Caribbean executive stating the same $83 billion claim.

The people leading the climate change response can’t keep returning to the same claim every year, as if skepticism about their figures doesn’t exist. The Oxfam reporting must either be knocked down or acknowledged as factual.

We need not only clarity in the accounting of the contributions; but also line-item detail on how the money was/is being spent. One Caribbean climate NGO lists on its website a solar panel manufacturing project in Trinidad, without sufficient details on costs, timelines or even location. I’m not sure whether the funding comes through the COP pipe; but detail is an issue.

What both sides agree on is the increased push in Egypt for so-called “loss and damage” compensation from rich countries. It proposes that they compensate poor ones that had suffered catastrophic damage from climate change-induced natural disasters.

More hard work on this lies ahead. US climate envoy John Kerry – a former Secretary of State and Democratic presidential nominee and therefore an encouragingly high-level front man on climate – told the UK Guardian that loss and damage isn’t fully defined, and funding can’t be agreed until it is.

The Sharm conference attracted 30,000 delegates. A UK Guardian story headlined “Like Vegas, but worse” chronicled the problems of a too-big and unwieldy event, and the time delegates wasted. There were too many people for the purpose of intense, high-level negotiation and crafting of policy. Amid the good, hard work was a waste of time and resources.

One Barbadian delegate said the world must abandon fossil fuels. Get real, chief. That’s not going to happen. Guyana, handed the national development opportunity of a lifetime, isn’t going to pass it up. And alternative clean/renewable energy is a long way away from filling the breach.

This is too many experts talking amongst themselves. (Orin Gordon is a consultant, at oringordon.com.)