As the dust settles in Belém, the rest of the world is left wondering what it was all about. Once again, hundreds of delegates from nearly 200 nations duly assembled – very expensively, both in monetary and environmental terms – to discuss the state of our climate, and the final net result was hardly worth the bother of printing out.
The COP conferences have been ongoing since the early 1990s, when the United Nations (UN) brought together two existing study groups and charged them with co-ordinating international policy on the climate. Quite quickly, in 1995 at COP3 in Kyoto, Japan, a protocol was agreed which was intended to chart a global path towards ending our reliance on fuels which produce carbon dioxide, and to encourage the adoption of those which do not.
The dangers to our climate were well understood 30 years ago.
Paris, COP21
The next serious milestone happened at the 2015 Paris meeting (COP21), where attempts were made to force individual nations to recognise their personal involvement and to define individual targets.
Before Paris, the ‘acceptable’ limit to global temperature rises was a bit hazy, and the meeting sought to limit the rise to 1.5°Celsius above pre-industrial levels. This last phrase is also a bit vague in that the Industrial Revolution is taken as beginning in about 1750CE, whereas reliable global temperature recordings are really only available since the early 19th century. However, numbers were agreed, and firm limits were set.
Following Paris, matters have generally gone downhill, with COPs being hosted by a number of fossil-fuel-producing nations (ie, coal, gas and oil). These respective conferences were shamefully exploited by the host nations as showcases for their carboniferous products. One consequence of the last decade’s backsliding has been that no-one now has ambitions for the 1.5°C limit, and most climate scientists expect the rise, by the end of the century, to be 2.6°C.
High hopes for COP30 in Brazil
It had been hoped that this year’s Brazil conference might begin to turn things around; the country’s recently elected president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva (often known simply as Lula) being much more sympathetic to the needs of the climate than his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who gained the nickname of ‘Trump of the Tropics’ for obvious reasons. However, Lula blasting a new highway through the Amazon jungle to the remote outpost of Belém on the Atlantic coast (near the mouth of the Amazon) tended rather to dent early expectations that serious changes were likely.
It seems to be difficult to find any serious climate commentator who is prepared to express any sort of enthusiasm for the outcome of COP30. A number of these commentators have hinted at the basic problem, but none has come out clearly to state that the United Nations is its own worst enemy.
It is a requirement of the UN that every decision, statement, or policy as defined in its final public statement needs to be agreed by every participating member state. This is another way of saying that the clear wishes of the vast majority of the world’s nations and their peoples can be vetoed by just one or two tiny, self-serving, mini states whose first objectives are to continue the acquisition of wealth from their oil reserves, irrespective of the effect of this on global environments.
The situation is actually much worse than that, in that the mini states in question all tend to be ruled by autocratic dynasties of vastly wealthy families, and so the global veto is being exercised by Just a few very rich men. (The absence from COP30 of the United States of America can hopefully be ascribed to a temporary anomaly).
The coalition of the willing
A new initiative for Ukraine currently being discussed amongst leaders of some European nations has come to be known as the ‘coalition of the willing‘, and it is significant in that it is not waiting for the foot-draggers to catch up. Something very similar is clearly needed for future COP talks if they are to have any value.
Any final communique should express the wishes of the majority of nations; if the minority wish to issue their own ‘Minority Report’, then that would be their prerogative, but at least, then we shall all be able to identify the stumbling blocks to progress.
The crisis facing us in our relationship with this, our one and only planet, is too important to be subject to artificial bureaucratic niceties.
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