‘For our today, we took your tomorrow’
This is the third of four parts of a series. You can read part one here and part 2 here.
United Nations (UN)
In 1992 the UN finally showed its recognition of the world’s developing environmental problems with the Framework Convention on Climate Change, now adopted by most countries. This was followed by the Kyoto protocol in 1997, then annual summits leading to the Paris Accord in 2015 and annual COP (Conference of the Parties) summits thereafter.
The Paris Accord is a series of commitments, signed by 194 countries:
- To “pursue efforts” to limit global temperature rises to 1.5°C, and to keep them “well below” 2.0°C above those recorded in pre-industrial times
- To limit greenhouse gas emissions from human activity to the same levels that trees, soil and oceans can absorb naturally – known as net zero – between 2050 and 2100
- Each country to set its own emission-reduction targets, reviewed every five years to raise ambitions
- Richer countries to help poorer countries by providing funding, known as climate finance, to adapt to climate change and switch to renewable energy
The 1.5°C target is generally accepted to mean a 20-year average, rather than a single year.
This is the agreement that the USA under President Trump withdrew from in 2017, taking effect in 2020, with the USA under President Biden re-joining in 2021.
Despite these enormous, well-regarded and well-meaning efforts having some success in getting all countries to sign up to the UN’s increasingly ambitious emission-reduction and financial contribution targets, these have been mostly missed in practice by most countries. The UN has no powers of coercion, only persuasion.
COP
The United Nations COP is the main vehicle internationally to achieve the necessary cooperative effort to limit emissions, but it is in grave danger of falling into disrepute, as a result of infiltration by pro-fossil fuel lobby groups, by appointing chairs from the fossil fuel industry, by pledges of money at the meetings not being honoured, and by country emission-reduction and financial contribution targets agreed at the annual meetings not being met.
Sultan Al Jaber, COP28 President in 2023, committed himself to a deep sense of urgency to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C, while planning a massive increase in oil and gas production as CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
The COP29 President was Mukhtar Babayev, a senior member of the Azerbaijan government, and previously a senior executive with the state oil and gas company Socar. Azerbaijan is a country renowned for corruption and very serious human rights abuses. Oil and gas revenues account for 90% of that country’s foreign exchange earnings and 60% of the national budget.
Outcomes from the COP29 event were: 1) a New Collective Quantified Goal on climate finance which aims to secure $300 billion annually by 2035 (but this target falls a long way short of the trillions required to meet real climate challenges); 2) no conclusions on Phasing Out of Fossil Fuels, and a delay to Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) guidance, (which is now unlikely to be ready prior to the NDC renewal deadline in February 2025); 3) completed rules for international carbon trading (though the proposed methodologies are still pending approval, and initial guidelines only are expected in 2025).
It is hard to disagree with Greta Thunberg’s comment:
“The only thing that will come out of [COP29] is loopholes, more negotiations, and symbolic decisions that look good on paper but are really just greenwashing.”
World annual carbon dioxide emissions have risen from 6 billion tonnes (1950), to 23 billion (1990), 35 billion (2012), and 37 billion (2022). After 30 years of UN summits, emissions continue to rise, albeit now at a slower rate. This is regrettably a record of UN mission failure.
Strong campaigning efforts to achieve a turnaround in the operation of the UN and COP would be very beneficial, as we were reminded by Bob Copeland in West England Bylines:‘The why and how of reforming the United Nations’, and ‘It’s Time for 109’, but this doesn’t seem very likely to happen at present.
The common good
The existential cost of resistance to the green transition is the widespread exploitation of our natural environment and the devastating breaking of critical environmental boundaries. Now, global society has reached a tipping point where poverty, famine, homelessness, illness and death are now almost certainly threatened on a massive scale in the medium and longer term. Even in the short term, in the UK there were an estimated 4,500 heat-related deaths in the 2022 heat wave.
These threats are likely to continue to worsen until the human race as a whole cooperates better and more effectively for the greater common good. There are many known and effective solutions to the problems of climate change and nature depletion. However humans must learn to organise themselves better to work together under the auspices of the United Nations to implement those solutions and save themselves as a species. Otherwise the future looks grim for some people now, for many more people in about one generation’s time, and probably for most people in about two generation’s time. Climate changes don’t reverse quickly. Once the ice sheets are gone, they’re gone.
There is a fairly widespread reluctance by many, individually, and at company, organisation and government level, to accept limits on their activities in order to achieve the greater common good over the medium and longer term. This finds expression today in votes for the political right. In the USA, Donald Trump and the Republican Party lead the way on this, claiming that climate change is a hoax, and planning, in their Project 2025 blueprint for the Trump presidency, to dismantle all the current Democrat president’s measures, regulations and policies to assist the green transition. Project 2025 even includes privatising and gutting the NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration).
Political graft plays a huge role in diverting governments from their role of advancing the best interests of their citizens including moving to a green economy. A small example from George Monbiot, The Guardian:
“Even as extreme heat raged across the southern United States this summer, the governors of Florida and Texas struck down heat protections for outdoor workers. Construction companies and agricultural firms lobbied against the rights of workers to water, shade and rest breaks when temperatures soar – and Governors Ron DeSantis and Greg Abbott, two men also lavishly funded by the fossil fuel industry, gave them what they wanted”.
Rethinking economic growth and sustainability
There is widespread criticism of Gross Domestic Product as a national definition of economic success, but it is never substituted by governments with something better. One chief criticism is that many things happen outside of markets that result from or impact on economic activity, such as health, pollution, ecological or social damage. The new UK Labour Government rests its mandate on improving economic growth as a way of spending more on its priorities. How that growth is measured and valued is important, especially in relation to less tangible or less monetarily measurable things like family cohesion, education, health, court delays, social well-being, environmental quality, and climate resilience.
Tim Jackson, a recent member of the UN’s Sustainability Panel, and also a member of the last Labour Government’s Sustainability Panel, which was abolished by the coalition government in 2011 as part of their ‘bonfire of the quangos’, argues in his book Prosperity Without Growth (2017) that prosperity transcends material concerns:
“The pursuit of ever-increasing profits and financial growth skews priorities and is linked to human exploitation and environmental destruction, and amounts to an ‘age of irresponsibility’’’.
He argues that a principal role of government is to manage the impacts that arise from unfettered market capitalism, and to ensure that priority is given to aspects of social and individual well-being that otherwise ghttps://westenglandbylines.co.uk/news/environment/understanding-the-climate-emergency-part-three/et overlooked.
To be continued. To read part four click here
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