Maybe Humans Are Supposed to Go Extinct?
COP28 is over and the 'best and brightest' have not impressed - at all
COP28 has ended. The apologists will say that “it’s good that so many smart, concerned people met in the Emirates to discuss climate change.” The suggestion is that things would be a lot worse if these well-intentioned folks hadn’t met up.
Okay, I can accept that. That logic, however, is similar to putting up a stop sign for a week at a particularly dangerous crossroads at which hundreds of accidents have occurred over the years. There were no accidents for one week, and people began to rejoice. Then, after all of the commotions died down, the sign was removed, and the accidents started again. “Well, at least they tried, and there were no accidents for one week.”
While there may be people participating in COP28 who are trying, the current president of the COP28 climate conference had this to say just a day after he convened the conference:
The president of the Cop28 climate summit will continue with his oil company’s record investment in oil and gas production despite coordinating a global deal to “transition away” from fossil fuels.
Sultan Al Jaber, who is also the chief executive of the United Arab Emirates national oil and gas company, Adnoc, told the Guardian the company had to satisfy the demand for fossil fuels.
“My approach is very simple: it is that we will continue to act as a responsible, reliable supplier of low-carbon energy, and the world will need the lowest-carbon barrels at the lowest cost,” he said, arguing that Adnoc’s hydrocarbons are lower carbon because they are extracted efficiently and with less leakage than other sources (His Firm Will Keep Investing in Oil).
Somehow, he will be praised by many who, just a year ago, would have condemned him. See, the thing is, all of these brilliant people always come around to praising each other regardless of how hypocritical these things seem. The CEO of the United Arab Emirates national oil and gas company was the climate conference president.
It does not get any more absurd than this, but here is something you should know: The elite smarty-pants crowd will eventually come to accept the sultan’s view because arguing and yelling at fancy-pansy cocktail parties is just “so unbecoming” of gentle people. It’s not decorous. It’s uncouth. It’s just not cool to show emotion. So many of these people, and you mark my words, will start posting how “brave and right” Sultan Al Jabor is on their social media.
Adnoc is planning a $150bn investment (£120m) over seven years in oil and gas, which Al Jaber said would maintain current production levels rather than increase output. He said Adnoc was forgoing much of its potential extraction.
“We have the fifth largest oil reserves in the world, but we are not harnessing these resources,” he said in an exclusive interview after the summit.
Al Jaber was widely praised by delegates at the Cop28 summit, which ended on Wednesday morning with a global agreement calling on countries to “contribute to … transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science (His Firm Will Keep Investing in Oil).”
I will take a shot at translating what Jabor said and shine a light on the reaction of the delegates: Poppycock! Pure and unmitigated poppycock!
I wasn’t there but could hear the conversations: “Wow, that was so bold of him. He is truly a hero to this cause and the great nation of UAE.”
No other life
It has always confounded me that in this great and vast universe, there is supposedly only a tiny, little Earth with life on it. It just doesn’t make any sense, and while I am not a mathematician, the odds seem astronomically high that we would be the only beings inside of a vast filled with billions of galaxies, each potentially populated with planets. That’s like there is only one needle in all of the haystacks in the world.
If Earth was so lucky to be the only one with life, then that makes us wildly lucky. It also makes it a damn shame that we are too dumb to appreciate the rarity of what we have, and so we choose endless consumption and material comfort as the sole reason to live. As a result, we don’t care that we will destroy our planet.
Or, maybe the reason we can’t find life on other planets is because they, too, evolved themselves to extinction millions of years before we came onto the scene. Maybe our end is inevitable, and there really is nothing we can do to stop this except invest heavily in sunblock.
Are we supposed to fade away like the millions of societies and beasts that came before? Future explorers will stumble upon our world, find the occasional decaying frisbee, and ask: What could this have belonged to?