Charades in Paris

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“A rising sea today submerged the hall in which COP21 negotiators were debating what to do about sea level rise.” You think that’s fantasy? Take a look at what COP21 is actually, really doing.

Charades: an absurd pretense intended to create a pleasant or respectable appearance. Paris: site of the 2015 conference of COP21 (or, if you insist: Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, 21st Session). Yes, it’s the 21st time the participants have gathered to congratulate themselves for finally getting serious about climate change, with the promise that this time they will not only be serious about it, they will actually do something about it.

Of course they haven’t been; and of course they won’t. The only principle to which they have been committed, leaders of the industrialized and developing nations alike, is the first principle of industrialized politics: always appear to be doing something, but never do anything.  To do something about climate change would negatively affect one or more of the Leaders’ industrial patrons on whom most of them depend to stay in office; but a Leader must always appear to be doing something about something lest the starving, choking, drowning peasants rise up and ruin the business plan.

By the 1990s, rising seas, spreading deserts, disappearing glaciers and intensifying storms had demonstrated to all but the severely mentally challenged that global temperatures were rising, with devastating effects, and the cause was the massive burning of fossil fuels that enabled the continuation of the Industrial Revolution. The Leaders responded by ostentatiously pretending to do something. They assembled and solemnly resolved in 1997 that they were serious, and one day would do something or other about the crisis.

It took them eight years to sign what they had written down; the Kyoto Protocol, which required its signatories to reduce their carbon emissions by 5% below 1990 levels, in ten years or so. Except that it did not apply to “developing” countries, including the second largest economy in the world, China’s, and some of the other most polluting and polluted nations, such as India. And then, of course, the United States refused to ratify, so we didn’t have to do anything.

The United Nations claims that Kyoto has been a success because the countries left — after you take out the biggest and the dirtiest — have actually seen their carbon emissions decline by 22 per cent, four times the target reduction. But that was almost entirely due to worldwide recession, not principled action. And meanwhile total carbon emissions worldwide have been soaring. This year, primarily because of China and India, emissions are on track to increase 2.5%, to a level 65% above 1990 levels.  

Another successful year in the War on Climate, 2015 will go into the books as the hottest year ever recorded on earth. Deserts are spreading faster, sea levels are rising higher, storms are more destructive than ever, and climate refugees are destabilizing the politics of the world. Yet public support for taking significant action to deal with climate change continues to decline in all the countries involved with COP21.

Now comes COP21, to do what, exactly? Well, above all, to take things seriously, as they are being urged to do by guitar-playing demonstrators. To do everything humanly possible (which means, in realspeak, nothing at all) to limit global warming to 2 degrees centigrade. (Their elegant, weeklong, extravagantly catered confab is sponsored in large part by oil, automobile and airline companies)  The reality is, that if the delegates resolved, and then returned to their countries and proceeded, to stop burning all fossil fuels entirely on December 31, no more gas, no more oil, no more coal, no more natural gas, at all — climate change would continue virtually unabated for at least another 40 years, warming would far surpass 2 degrees Celsius and the industrial age, along with the lives of most people on Earth, would be over.

If instead, the Leaders highly resolve to adopt the proposals before them — to create, for example, a “Womens’ Earth and Climate Network, ” to encourage scads of public, private and public-hyphen-private partnerships to get serious about studying something to be done somewhen to proactively address the problem — if, in other words, COP21 is an historic, unparalleled, unmitigated success, then the industrial age will be over a few years sooner.

What is going on in Paris this week is not serious, nor is it hopeful, nor even meaningful. Just call it bread and circuses, without the bread.