Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Another UN climate meeting has come and gone. Yet again, it will make no difference whatsoever. The fossil fuel industry will continue to expand. Greenhouse gas emissions will increase. The climate crisis will get worse.
All told, according to the International Energy Agency, the net income for the world’s fossil producers is set to double in 2022 from 2021, to a new high of $4 trillion. This is the best possible time for the check to arrive at the table.
Ending the extraction of fossil fuels from the Earth while achieving material sufficiency, equity and justice would move us a long way toward the more livable future that the people who gathered outside COP26 — along with billions of others around the world — are demanding and are standing ready to create.
So my plan for meeting the climate apocalypse is to keep thinking, keep writing, keep farming and keep being hopeful (but not ‘optimistic’) as best I can. What’s yours?
I’m wondering what it is that President Biden and his entourage of 12 Cabinet members and assorted other high-ranking officials will be able to promise their counterparts from other nations over the course of COP26.
COP26 will be a fight over different possible futures, a battle between social movements and entrenched power; between those desperate to defend the world, and those who prefer to preserve the world order; between reality and spin.
Telling young Asian leaders that they’re basically on their own when it comes to defending against climate change because old people are not going to worry about this as much is not the message you should be sending.
Now is the time when the generations need to feed off each other’s strengths.
When politicians set a lofty goal like zero emissions, engineers scramble. Platitudes may win elections, but it takes timber and nails to build bridges. Or willows and biochar to deal with our sh*t.
But by playing host to COP26, the movement has a chance to push for the country to redefine its relationship to the rest of the world in the post-Brexit era. Those who refuse to let imperial nostalgia become the accepted goal for the UK can and should put forward an alternative vision of international solidarity and cooperation…
Four weeks on and the allure of Christmas and New Year festivities fade into the grey light of a Manchester January – a fine backdrop for revisiting December’s COP24
The climate crisis is looming large and threatens to go beyond our capabilities. In addition, COP24 at Katowice has decided on a rulebook that in parts both lacks in substance and is unjust. The resolutions agreed are not enough to prevent disaster, by a long shot.
Just as four big oil and gas producers block the UN climate policymaking conference in Katowice, Poland from welcoming a report on the science of the 1.5 degree Celsius (°C) target which it had commissioned three years earlier in Paris, new evidence has emerged of the striking contradiction between word and deed at COP24.
