DEAR News Of The Area,

WELL the hottest global summer on record is hanging over us and COP28 participants have had their talk-fest in the UAE discussing what we are going to do to keep rising global temps within 1.5 degrees.

While each major Conference of the Parties on Climate Change Policy has its own major breakthroughs or failures, this one must go down as one for the fossil fuel industry actually acknowledging it needs to transition.

Host nation UAE made it clear from the start they were going to drive the agenda with global industry players on all sides stepping up and revealing who the real puppeteers are in this pantomime.

There is both anecdotal and archival evidence that the Board of ExxonMobil, one of the world’s oldest, largest and most influential fossil fuel companies and direct descendent of J.D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, understood and accepted the science of climate change, as well as the implications of continuing burning fossil fuels, back in the 1960s when predictions were already being exceeded.

Sadly, what started out as a deliberate corporate decision to ‘stonewall’ in favour of the industry’s long term future became a global strategy in the promotion and dissemination of ‘disinformation’ to discredit the science and delay the necessary inevitable transition to alternative appropriate technologies.

As consumers we have arguably been both players and beneficiaries in this delay, but it’s worth acknowledging our own ‘puppeteers’ in Australia.

The mining and fossil fuel industry backed Institute of Public Affairs along with the Minerals Council, and Murdoch’s right wing media network, working through successive Liberal – National Party Coalition governments have deliberately stalled the transition process which has seen us lose at least a decade.

Remember former PM Abbott bagging wind turbines in 2015 and PM Scomo bagging EVs during Covid.

Sadly, we are all shareholders in this debacle and any early dividends have long ago vaporized as we try to catch up globally.

History will judge whether that is even possible.

Regards,
Dave WOOD.