Why COP28 is the ultimate expression of misunderstanding climate change

Real planetary action will be an Indigenous lifestyle. Dubai is the most unsustainable city on Earth — built on oil money. There is a true need for a global consensus, but the consensus must be: Enough.

This sounds harsh, but it’s not. It’s freeing.

We don’t know what we will have to give up.

We formed Savimbo when I was living in Dubai. It's a lovely city. With lovely people. Peaceful and hopeful. A dream of plenty. But I couldn't shut out the awareness, after living in the Colombian Amazon, of how horrifically unsustainable it was.

This is a strange article. It is pouring out of me unanticipated. Because so many people are asking me why I am not attending COP28 for Savimbo.

We are sending local representatives, people I respect to truly advocate for a desert nation. They work on water, food supply, and reforesting in the desert. They are worried about their people because they know — if the oil money stops, there will be nothing to eat.

The intimacy of equity

Because I’m a pigheaded American who always cycled in San Francisco, I brought a bicycle to Dubai for commuting. It was a true case of Mad Dogs and Englishmen.

I underestimated the ecosystem.

I was cycling across the city during the summer — a truly insane endeavor in the Gulf. But I wasn’t alone, there was a strange community of the poor cycling with me. People who couldn’t afford the air-conditioned cars and futuristic public transport — to leave the country when the seasons changed.

Crossing the spaces between the built environment I saw the poverty hidden behind and in-between the buildings. Most of the truly poor are exported from UAE to Jordan or surrounding nations. Only healthy laborers remain, imported from Africa, India, and Eastern Europe. The country is so wealthy that they hire temp Americans as McKinsey consultants and doctors to be a cognitive working class. A position I was frankly hopeful to attain.

A trendy startup person, I had a desirable skillset in Dubai’s new crypto boom. But traveling from meetings with high-net-worth oil moguls, I noticed people picking cardboard along the freeways. Cleaning the streets. Eating hummus in enclaves of all-male construction workers. I began to realize, peeking behind the scenes, that the entire country was artificial — created to be an enclave of the wealthy.

I’ve been on both sides of this divide. Seen this kind of constructed inequity before in California and Thailand. The Buddhists call it the God Realm (one of the six samsaric hells). And it is lovely, but heartbreakingly intangible. Perfection. Perfect faces, perfect clothes, perfect environments, perfect possessions, perfectly peaceful. Supported by a stage crew of silent commuters. And everywhere something to buy.

But this time it gnawed at me. Because I had recently come from the Colombian Amazon, living in an Indigenous community. Everyone equal, and equally flawed. Everyone known — their sun and moon personalities. No one cared about my trendy startup skills there. Unfamiliar with the jungle economy I was frankly a burden. My only value, the ability to communicate with the outside world.

No one can escape real equity, it means people know you. What you’re really like behind the mask. Outside of your bank account.

Intimacy breeds love, and acceptance. Or you can’t sustain it.

The desert, and the jungle

Dubai is a desert. Yes, it is a lovely desert. I learned to love desert ecosystems when I was a firefighter in the American Southwest. They are fragile, delicate biozones with strangely adapted species and humans. The ultimate zen experience.

I truly respect Arab nations, the segmented lineages, the hospitality that is such a legacy of living in a resource-restricted ecosystem. I see the same kind of welcome when I talk to Australian Indigenous Peoples. Cultures hatched from deserts know what it means to be without water — what it means to give it.

Because I was truly experiencing the desert, and I had just come from the Amazon, I realized the terrifying difference in abundance. I became painfully, horrifyingly aware, of what our planet has been, and what it would be like if it became a desert.

Our planet is a garden. And that garden is dying. We have a stark, and truly imminent choice in what our lives will become.

We have to give up the dream of Dubai. Not the people who live there, but everything else. And that leaves Dubai itself in a terrible, awful, situation. If the people who lived in Dubai, had to be sustained by their actual ecosystem, they would be in dire need.

So what are they sustained by? The answer is simple: oil. Petroleum. And we know, we will have to give up petroleum or face extinction. The writing is on the wall, the changes are already being made. And anyone who lives in Dubai, and cares about their people, is frantically preparing for this. Using their wealth to learn how to make a desert into a garden.

Or if they are more short-sighted, fighting to prevent it.

Giving up the dream

Sustainability is deceptive. We think it's going to be one thing, and it’s actually going to be another.

We think it’s going to be another climate conference, a more important set of people, and a better LinkedIn title. One that makes people want to date us, because although we live in a constructed bubble of wealth, we are so kind. We are so smart. We are so futuristic.

We think we’re going to make a lot of money off it. I know people think this because I talked to 3,000 climate investors. Who told me candidly they don’t invest in Nature. They do mechanical carbon capture, our something equally industrial, despite how scientifically questionable it remains. 

As a scientific purist, I know that if you can’t disprove it it’s outside the realm of Western science and trespassing on science fiction. With dreams of 1000-year permanency, these claims are the ultimate hoax - who can tell if it works? Who’s going to pay the price if what we were sold doesn’t deliver? It reminds me of our dreams of being crypto barons - someone else footing the bill in an endless Ponzi scheme.

Sure forests are out of fashion, but have you wondered if it’s only because we can measure our failures in them faster?

Climate VCs are building digital platforms, where they will Win and everyone else will pay them to do something automated. To buy and sell Nature, to measure it, to account for the impact they are subconsciously terrified of changing. And 90% of them will fail. And when they fail, how will they live? What will the 90% do to better the planet? What can they do? We’re good at automating things and building machines. But who is going to need that in fifty years?

Just like crypto, nothing artificial lasts. Artificial inequity cannot sustain itself. The cells in your body, that endlessly maintain perfectly imbalanced states, must work constantly at disequilibrium. Those sodium-potassium pumps are busy little bees, perhaps the true hallmark of life. 

So we’re on the wrong track. So what? I’m an optimist, we’re a creative species and we tend to figure things out…. Honestly, I wasn’t going to say anything about this. Just skip the event with an (admittedly off-brand) polite disregard. This is not because I’m so nice, we rarely go to climate conferences anyway. But because I didn’t think people were ready to hear it. I was worried it would seem like a counterproductive attack, although it really, really isn't. It's just an understanding.

Because I get it, I really do. I didn’t want to change either. Just suddenly, one day I became aware of myself, and change automatically followed. And I understand why you might not see it yet. You’ll get there.

Truth changes you. When I saw how I was living, and how entrenched my consumption really was. I realized I was chasing a mirage, and I was never going to catch happiness through that means. The dream of being more important, more special, and deserving more than the people around me wasn’t true — and surprisingly, it wasn’t satisfying.

I was always hungry.

Driving along the freeway in Dubai, in an air-conditioned car, pretending to have more money than I did, I saw the endless series of billboards for luxury goods, and I realized I didn’t want ANYTHING. Yes, it was shiny, but I didn’t want what Dubai had to sell. I didn’t want the indoor wonders, and the endless chase to consult for another, more important, patron. The stylish spreadsheets, and the projections…. climbing always climbing. And the beautiful parties. It wasn’t Enough.

I had a horrible gnawing feeling as I made growth-curve after high-tech growth-curve, the pitching cycle for another startup — that I had seen the curve before. I had seen it in medicine when we studied bacterial overgrowth in a petri dish. We modeled it in biology 101 lab, because it was so predictable. It was a fundamental principle of life.

Nothing that consumes exponentially survives its environment.

What Indigenous Peoples KNOW

I’m telling you all this because when I explained to a few close friends why I wasn’t attending COP28 (the candid text above)  - they surprised me. “I totally, 100% agree”, responded a woman I respect and adore today. A collaborator on our biodiversity methodology and the Ecological Benefits Framework. My friends surprised me, these people who I have been working with virtually for months. I love them because they’re all action and very little talk. They aren’t names you would know, but you should.

Perhaps I wasn’t alone. Perhaps the reason we were working together so successfully, was that we all saw it.

What my friends embody is the realization that climate isn’t about other people. The plebian masses living on a diet. (The true topic of every climate convention while the invite-only events serve hour d’erves.)

Just like my 6-month yoga bender to lose my COVID weight gain using every trick in the medical book. I had to actually change what I actually did every single day. 

Climate was about ME.

Starting over, I realized I had to figure out what a sustainable life was actually going to be like. Then build it into my automatic habits. I had seen behind the Wizard of Oz curtain — but was I capable of doing something different? How hard was it going to be?

But acting was no longer a choice. I only wanted Nature. I craved it like a fix. The only thing that was filling me up. The only peace I had found. I wanted the turbulent muddy waters of the Amazon, hopping around snakes, eating bananas, and the friendship of a close community. I didn’t even know I lacked community until I truly experienced for the first time living among Indigenous Peoples here. It was FUN. I wanted the superfoods, picked off a tree, and simply prepared. The piled meals of yucca and beans. I didn’t want more, but I no longer wanted less.

And something strange happened to me when we started Savimbo. At first, it was a blind groping, trying to make a new life in the Amazon jungle, using skills I already had. Just finding a reason to live in Nature, because to me it felt like real wealth. But then it became something more, because as I worked in the jungle, and the jungle started to teach me how to live, the people in the jungle began to actively teach me.

They see a lot of people come and go here in the Amazon. They come and do psychedelic ceremonies and make promises about saving the planet and they go back to their lives and forget — because actually curating the planet is a big, and very personal, change. You’d be surprised at who comes, and how well-positioned they are in the industrialized world. Indigenous Peoples, at least the shaman, are well socialized 🙂

But it’s a vacation for most of our visitors. “Oh, that's Nature!” they crow with big smiles, and they love it, and then they go back to the city. And it fades into a nice memory.

But if you really work for Nature, take concrete action, if you have real skills to offer, and you really give up your inequity, and really put your skills to work for the jungle, and find ways to create true opportunities that help, then it’s worth the effort to learn how to collaborate.

Because these are big paradigms, biases, and stereotypes, and preconcieved perspectives. And those are painful and delicate to change.

See here, they aren’t stupid. They know. They know about the industrialized world and all the gadgets, and the shiny toys, and the endless chase. They know it’s not fair, and it wasn’t fairly obtained. It’s pretty obvious from the other side. But they also know, how profoundly insufficient it all is. They know how sick we actually are. And it makes them sad for us.

There is this horrible paradigm in the industrialized world, that we have it soo good. All the modern conveniences, and all the knowledge. That indigenous people are savage, the past, and so naive.

But when you reach the end of civilization, like I did in Dubai, when you travel to the future and see it is a profoundly inequitable desert. When you realize what that future holds, and that you don’t want it, that you need something else…, Well,  then you know something Indigenous Peoples already know.

They live in a garden, and they keep the garden alive. They learned how to do that. Because they know.

This is not to romanticize ethnicity or culture. People are people and we all have flaws. But there is ecological knowledge within cultures that have prized ecological values. Just like Americans are good at technology, Indigenous Peoples are good at protecting and restoring ecosystems and there is value in having respect for that, and what paradigms formed it because we all want to live in a planet that is a garden.

If you ask, Indigenous Peoples will teach you. But you can’t ask the way you think. You can’t demand the information, and try to sell it with your own plastic packaging. Words mean nothing.

You have to prove it with real actions. 

Indigenous Peoples and climate leadership

What I am telling you is to make it real. Indigenous Peoples are not climate lip-service. They are not charity cases. They are the only real climate experts. The only sustainable civilizations our planet has.

Yes, we need a global conference. We need to meet in person because there are some painfully tough things to agree to. There will be laws and lawsuits. Leaders lead, and limits have been crossed and people are finally taking responsibility. But if you are in Dubai this week, then make it count.

Walk outside of those artificial environments, feel the actual desert. Look at the luxury goods, notice the constructed inequity of the Blue Zone, the artificial FOMO, the inside and the outside. And don’t be fooled. Don’t make a pageant of a change like this again. Find the people in Dubai that are making water in the desert. And don’t talk about later. Do it Now.

There is no other time to change than NOW. There is no other person to change but ourselves. But I can promise you that this change will be the best thing you ever do. You are not alone. And there are people who know what to do next.

By Drea Burbank, MD. Drea is an MD-technologist and delinquent savant.