Monty Python and the Oily Grail.

It seemed we’d reached the genuinely funny part of our planetary death march towards extinction when somebody decided that the world’s biggest climate change conference should be hosted by one of the world’s biggest climate change perpetrators. But the chuckles to be had from holding the United Nations’ COP28 in the United Arab Emirates were soon drowned out by the absurdist lulz, easily mistaken for endless screaming, occasioned by inviting Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, to host the event.

The Sultan, who is personally responsible for 3% of the world’s oil extraction when he’s not gliding around the old climate change conference with a plate full of Jatz crackers and cocktail onions, was this week revealed to be planning a busy schedule of gliding around the old climate change conference with a briefcase full of proposals for new oil and LNG projects all over the world.

From liquified natural gas projects with giant Chinese state firms in desperate third-world petro-states like Mozambique and Western Australia to strong-arming Kenyan delegates into profitable jet fuel deals, the Sultan’s plans for dealing with climate change seem to mainly involve getting the fuck on with it.

It would be wrong, however, to condemn as Kafkaesque entrusting the global economy’s transition away from fossil fuels to a country, a company and a man who are committed to digging up and burning off even more of the stuff. Honestly, that seems more Pythonesque to me, especially when one of the documents that slipped out of Al’s briefcase and into the hands of the BBC was a plan to take over a bunch of renewables companies - presumably to bury them in a desert somewhere. Death, after all, is a kind of transition, is it not?

I can imagine the logline for the movie now.

Monty Python and the Oily Grail. On the eve of planetary climate catastrophe, all hope is lost when the world's last chance for salvation—a pivotal climate summit—is hijacked by the very oil barons it aimed to thwart, turning a fight for the future into…'

Wait, hang on. No. That’s not even darkly funny.

But it’s not really surprising either, is it?

All the money and power are in the hands of guys like Al Jabar, not Al Gore. And if in some alternate reality, someone like Gore does fall arse-backwards into executive office, the fossil fuel industry has the leverage to remind them that holding office does not mean holding power, and it doesn’t even mean holding office very long if the industry decides otherwise.

For now and possibly until the ending of the world in, say, fifteen years, our dependence on burning dinosaur sludge makes of us hostages. The industry will squeeze every dollar it can out of the legacy energy market before using that wealth to capture the renewables that should have replaced them twenty years ago.

And if they mismanage the transition? If they don’t turn off the furnace before it burns the world?

Doesn’t matter. Not to them.

These guys will have plenty of money to build luxury fortified compounds and pay for the armed guards to secure them.