Is 400bn euro climate fund COP-out as less resilient poorer countries bear brunt of climate change?

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00:00 the analysis and bringing Dr Richard Blanchard, he's head of energy and power engineering research

00:05 at the University of Loughborough. Good evening to you sir. Does Sultan Al-Jabir have a point

00:09 as well as perhaps a conflict of interest when he says that fossil fuels need to be part of the

00:14 conversation? Yeah, thank you very much. I guess it depends what he means by being part of the

00:21 conversation. Does he actually mean to, you know, to say well we need to phase these down as we are

00:27 already happening at COP26 with coal? So does he actually mean that or does it or what does he

00:34 actually mean by this or does he mean well it's part of the conversation but we'll carry on doing

00:39 what we're doing and a lot of the sort of issues around having an OPEC pavilion at the event plus

00:47 a thousand oil lobbyists make it hard to think well are we actually going to see, you know,

00:54 becoming a goal to reduce fossil fuels but I guess we'll just have to wait and see how the

01:00 negotiations go over the next two weeks. Indeed it's not a good look even as you point it out

01:06 talking about the number of lobbyists and the very fact that it was exposed that the Sultan had

01:11 all kinds of briefing notes about oil and gas deals he was going to talk about with various

01:15 governments. Yes, I guess it's kind of a sort of this long-running battle which I mean has been

01:25 going on for quite a few decades. I mean the oil industry has known and from its own science in

01:33 the 1970s and 1980s that it was contributing significantly to global warming but has

01:41 continued to do as much as possible you can to keep its business going. I'm not actually opposed

01:46 to the use of petrochemicals for making, you know, wonderful things which we need, the plastics and

01:55 other materials and resources which we get from petrochemicals. So I still think even if fossil

02:00 fuels are phased down over time there still will be an industry, a different type of industry,

02:07 but there will still need to be a petrochemicals industry going forward. So I don't think, you know,

02:13 there should be a sort of a, you know, perhaps a fear from a fossil fuel industry that they won't

02:18 have jobs in the future. I think it is important to realise that we rely so much on petrochemicals

02:24 and how we need them to actually do good things rather than burn them to produce carbon dioxide.

02:29 Dr. Blanchard, you anticipated my next question so let me think of another one pretty quickly

02:33 and ask you about this fund that's been hatched in order to help the poorer nations. Now let's

02:38 remind everybody that's watching, I'm sure they all know, the poorer nations are paying the price

02:42 for what the richer nations have done over the past century or two. So therefore they're paying

02:47 the cost of everybody else's industrial growth. So this fund has been set up, some 400 million euros

02:54 has been pledged, which may seem like a lot of money to you and I, but in the scheme of things

02:59 it's not a great deal is it? No, it doesn't seem like a lot of money to me at all I'm afraid.

03:04 I mean we had from COP21 the plan to have a climate fund to be a hundred billion dollars per year

03:10 to help poorer countries to develop their economies with renewable energies and in

03:16 resilient infrastructure to cope with climate change. That worked quite well, it's never got

03:22 to a hundred billion per year and this particular fund, you know, it needs to be of a similar sort

03:28 of magnitude, it needs to be that hundred billion per year to help the poorer nations and it's what

03:33 they want. The poorer nations want that amount of money and they need it because they are less

03:39 resilient to climate change. We see issues around flooding in Pakistan where 40 percent of the crops

03:45 are washed away, we've had flooding in Uganda recently, we've had droughts and the implications

03:51 of the warmer planet are going to hit the poorest of the worst. I mean I have a lot of research

03:57 activities in Africa where we're looking at how we can try and improve resilience of

04:03 infrastructure systems and to see how countries can develop without necessarily going down with

04:10 sort of the need to build fossil fuel power stations and it's worth thinking that even

04:16 that countries like Kenya have made quite significant advances in electrification in

04:22 recent time and making use of renewable energy sources to help them to get, as they develop

04:28 and increase their energy demand, to meet it through renewable energy. Professor Blanchard,

04:35 thank you very much indeed for joining us from Loughborough University. We look forward to see

04:37 what happens next at COP28 and thank you sir once again for being with us.

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