We must stop playing musical chairs with the climate

We all know the game. The chairs are in the middle; the kids circle round. All of a sudden, the music stops. There’s a rush to put bums on seats: and someone always misses out.

It’s been a big week in climate politics. In Baku, Azerbaijan, the nations of the world met to hammer out a new carbon pact; in Newcastle, New South Wales, a weekend of on-water protests shut down the world’s largest coal port.

One of these two events had a material impact on the fight for a liveable future; the other pushed it further out of reach. Here’s another game: can you guess which is which?

Fiddling while the world burns

Baku’s COP29 attracted tens of thousands of delegates from all over the world – political leaders, business magnates, consultants and lobbyists – most arriving by private jet.

Over a week of talks described by a delegate as “one of the most poorly led and chaotic COP meetings ever”, negotiators hemmed and hawed over international finance, dotted the i’s on a global carbon trading scheme, and sat mute in the cavernous plenary hall while Azerbaijan’s president declared fossil fuels “a gift from God”.

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In the end, the 66,778 delegates – meeting in a country where oil and gas make up 90 per cent of exports – couldn’t even bring themselves to reiterate last year's timid call for a “transition away from fossil fuels”: in effect walking back that commitment under pressure from wealthy petrostates and an estimated 1,700 oil and gas lobbyists.

This is the process in whose hands we are expected to place our world, our lives and our future.

From its high water mark with the Paris Agreement of 2015, the COP process has descended beyond squalor into infamy, tragedy, and finally, farce.

How did we reach a point where the past three meetings have been hosted by petrostates – with the next to be held in Brazil, the epicentre of global deforestation and the biggest oil and gas producer in Latin America?

Here’s an answer in two words: net zero.

The trap of net zero

Global heating is driven by atmospheric carbon. More carbon means higher temperatures, and higher temperatures mean more and worse disasters.

The main way carbon gets added to the atmosphere is by burning or decaying organic matter. But carbon can also be removed from the atmosphere, in lots of different ways: sucked down into trees, dissolved in the ocean or heaped up in black soils and peat bogs.

If we can balance the books – have polluters pay someone to ‘subtract’ a bit of carbon from the atmosphere for every bit added – global temperatures will stabilise. That’s the idea of net zero.

The problem – as even those who coined the phrase now acknowledge – is that ‘net zero’ is, has been, and always will be nonsense.

Measuring the climate crisis by atmospheric carbon alone is like measuring a leaky faucet by the amount of water in the sink. You can do whatever you want with the water after it enters your house, but that doesn’t do a thing to stop the leak.

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Yes, we’re talking about fossil fuels here: carbon in the form of coal, gas and oil. And that sets us apart from the delegates at COP, who never speak of fossil fuels except to praise their name.

In truth, net zero has been the salvation of the fossil fuel sector. Every year, these corporations dump over ten billion tonnes of new carbon into the system. Now, having broken open the tap, companies like Woodside get to sell us the mops.

While talking heads prattle about the modest and reversible shuffling of carbon between sea and soil and sky, the world is deaf to the colossal and irreversible rush of carbon from the geological past into the human present.

For once a carbon atom leaves a fossil fuel deposit, no feasible process – whether natural or technological – can put it back again.

Paddling for the climate

It is a hallmark of our times that the things we are asked to take seriously are increasingly absurd, while the things decried as absurd are tragically serious.

So it was this past weekend when 7,000 Australians from all walks of life paddled into the Newcastle shipping lanes and stopped a coal freighter in its tracks.

The political and media classes mocked them as numbskulls and other words not fit for print, and at least 170 people face life-altering fines and jail time for an act in support of what an Australian prime minister once called “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

Watching the little boats shrink under the shadow of a 400,000 tonne bulk carrier, it’s easy to see the joke.

But the view from the water, looking back, was of 66,778 (mostly) men in suits, dancing around too few chairs, waiting for the music to stop.