The First Draft of History: Thirty-Four of the Best Pieces on the Paris Agreement at COP21

January 18, 2016

The recent COP 21 UN climate summit is something of a political, social, and climate justice Rorschach test.  Opinion is as all over the place as any historic event I can think of.  And make no mistake, Paris was historic.

We knew it was likely to be historic going into it; we just didn’t know what that history would look like.  And that, of course, is one of the hallmarks of the hinges of history – we don’t know who will make it, or how it will turn out, until it happens.

Everything seems to be at stake.  And no one is in control of the outcome. The outcome, in fact, is the sum of all the vectors of force put on the object itself:  in this case, the meaning of what happened in Paris between November 29 and December 12, 2015.

And no one knows where things stand today.  Powerful forces met on the ground in Paris, and things after now look different, if still completely up in the air (NPI – no pun intended).

And if Zhou Enlai actually uttered the words "It is too soon to say" when asked what he thought of the outcome of the French Revolution, it’s even more true, and way too early to tell "what happened in Paris."

But it’s never too early to begin the telling.  And this is what started even before the joyful (or relieved) applause died down after Laurent Fabius gaveled COP 21 to a conclusion.

This collection, then, aims to explore the outcomes less than one month on by presenting – in full, the best pieces I could find in my obsessive ongoing archiving of opinion.  Though I have grouped them in section titled Outcomes, Judgments, Interpretations, and Advice for Movements, it should be clear that these categories blur into each other and many of the pieces fit easily into more than one of them.

I make no pretense to presenting here a "balanced" spectrum of opinion on the Paris outcome.  These are personal choices, the ones that brought me the most from reading them.  If anything, taken as a whole, they "balance" the mainstream press on the outcome, which generally starts by accepting the self-congratulation of the makers of the Agreement as its opening premise.  Here the opposite principle holds.

And remember, what happened in Paris doesn’t stay in Paris.  It radiates outward (NPI) and will resonate in the days and years to come.  It was history – to be sure – but nothing began or ended there.

The next chapters will be ours to write, and we will write them with our passion, imagination, actions, and movements.


Tags: climate change, COP21 Paris

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