Politics Plus

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.”