The 28th United Nations climate change summit began on 30 November. The UN climate conference, which has just started and will run until 12 December, is called COP28.

This year's summit is being held in Dubai, which is all the more controversial because the United Arab Emirates is among the top five countries in the world with the highest CO2 emissions per population.

The main issue to be addressed at COP28 is that despite the rapid development of renewable energy sources, the market for fossil fuels continues to grow globally. This means that achieving the primary goal of the 2015 UN Paris Agreement is in question. This goal is to keep a global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius relative to the pre-industrial era.

The average global temperature has risen by 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. The consequences are widespread droughts, increasingly frequent deadly heat waves, forest fires and storms worldwide. According to scientists, warming above 1.5 degrees Celsius will cause a catastrophe that humanity will not be able to cope with globally.

On the eve of the summit, a short film featuring Academy Award winner Olivia Colman was released on YouTube. The actress plays the role of Oblivia Coalmine (a play on the words "oblivious" and "coal mine"), who represents the fossil fuel industry. In the film, she thanks all individual consumers for pumping record amounts of money into the accounts of oil and mining companies this year despite inflation and the climate crisis.

The film was created by Make My Money Mater, an organisation dedicated to promoting awareness among consumers about the impact of their everyday choices on the reality around them. The film was made for the UK market to highlight that pension funds there invest vast amounts of money in fossil fuels, "allowing oil and gas companies to dig, drill and destroy more of the planet than ever before." Colman is so wonderfully repulsive that the video has gone internationally viral on social media.

Source: Reuters, The Independent