Davos 2020: yet another hypocritical climate conference

This makes all the ‘good-natured’ preaching and expensive dinners paid for by this conference, the mission statement of which is to ‘improve the state of the world’, seem rather ironic. Greenpeace International’s executive director Jennifer Morgan said in a statement accompanying the report that ‘The banks, insurers, and pension funds here at Davos are culpable for the climate emergency. Despite environmental and economic warnings, they’re fuelling another global financial crisis by propping up the fossil fuel industry.’

This is more evidence to Thunberg’s point, brought up in her speech, that although the climate emergency feels like a hot topic in today’s zeitgeist, much of the public posturing by institutions is hot air. An example of the hypocrisy that Greenpeace is trying to call out is asset manager BlackRock’s announcement that it will put sustainability at the heart of its investment model whilst its ‘passive’ investment arm continues to invest in fossil fuel firms.

This year Klaus Schwabb, WEF’s founder, wrote to attendees requesting that they pledge to make their companies carbon neutral by 2050. However, as Thunberg pointed out, ‘with today’s emission levels, the remaining [carbon] budget [of the world] is gone in less than eight years.’ She’s referring to the 2018 IPCC report which states that the world has a total limit of 420 gigatons of carbon to emit in total if we’re to meet the 1.5 degree temperature increase by 2030 target. 2050 just isn’t going to cut it, even if these companies weren’t signing pledges with one hand and shafting money to fossil fuel companies with the other.

It’s a shame to see yet another highly expensive international conference go ahead with an agenda too mammoth to boil down to any one salient and achievable goal, populated by people who’d rather make a show of multipolar collaboration than enact it.

Thunberg, climate activists, and Gen Z in general must demand faster progress and higher ethical standards from our economic leaders. Huge ongoing investments in fossil fuel exploration and enormous subsidies for coal, oil, and gas use must be siphoned into exploration of alternative fuel sources if we’re to have a chance at combatting climate change.

Or, at the very least, maybe next year instead of jetting off on their private jets merely to peacock about bank execs could hold a conference call instead?