Delusional Denial on an International Level
Delusional Denial on an International Level
How COP28 Illustrates Psychotic Levels of Defensive Avoidance (Vol. 3; Issue 49)
While the wars raging in Israel and Ukraine kill thousands of innocent civilians, they also spew tons of carbon into the atmosphere. These pollutants will eventually kill millions more. Artillery shell explosions, fighter jet plumes, detritus from bursting bombs and more contaminate our precious—and resource limited—environment. A rather perfect irony, the COP28* meeting wraps up as these conflicts continue.
The painfully instructive illustration of psychotic denial lies here:
The president of this year’s meeting, Sultan Ahmed Al Jaber, is the CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company. And, further, the decision to choose a petro-state, namely the United Arab Emirates (UAE), to host COP28 further validates insanity.**
In brief, the person running the annual meeting of a UN committee devoted to averting global warming operates a firm causing it. The Abu Dhabi National Oil Company is but one component of a massive, international industry poisoning the planet.***
The irony exceeds belief.
When confronted with the paradox of his COP28 presidency, Al Jaber argued he is "uniquely placed" to persuade the industry to adopt a green energy future. Kurt Vonnegut (1973), king of fictional irony, is rolling over in his grave.
Consider similarly absurd leadership roles:
The CEO of a vape company advising the Biden administration of its dangers.
Melinda Gates offering Putin intelligence for his invasion of Ukraine.
Elon Musk serving on, well, any kind of ethics committee.
Early in the COP28 meeting, Al Jaber remarked that “no science” existed to support the phasing out of fossil fuels. (He claimed, later, that his remarks were misinterpreted). But how could they be? Fossil fuels must be phased out; industrialized animal agriculture will also require transition into more eco-friendly practices.
Regarding the relevance of Al Jaber to the unconscious mind, his appointment to run COP28 represents a form of propaganda as well as psychotic denial. And, propaganda intends to slip its way past people’s consciousnesses. It is possible that whoever asked Al Jaber to run COP28 meant for him to get “buy in” from petrochemical firms. As noted, Al Jaber thinks so himself. But the real reason is propaganda. His service to COP28 puts a large green smile on the face of these massive oil companies. He asks global citizens to feel less fury at his industry’s ever-increasing destruction of our host planet.
Describing the cynicism evident in how the US Treasury Department spun the 2008 financial disaster, philosopher and cultural critic Slavov Žižek writes:
The danger is thus that the predominant narrative of the meltdown will be the one which, instead of awakening us from a dream, will enable us to continue dreaming (p. 20).
Mapping Žižek message into this Al Jaber situation, his status as COP28 president invites us to continue dreaming, to delay the phasing out of fossil fuels, and to view these exploitative firms as striving to make positive change. It is simply absurd. Let’s lay some love on Saudi Aramco, Petro China, Exxon Mobil, Shell and Chevron. At some point, we global citizens are told, they will join the green energy movement. Meanwhile, and most people have no idea about this, oil and gas production are at all time highs. The damage caused by burning hydrocarbons, relying upon industrialized animal agriculture, and other polluting industries is making matters worse.
The year 2023 displayed sufficiently extreme weather events to validate how little progress has been made towards achieving the Paris Climate Accord’s agreement to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Weather events ranging from record Greek wildfires to Libyan floods were estimated to have been made 50 times worse by global warming. The EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service documented that global temperatures briefly exceeded 2°C above pre-industrial averages for the first time in human history.
Most individuals throughout the world know about, if not already experience, global warming. The 2023 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which synthesizes 14,000 peer-reviewed research studies, presents these worst-case scenarios likely by 2100: The climate will warm by 8.5°C, destroying 99 percent of the world’s coral reefs, melting 80 percent of Alpine glaciers, and raising sea levels by three feet. By 2030, just a few years from now, runaway meteorological events like heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and unseasonable cold spells will occur with regularity. The report’s authors believe insufficient time remains to prevent the extinction of half of humanity. Many will die of malnutrition, heatstroke, or dehydration; others will be killed by crop failures, mass migrations, and military conflicts.
Meanwhile, most of us global citizens use one or more of a variety of defense mechanisms to avoid the pain of what’s coming. An analogue to the body’s immune system, the ego shelters itself from pain. Writing in the late 19th century, French psychologist Pierre Janet first used the word, dissociation, to describe how persons’ mental processes fracture. His understanding of consciousness-splintering delivered the idea of defense mechanisms to psychoanalysis. In 1894, Freud, one of Janet’s students, first used the phrase, “defense mechanisms.” These protective apparatuses arise, he thought, to defend against internal and external threats. In 1936, Anna Freud expanded upon the defense mechanisms in her book, The Ego And The Mechanisms of Defense.
The concept of defense mechanisms rests upon the assumption that, when stressed, the mind creates partitions much like how submarines are designed to break into self-contained sections. Each mental subdivision has unique characteristics. Mature defenses, like anticipation, neutralize threatening information by motivating people to prepare. Sublimation channels discomfort from threats into productive activity. Other maneuvers like disavowal (conscious) or denial (unconscious) create still different mental segments. These various defense mechanisms are, essentially, varieties of dissociation. When the dissociation reaches extreme levels, phenomena like the psychotic denial to which I refer occur.
In the final analysis then, Al Jaber’s role in COP28 represents psychotic denial as well as corruption. His appointment was a clear form of propaganda. As mature adults, we share a duty to identify propaganda, to break through our own levels of climate change denial, and to take action. The latter ranges from minor steps, like conserving energy in your homes or offices, to major ones, like joining in Greta Thunberg’s disruptive Climate Strikes. Given that global warming will definitively make the horrors of Israel v. Hamas, and Russia v. Ukraine look like minor misfortunes, I propose that we humans must take an activist stance.
*COP28 is the 28th iteration of this UN climate conference.
**Abu Dhabi is one of seven emirates forming the UAE.
***Factory farming of chickens, pigs and cattle creates methane and other emissions equal to the effect hydrocarbons have on climate change.
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References
Freud, A. (1936). The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense. London: Hogarth.
Freud, S. (1894). The neuro-psychoses of defense. Standard Edition, 3:43-61.
United Nations. (2015). The Paris Agreement. New York: United Nations.
United Nations. (2023). UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC
Vonnegut, K. (1973). Breakfast of Champions. New York: Random House.
Žižek, S. (2009). First As Tragedy, Then As Farce. London: Verso.