Davos 2023: the results are extremely controversial
The annual session of the World Economic Forum on the picturesque slopes of the Swiss Alps has ended. The discussions, which lasted from 16 to 20 January, were attended by delegates from 130 countries. Among them were 50 heads of state and government. In addition, there were 200 ministers. And the number of top managers of leading companies and banks, corresponding to the honorary rank of business leaders, has reached one and a half thousand! In general, at least 2,700 guests came to Davos, most of them eminent. So, this gathering could be called an optimistic gathering not of ordinary negotiators and speakers, but, according to the Deutsche Welle, of the “global elite”. Yes, it could, if not for the absence of the Russian business world subjected to sanctions and the almost complete vacuum of “personalized business” from China, which is increasingly wary of the West. And if the participants of Davos-2023 did not celebrate something sad every now and then. Namely, the fact that, in general, things on Earth – in a wide range from the impending economic recession to the already onset era of weather and climate collapses – are far from going in the best way.
Alas, there is nothing to rejoice …
So, it was precisely because of the energy crisis that engulfed South Africa that South African President Cyril Ramaphosa was forced to cancel his trip to Davos at the last moment. However, we already knew that the BRICS countries, which did not please the West with their Russian, Chinese, Indian, Brazilian, and now even African postulates, do not impress the crafty instigators of fuel price and sanctions collapses.
Meanwhile, the well-informed gas-bearing Qatar predicts that sooner or later Russia’s “blue fuel” will still return – one way or another – to Europe, or nothing good will await it … And the Chinese also warn the Old World in a timely manner, – believes The South China Morning Post. As the newspaper notes, “to ensure its political survival, Europe must forge strategic independence from the United States.” Moreover, in the States themselves, not only economic, but also monstrous domestic political confusion is growing before our eyes. “President Biden’s feud with the oil companies is heating up again,” Moneywise reports. “Won’t the matter end with the fact that we all burn in it?!”
If anything, Pricewaterhouse Coopers notes in its report that the CEOs of most of the mega-corporations surveyed are more gloomy about the likelihood of economic growth on the planet than at any time in the past decade. But what about the White House, which did not hesitate to throw out the echo of its own political squabbles on the WEF audience. And now “the Davos crowd already sees the enemies in the American Republicans,” The Wall Street Journal tartly responded.
But, of course, the decisive thematic plane, on which the “big-caliber” controversy around hydrocarbons and their role in the post-industrial economy of the 21st century played out in full force in Davos, is the failed struggle to prevent climate change. Moreover, “the global debt crisis is what is becoming a climate crisis,” AXIOS outlined the all-encompassing nature of what is happening with a hint of hopelessness.
Under the blow of the UN Secretary General – not only ExxonMobil
From the Davos rostrum, the oil and gas community was harshly criticized for disrupting the environmental agenda by United Nations Secretary General António Guterres. The immediate cause was the current scandal around the world’s largest private hydrocarbon corporation – American ExxonMobil.
As you know, she was forced to admit at the start of the New Year an extremely unpleasant truth for herself. It turns out that back at the turn of the 1970s and 1980s, this locomotive of the raw fuel and energy complex of the United States received from a team of its own, that is, full-time (!), researchers, irrefutable and, moreover, detailed evidence of the emerging “greenhouse effect” and forecasts of those horrific which he will bring to the globe.
It will bring – it became clear even then – almost half a century later. This will happen through the fault, mainly, of the same oil and gas workers. And also, let’s not hide a sin, through the fault of petrochemistry, power engineering and a number of other sub-sectors affiliated with them.
How, in fact, did the yesterday’s bosses of transnational capital act with the sharp-sighted prophets of the extremely ambiguous mission of the fuel and energy complex then – during the last quarter of the 20th century? Clairvoyants, it turns out, simply shut their mouths. Yes, they drowned out, not giving a chance to give a public character and global significance to such a bitter discovery of the effects of atmospheric carbonization that had just begun, from which the whole world is suffering today!
The conclusions of experts in scientific futurology, who foresaw and described the evolution of the ecological crisis in the smallest detail, were prevented by corporate censorship from publishing, publishing and, thus, making it public. Otherwise, of course, the belated Paris climate agreement of 2015 (which, by the way, is being implemented extremely unsatisfactorily) would have come into being thirty years earlier.
From António Guterres to Greta Thunberg
The untimely decision on the redistribution of production chains in the field of fossil fuels has led, in the opinion of the UN Secretary General, to an unforgivable information vacuum. Failure to respond in a timely manner to dramatic forecasts means, from today’s perspective, that “parts of our planet will still turn out to be uninhabitable, and for many of them the above will generally be a death sentence,” Guterres said.
According to him, not only ExxonMobil, but also other oil and gas majors have been “trading a big lie” for half a century – the thesis about the imaginary safety of ubiquitous unlimited processing and burning of hydrocarbons. As a high-ranking guest from a New York skyscraper on the East River added, this is where the main “existential threat” to the Earth follows.
The collectively belated 2015 commitment to limit the growth of the planet’s average annual temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius, and no more, is visibly frustrated, becoming an almost unattainable myth. This dream, according to Guterres, “almost vanished into smoking clubs” of collapsed hopes for the best. By the way, these undesirable caustic fumes are becoming more and more not only from hydrocarbons, but also from the most common raw material of the day before yesterday – coal (!). We are even talking about lignite – low-calorie, but again in demand. Yes, about the half-forgotten brown briquettes, called by Europe to help because of its defiant sanctions refusal from “black gold” and “blue fuel” from Russia.
What is curious: the now 20-year-old Swedish eco-activist Greta Thunberg did not arrive in Davos straight from her native Stockholm. She stayed halfway in Germany – in a protest camp of fellow environmentalists. It was they who, with her participation, opposed the demolition of the village, which prevented the launch of additional coal mines for their immediate development.
Criticism from the rostrum of the WEF did not subside for a minute
The police seized, but … released the detained rioters, among whom was the uncompromising Greta. At the same time, law enforcement officers, like the environment of the eco-star, deny the most interesting thing …
… Namely, the fact that what happened on the coal periphery of the Old World could – you will agree – become part of a deliberately invented PR plot. Or even a whole performance designed to add a lot of propaganda points to the rebellious Scandinavian on the eve of the panel discussion at the WEF session.
But then, now in Switzerland, there was, imagine, a smooth transition from rural eco-pickets to lectures in front of a respectable audience. Such was the conciliatory dialogue in Davos between the seemingly furious Greta and the diplomatically polite head of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol. And yet the semantic rapprochement was not easy. After all, even before the Swede reached an understanding with the IEA Director General, the resolute UN Secretary General added something important to his devastating criticism in Davos. “Every week,” he said, “brings with it a new horror story. Greenhouse gases are accumulating at record levels, and those volumes are growing.”
“If nothing is done, then we will face a temperature jump of 2.8 degrees, and the consequences will be devastating,” said Guterres. . This refers to experts from the very same research units in the bowels of the fossil fuel sphere. So is remorse heard in response from the lips of the fuel and energy complex? And what is the essence of the belated, but apparently tangible reaction of the oil and gas majors of the West?
How are Big Oil and green energy reacting?
The answer of the suppliers of “black gold” to the “climate accusations” from the world community is simple, like everything ingenious. “Yes, we really have been concealing for a long time what the mega-chaos leads to in the upstream and downstream,” other corporate offices are now repenting (albeit in an undertone).
But, alas, as the defenders of the old fuel and energy complex said in Davos, “the climate threat has now gone so far that it is only we, the oil and gas workers, who can sponsor the fight against it, forcing the energy transition. So don’t stop us from earning – at least for the sake of growing deductions for renewable energy!”.
Unlike the November (2022) COP26 forum, where top managers of oil and gas trusts, as a rule, most often were absent as “persona non grata”, the current friendly tolerance for them in Davos has suddenly gone wild! As the reporter Maha al-Dahan, who was there, writes, this time “bosses from the fossil fuel industry and renewable energy managers sat closely with each other, sometimes leaning almost cheek against the jaw of a neighbor (!) … That is, many emissaries of solar, wind and hydropower as if thawed in soul to the crowd of supporters of carbonization.
Tejprit Chopra, who heads India’s clean energy firm Bharat Light & Power, was surprised to receive an invitation to a behind-the-scenes session of more than 60 guests from the oil and gas sector. But, on the other hand, it’s time to start understanding each other, isn’t it? “The course of energy transit should be more inclusive until we reach the point where we want to be together,” said the Indian, having approached the riches of the earth’s bowels, positively, in an interview with Reuters.
Keys to corporate safes become more accessible
Such, in other words, is the era of detente between “archaic” fuel and, on the other hand, renewable energy sources. But it must be admitted that no one in the upper echelons of the energy industry dared to voice this paradox so frankly.
However, fragments of other statements in Davos revealed just such a picture. If we add up the profits of 2022 that have not yet been calculated by the end of the year in the safes of the “five” of the leading “supermajors” on the shores of the Atlantic, then a record $199 billion will come out; and some of them will go to RES with all their favor! “Unfasten” a little on the advertised generation of solar, wind, surf and biomass energy for oil barons is not so expensive.
On the other hand, and adepts …
