Whereas people become instantly
upset upon hearing that someone has self-aggrandized oneself by exploiting a
conflict of interest, by, for example, embezzling funds for personal use, our
species has the tendency to ignore the institutional variety of conflicts-of-interest.
We don’t want to hear of another person incurring a privately-held benefit by ignoring
the duties of one’s office, such as fiduciary responsibility, but we are fine
with countries whose dominant industry is oil hosting the UN’s annual climate
conferences. The sheer denialism entailed in assuming that the governments of
such countries can be expected to steer a conference from the interests of the domestic
oil companies is astounding. If there were ever a case of private benefits
being at odds with the public benefit from mitigating climate change from
carbon emissions by humans, this instance would be it. As had been the case of tobacco
companies that promoted smoking even to minors while knowing that smoking kills
or at least shortens a person’s lifespan, oil companies place their own
profits, which are only a benefit to themselves, their managements, stockholders,
and their external sycophants (i.e., governments) through more tax revenue and higher
political contributions, above whether the planet warms more than 2C degrees—1.5,
the prior limit, being passed in 2024. In other words, greed (i.e., the desire
for more) can render board directors and managements oblivious to even
forecasts of catastrophic impacts from global warming. In 2024, as COP29 was in
progress in the Azerbaijani capital, Baku, Al Gore, who had been the U.S. vice
president during the eight-year Clinton administration in the 1990s, was
astonished by how blatant (and undercutting relative to the conference’s goal)
the institutional conflict of interest has been in allowing petro-states to be
the hosts. I’m skeptical, given the lapse that seems to be inherent in the
human brain when it comes to assessing and even recognizing such conflicts of
interest, whether Gore’s “wake-up” call would make more than a ripple next to
the power of the oil industry, given its private wealth.
The full essay is at "UN Climate Conferences: An Institutional Conflict of Interest."