It’s been over a year since I posted under this heading and I always edited the text I based the article upon to prevent Politics Plus from getting into copyright trouble. This time, however, I thought the full text was too important to cut down and to be honest I didn’t have the time to do all the editing either.
So I’ve copied the full editorial of Euronews’ The Briefing. As yet there’s no link for this article to Euronews, probably because it is still in the very early hours of the morning in Europe.
COP26 is not about saving the planet. It’s about saving civilisation
By Euronews Brussels bureau
All eyes are on Glasgow.
World leaders are days away from descending upon the Scottish city to attend the 2021 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26). As global temperatures quickly approach the 1.5°C threshold above pre-industrial levels, the window for opportunity to fight climate change is desperately closing.
For the next two weeks, negotiators will discuss how to transform our industries, energy systems, financial institutions, food chains, means of transport, urban areas and even societal structures. Do we still have time left to save the planet?
“The planet has been around for four and a half billion years. She was perfectly happy before we ever got here, and she will be perfectly happy if we’re idiots enough to pull the ejector seat and leave.”
These are the blunt words of Christiana Figueres, one of the main architects behind the 2015 Paris Agreement. The deal is today considered a monumental achievement but its rulebook still requires further fleshing out – one of the main objectives of COP26.
“This is truly not about saving the planet – it’s about saving something that is incredibly unique in the evolution of the planet,” Figureres told our colleagues from Euronews Green.
“A very, very short time period – 12,000 years – has allowed for the human species to flourish, and build the ‘civilisation’ that we have now,” she said. “If there’s anything that we want to rescue from that, then we have to be able to get back to a stable environment.”
After 15 years representing Costa Rica, Figueres was made the UN climate secretary in July 2010. Her appointment came in the wake of the failed Copenhagen Summit (COP15), where talks had fallen apart without any meaningful commitments. Figueres spent the next few years reviving negotiations, eventually paving the way for COP21 in 2015, when the legally-binding Paris Accord was adopted by 196 parties.
“[It] was not an agreement by consensus,” explains Figueres, “[it] was an agreement by unanimous decision, which has never happened before in the UN. It was the one agreement that was unanimous, and they all decided that they would go to net-zero by 2050.”
Activists have frequently criticised the Paris text for its alleged lack of ambition: its core goal is to keep global warming below 2°C, ideally 1.5°C, in line with pre-industrial levels. Science today indicates the effects of 2°C will be already catastrophic.
“I think the Paris Agreement is still out there on the horizon as being incredibly ambitious because it [does] three things: It establishes the finish line, which is net-zero by 2050. It establishes the fact that there are very different starting points for each country, and each country will travel differently at a different speed. And then to establish the 2°C, with an aspirational 1.5°C. It’s actually quite futuristic!”
The upcoming COP26 is the next major diplomatic milestone in meeting the Paris goals and – as August’s IPCC report clearly laid out – we’re a long way off target. Having worked in diplomacy for many years, Figueres is closely familiar with the challenges that negotiators will face in Glasgow but still advises patience and positivity.
“It’s precisely because of reports like [the IPCC one]. Precisely because of the melting of the ice in Greenland. Precisely because of all the destruction that we have seen this summer that we have to stay stubborn and optimistic,” she says, expressing “anger” at her own generation’s idleness.
“Our inability and our stubbornness of not engaging in climate action in a timely fashion is what has brought us here today. No longer facing climate change, but facing a climate emergency – climate chaos!”
The situation has turned so critical, so frantic and urgent, that many of us are losing hope. Reading the news, one tends to believe our leaders will never have the courage to rise to the occasion and take the decisive action that is needed to curb emissions.
In an emotional moment of the interview, Figueres explained how much she can relate to that feeling of cynicism and hopelessness. In her view, there’s a bus coming towards our children, and we have no choice but to throw ourselves in front of it.
“We basically have two options. Either we can sit back and say ‘okay, well… you know we’re too late.’ Or we can say ‘oh my gosh, we’re totally running out of time and we have to stand up!’” she says.
“And in my book, we don’t have any other option.”
8 Responses to “As Seen from Afar 10/29/2021”
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I don’t understand how anyone (other than those with vested interests in activities contributing to climate change) can deny what we are seeing around the whole planet. Mother Earth is telling us “Enough! Stop harming me!” Volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, wildfires out of any control for days, heat waves, floods, droughts … And scientific progress enables scientific experts to record and track what is happening – if one ignores the impact even at the level of our own personal environments.
It is true that the Earth has seen climate change before. That caused the end of the age of the dinosaurs, and scientific evidence shows that there was an Ice Age. History shows us how Northern Europe endured far colder winters in the 17th century. (They used to hold fairs on the River Thames, which used to freeze hard enough for people to walk & dance on it … But my family has lived on an island on the Thames since 1955 – and only once was it cold enough, in 1962, that ice formed right across the river. And that year, it was thick enough that my brother dared drive his bike across – which was crazy & dangerous!)
But those climate cycles developed slowly. What we’re seeing now is extremely rapid, and I don’t see how one can doubt that humankind has contributed significantly to this acceleration, even if one is convinced that nature also has cycles of change.
Remember when almost all the world was under lockdown last year? With minimal transport around, the air cleared, within very few weeks. Mount Everest was visible (for the first time in long lifetimes) from Nepal. Pictures of cities round the world were free of air pollution. Fish and waterbirds explored cities like Venice. Covid showed us that much of human damage to the environment can be reversed rapidly …
I could wish that COP26 were elsewhere than the UK – because the current UK government is “preaching cream but living sour milk”. They’ve refused amendments to a law that would have tightened protection against release of raw sewage into waterways and along the coast – and other critical elements including ones that would protect bees etc. It is also likely that they’ll take steps in favour of fossil fuels. Hardly a model for COP principles.
No rational person could deny it. In the face of change, even apparently rational persons become irrational. Ostriches may not actuall put their heads into sand, but humans, metaphorically, do.
Thanks, Lona. We all know “former guy” took the USA out of the Paris Agreement but I’ll drag it up, LOL! I try to stay optimistic, though I live amidst a bunch of his supporters (most won’t even get a free “pro-life” vaxx) roaring around in huge trucks, mostly haulin’ nothin’ . I guess when there are only EVs being produced they won’t have any choice. I see them resisting and continuing to disbelieve. I also say “save the planet” but it is actually human civilization—–the geology, etc. will “rock” on,LOL!
Humanity was enabled to exist through a very special set of circumstances – and immediately began changing those circumstances. When there weren’t so many of us, it didn’t much matter, because we couldn’t do much damage. But now, we can do enough damage to destroy ourselves. Now, species of insects are starting to disappear en masse. We don’t even know what most of them contribute to our welfare, the exceptions being pollinators, and we won’t know until they are gone – or at least until it is too late to bring them back.
Speaking as an American, the knowledge that what is at stake is our civilization is not even encouraging. So many people here consider the nest of out civilization to be the work of the devil and wll be happy to see it go … until it’s gone. That’s majorly how TFG was able to pull out of the Paris Agreement and so many didn’t even notice.
I’ve posted this article because I really regret coming to Australia sometimes, specifically because of the federal government’s non-action or rather anti-action with their continuing support of coal. It wouldn’t commit to net-zero emissions by 2050 until last week!
This country is the lowest ranking of all developed countries that signed up for Kyoto but the majority of Aussies, even those living in very conservative central Queensland, want some serious action and that forced the hand of PM Scott Morrison, who wouldn’t even commit to going until the beginning of the week. Now he’s left for Glasgow with some half-baked plan they hastily cooked up last week for net-zero emissions by 2050 and no further promises on reduction by 2030 by more than the promised 26-28% in Kyoto. Any action towards that has come from the states, none have come from the government so far.
I’m utterly disgusted, as you may understand.
Note: I don’t think this planet will be fine without us humans. The rapid temperature rise doesn’t give animals and plants much time to adapt and those that do may not survive the extreme weather of superstorms and fires. But even if they do, I think wars will have broken out over scarce resources like water. More governments are focussing on developing nuclear arms than on fighting climate change, so it doesn’t take much imagination to predict where these wars will end; with a big bang.
Comment from Mitch –
Yes, civilization!The planet will do just fine if all we humans die by next week, even. Maybe it will dobetter.
Mitch
Thanks Lona–and the science keeps saying we need to do more sooner than we last knew. Scary stuff. My governor will be attending virtually instead of in person. As much as my state has done, it still feels too little, too late just like I feel about what was originally proposed by our POTUS.
I’ve been saying this for years, really since An Inconvenient Truth came out because I was not as “sure” as Al Gore that the nations of earth would, or could, reverse the damage done. That was quite a long time ago and nothing has changed, it’s gotten worse actually.
It’s the height of human arrogance to think we can “kill” the planet. We can’t. We can make it uninhabitable for oxygen breathing life and honestly I think we’ve no chance of reversing what we’ve done. Yes, 12,000 years was what it took to get us here, but most of the damage has been done in the last 200, damage we continue to do. I will never understand the lack of concern for those of our descendants who will face the worst of it. Lona’s right, of course, it isn’t just humans who will suffer. The centuries to come are not going to be pleasant for any life on earth.
We’ve done so many good things here, with so many more that we could, if we had the time to continue evolving as loving, creative inhabitants. I don’t think we’ll have that time. Maybe a few of us survive to begin again once the oil runs out and we stop the damage, if we still have an atmosphere then. I think it more likely that what Al predicted in his documentary comes to pass. Life on this planet may well cease to exist. The planet itself will do what it’s always done and cleanse itself of what we’ve done even if that takes 50,000 years. I hope that once an clean atmosphere forms and life begins again here that the next sentient species to arise reads the fossil record clearly and understands that we are tenants on this planet, not owners, and treats this beautiful blue oasis in space with the respect it deserves. All the talk in the world can’t change what’s coming and I really do think we’ve passed the tipping point. Sadly.