Yesterday, I learned that Dr. Sultan Al Jabar has been appointed president for COP28, the 2023 iteration of the misnamed conference on climate change. Al Jabar is the UAE minister for industry and advanced technology but, more pointedly, also serves as chief executive of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company (ADNOC), the world’s 12th largest oil producer. Warning: the next paragraph contains many swear words.
Are you fucking kidding me? Are you out of your fucking minds? Have your brains fallen out of your ass holes? Have you lost the capacity to perceive irony? Is there anyone left in the world that you (i.e. the UN) represent except a handful of oil executives and the shareholders of the companies they serve? Who fucked you, or sucked you, or paid you, or all three, for this decision? You do realize, don’t you, that you’ve appointed one of the people most easily identified as complicit in driving the planet to the edge of extinction? Don’t you? If I invited you people over to my place for dinner, would it be okay if I held each of your heads in the unflushed toilet (after I’ve taken a shit, of course) just to give each of you a taste of what it feels like to fear for your future?
Get the feeling I’m angry?
One of the ways I deal with my anger is to work it out in words. The idea isn’t to mollify myself. I want to stay angry. The idea, instead, is to leverage my words to a keener anger, hone it to an incisive knife-edge, fashion something I could use to slit the throats of idiots. And so I offer 14 lines, an almost sonnet, written in anger. I hope the COP28 delegates choke on it:
I’m drawn to rages, trolled to spittle-spewing blusters, gale force declarations, cheek-puffery to rival angry blow fish, the red heat of a volcanic contempt. Oh, the treachery of a well dressed ignorance, purposely cultivated, whipping blinkered horses to the cliff and dragging us with it. How long before we snatch it from the hand that cracks it and turn the whip on its smarmy insensate master? How long before we back away from water cooler conversations about theoretical underpinnings and conceptual frameworks and turn to the only question of this or any other day: how to jam bananas up the tailpipes of power? A hundred years ago, the poet declared the world would end with a whimper. He was wrong, of course. It will end with eye rolling and a cynical laugh. And we will boil together in this rendering pot, the tallow poured in runnels, wicked and set alight, and we will consume ourselves until at last we gutter out.