And yet the threat of climate change has only grown larger. In 2022, carbon emissions grew by%.

This failure is not for want of institutions. There’s the UN Environment Program (UNEP), which oversees the complex of international treaties and protocols, helps implement climate financing, and coordinates with other agencies to meet sustainable development goals (SDGs). The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has marshaled all the relevant scientific data and recommendations. The Green Climate Fund is attempting to funnel resources to developing countries to advance their energy transitions. The Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate, begun in 2020 at the instigation of the Biden administration, has been focusing on reducing methane. International financial institutions like the World Bank have their own staff devoted to global energy transition efforts.

Still, with the notable exception of the global effort to the ozone layer, more institutions have not translated into better results.

On climate change, notes Miriam Lang. a professor of environmental and sustainability studies at the Universidad Andina Simon Bolivar in Ecuador and a member of the , “it seems that the more we know, the less we are able to take effective action. The same can be said about the accelerated loss of biodiversity. We live in an era of mass extinctions, and there’s been little progress at the governance level despite many good intentions.”

One major reason for the failure of collective action is the persistent refusal to think beyond the nation-state. “It’s weird that nationalism has become so dominant when the challenges that we face are global,” observes Jayati Ghosh, professor of economics at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. “We know that these problems can’t be regulated within national borders. Yet governments and people within countries persist in treating these crises as ways in which one nation can benefit at the expense of another.”

Another challenge is financial. “Adequate funding at all levels is a fundamental prerequisite to improving climate governance and the implementation of sustainable development goals,” argues Jens Martens, executive director of the . “At a global level, this requires predictable and reliable funding for the UN system. The total assessed contributions to the UN regular budget in 2022 were just about $3 billion. In comparison, the New York City budget alone is over $100 billion.”

In part because of these budgetary shortfalls, international institutions have increasingly relied on what they call “multistakeholderism.” On the face of it, the effort to bring other voices into policymaking at the international level—the various “stakeholders”—sounds eminently democratic. The inclusion of civil society and popular movements is certainly a step in the right direction, as is the incorporation of the perspectives of academics.

But multistakeholderism has also meant bringing business on board, and corporations have the money not only to underwrite global meetings but to determine the outcomes.

“I was at Sharm el-Sheikh in November,” recalls Madhuresh Kumar, an Indian activist-researcher currently based in Paris as a Senior Fellow at Atlantic Institute. “We were welcomed at the airport by a banner that read ‘Welcome to Cop 27.’ And it listed the main partners: Vodafone, Microsoft, Boston Consulting Group, IBM, Cisco, Coca Cola and so on. Most UN institutions face a growing monetary problem. But this monetary problem is not actually at the crux of the issue. It is astonishing how through multistakeholderism, which has evolved over the last four decades, corporations have captured multilateral institutions, the global governance space, and even the big International NGOs.” He adds that were registered at COP 27, a 25% increase from the previous year’s meeting.

The challenges facing global governance are well known, whether it’s nationalism, funding, or corporate capture. Less clear is how to overcome these challenges. Can existing institutions be transformed to more adequately address the global problems of climate change and economic development? Or do we need different institutions altogether? These were the questions addressed at a recent webinar on sponsored by Global Just Transition.

Global Shortcomings

Transforming the current system of global governance around climate, energy, and economic development is like trying to repair an ocean liner that has sprung multiple leaks in the middle of its voyage with no land in sight. But there’s an additional twist: all the crew members have to agree on the proposed fixes.

Jayati Ghosh is a member of the new UN . “The challenge is in its very title,” Ghosh explains. “Multilateralism itself is under threat in part because it hasn’t been effective. But also the imbalances that are rendering it ineffective are not likely to go away any time soon. We’re all aware of this on the board. But without much broader political will, there’s a limit to any given individual or group proposals.”

In addition to nationalism, she believes that four other broad “isms” have prevented a cooperative response to the global problems facing the planet. Take imperialism, for instance, which Ghosh prefers to define “as the struggle of large capital over economic territories when supported by nation-states. We see evidence of that in continuous subsidies of fossil fuels or the greenwashing of environmental, social, and governance (ESG) investments. The ability of large capital to sway international policies and national politics in its own interests persists unabated. That’s a major constraint to doing anything serious about climate change.”

Short-termism is another such constraint. In the wake of the Ukraine war, food and fuel corporations sought to profit in the short term by manufacturing a sense of scarcity. The rise in fuel and food prices, Ghosh notes, were created not so much by constraints on supply, but from market imperfections and control over markets by large corporations. That short-term profiteering in turn led to equally short-sighted decisions by the most powerful countries to reverse their previous climate commitments and make fewer such commitments at the last COP in Egypt. Politicians “reversed those commitments because they have midterm elections coming up,” she points out. “They’re worried that voters will support the far right, so they argue that they have to do whatever it takes to increase fuel supplies.”

Classism, in various forms of inequality, has also prevented effective action. “Globally, the top 10 percent, the rich, are responsible for one third to more than one half of all carbon emissions,” Ghosh notes. “Even within countries that is the case. The rich have the power to influence national government policies to ensure that they continue to take the bulk of the carbon budget of the world.”

Finally, she points to “status-quo-ism,” by which she means the tyranny of the international economic architecture, not only the legal and regulatory framework but also the associated global agreements and institutions. “We really have to reconsider the role played by international financial institutions, by the World Trade Organization, the multilateral development banks, and legal frameworks like economic partnership agreements and bilateral investment treaties that actually prevent governments from doing something about climate change,” she argues.

One way of addressing these last four obstacles is to reverse privatization. “The privatizations of the last three decades have been absolutely critical in generating both inequality and more aggressive carbon emissions globally,” Ghosh concludes. She urges the return of utilities, cyberspace, even land to the public sphere.

Revisiting Sustainable Development

In 2015, the UN endorsed 17 sustainable development goals. These SDGs include pledges to end poverty and hunger, combat inequalities within and among countries, protect human rights and promote gender equality, and protect the planet and its natural resources. But climate change, COVID, and conflicts like the war in Ukraine have all pushed the SDG targets further from reach—and made them considerably more to achieve.

“The implementation of the 2030 agenda is not just a matter of better policies,” observes Jens Martens. “The current problems of growing inequality and unsustainable models of consumption and production are deeply connected with powerful hierarchies and institutions. Policy reform is necessary, but it is not sufficient. It will require more sweeping shifts in how and where power is vested. A simple software update is not enough. We have to revisit and reshape the hardware of sustainable development.”

In terms of governance, this means strengthening bottom-up approaches. “The major challenge for more effective global governance is a lack of coherence at the national level,” Martens continues. “Any attempt to create more effective global institutions will not work if it’s not reflected in effective national counterparts. For instance, as long as environmental ministries are weak at the national level we cannot expect UNEP to be strong at the global level.”

Stronger local and national institutions, however, operate within what Martens calls a “disabling environment” where, for instance, “the IMF’s neoliberal approach has proven incompatible with the achievement of the SDGs as well as the climate goals in many countries. IMF recommendations and loan conditionalities have led to a deepening of social and economic inequalities.” Also disabling is the disproportionate power wielded by international financial institutions. “One striking example is the Investor-State Dispute settlement system, which awards investors the right to sue governments, for instance, for environmental policies that reduce profits,” he notes. “This system undermines the ability of governments to implement stronger domestic regulations of fossil fuel industries or to phase out fossil fuel subsidies.”

Enhancing coherence also means strengthening UN bodies such as the , which is responsible for reviewing and following up on the SDGs. “Compared to the Security Council or the Human Rights Council, the HLPF remains extremely weak,” he points out. “It meets only eight days per year. It has a small budget and no decision-making power.”

Some additional institutions are needed to fill global governance gaps, such as an Intergovernmental Tax Body under the auspices of the United Nations, that would ensure that all UN member states, and not only the rich, participate equally in the reform of global tax Rules. Another oft-cited recommendation would be an institution within the UN system independent of both creditors and debtors to facilitate debt restructuring.

All of this requires sufficient funding. Around $40 billion goes toward the development activities of UN agencies, Martens notes, “but far more than half of these funds are project-tied non-core resources mainly earmarked to favor individual donor priorities. That means mainly the priorities of rich donors.” UNEP, meanwhile, gets a mere $25 million from the regular UN budget, which is about $3 billion and doesn’t include for activities like peacekeeping and humanitarian operations.

More democratic funding would have the side benefit of shrinking reliance on foundations and corporate contributions, which “reduce the flexibility and autonomy of all UN organizations,” he concludes.

Addressing Multistakeholderism

One path that global institutions have taken to address the funding shortfall is “multistakeholderism.” As with corporations pushing for privatization at a national level with arguments about the inefficiencies of state enterprises or the bureaucratic state, the advocates of multistakeholder initiatives (MSI) point to the failures of global public institutions to tackle common problems as a reason for greater corporate involvement. In effect, this to large corporations buying more seats at the table for themselves.

Madhuresh Kumar has produced a with Mary Ann Manahan that looks at how multistakeholderism has evolved in five key sectors: education, health, environment, agriculture, and communications. In the forestry sector, for instance, they looked at initiatives like the Tropical Forest Alliance, the Global Commons Alliance, and the Forest for Life Partnership. “We found that in their first decade, the initiatives primarily established the problem by arguing that the multilateral institutions are failing and that’s why we need solutions,” he reports. With the rise in global demand for raw materials, particularly in the context of a “green economy,” there was also greater demand to regulate the industries. The corporate sector responded with initiatives that emphasized “responsible” mining, forestry, and the like.

These “responsible” corporate initiatives revolved around “nature-based” solutions that rely on markets to “get the price right.” Kumar notes that “at the heart of these false, ‘nature-based’ solutions promoted by MSI is the notion that if nature does not have a price, human beings are not incentivized to take care of it, that we have to use nature and also replace it. Carbon offsets, for instance, come out of the principle that you can continue to produce as much carbon as you want as long as you also plant some trees somewhere else.”

According to this logic, nature can be priced according to various “ecosystem services.” He continues: “Seventeen ecosystem services have been identified along with 16 biomes. Together they have an estimated value of $16-54 trillion. If they can be unlocked, the idea is that this money can be put toward solving the climate crisis. But we won’t see that money. Ultimately, what rolls out on the ground won’t help our communities.”

Not only nature is commodified but knowledge itself, for instance through intellectual property rights. “Increasingly, we have a reinforcement of very rigid rules and very rigid systems that lead to the concentration of knowledge and to large corporations appropriating traditional knowledge,” notes Jayati Ghosh.

Another essential part of MSI is the focus on technical fixes, like carbon capture technology, geoengineering, and various forms of hydrogen energy. “These divert a lot of attention from climate justice,” Kumar notes. “It is also having an impact on indigenous communities. For instance, the One Trillion Trees Initiative that the UN backs is promoting a monoculture, the destruction of biodiversity, and the eviction of indigenous communities and many others.”

The disenfranchisement of indigenous communities is especially worrisome. “Indigenous peoples are responsible for preserving 80 percent of the biodiversity that still exists today, which is even confirmed by the World Bank,” Miriam Lang explains. “Nevertheless, we somehow do everything to disrespect, weaken, and threaten indigenous people’s modes of living. We still systematically treat indigenous people as poor and in need of development. We are reluctant to guarantee their land rights, their rights to clean water, their rights to the forest where they live. Instead, we propose to pay them money to compensate their losses, which is just another way of weakening their social organization and decision-making. It causes division and lures them into consumerism, individualism, and entrepreneurialism: precisely those aspects of capitalism that have brought about the current environmental breakdown.”

In addition to corporations, large NGOs like World Wildlife Fund, and major funders like Michael Bloomberg, Kumar notes that “the UN has been a willing participant in all of this. Sustainable Energy for All, which is another MSI, was started by former UN General Secretary Ban Ki-Moon in 2011 as a response to a statement made by a group of countries. But Sustainable Energy for All later acquired an independent status of its own over which the UN has no control. The UN General Assembly plays an important role in shaping the agenda and setting standards. But then these institutions, like the Renewable Energy and Energy Efficiency Partnership that was initially backed by UNIDO, later go out on their own, become unaccountable, and fall into the lap of corporations.”

Democratizing Governance

In 1974, the UN declared a New International Economic Order to free countries from economic colonialism and dependency on an inequitable global economy. The developing world was unusually unified in supporting the NIEO. Though some elements of the NIEO can be seen in the Agenda 2030, the effort did not translate into any substantial changes in the Bretton Woods institutions—IMF, World Bank—that form the international financial architecture.

“The reason we had demands for a NIEO is precisely because developing countries felt that the global economy was not just or equitable,” Jayati Ghosh observes. “Yes, it was a period of relatively more access to certain institutions. But some of the imbalances that we’re talking about in trade or finance or technology existed even then. Of course, it’s also absolutely true that neoliberal financial globalization has dramatically worsened conditions globally. But I would put it more in terms of the supremacy of large capital over everyone else.”

Also, the United States and European Union continue to wield disproportionate power: appointing the leaders of the World Bank and IMF and controlling the majority of votes in these institutions. “Middle- and low-income countries, which together constitute 85 percent of the world’s population, have only a minority share,” observes Miriam Lang. “There is also a clear racial imbalance at play with the votes of people of color worth only a fraction of their counterparts. If this were the case in any particular country, we would call it apartheid. Yet, as economic anthropologist Jason Hickel points out, a form of apartheid operates right at the heart of international economic governance today and has come to be accepted as normal.”

Developing countries have long demanded a reform of the governance of these IFIs. “The voting rights were originally allocated on the basis of a country’s share of the global economy and of global trade,” reports Jayati Ghosh. “But this was done based on the data of the 1940s, and the world has changed dramatically since then. Developing countries have significantly increased their share of both, and certain countries are much more significant while a number of European countries are much less significant.”

Despite a very minor change in this distribution of votes, the United States and European Union retain the majority of the votes and the lion’s share of the influence. “When you have a new issue of Special Drawing Rights (SDRs)—which we for $650 billion— this liquidity created by the IMF is distributed according to quota, which really means that the developing world doesn’t get very much. And 80 percent goes to countries that are never going to use them. So, it’s an inefficient way of increasing global liquidity.”

“Obviously the rich countries that control these institutions are not going to give up their power easily,” she continues. “They have blocked every attempt to change because they have the voting rights now. So, do you say, ‘Okay, let’s demolish the whole thing and start afresh’? But then, how do you create a new institution? How do you even create a minimally democratic way of functioning?”

If the rich countries won’t give up their power voluntarily, they’ll have to be pushed to do so. “I have to confess: I’m saddened by the lack of public outcry,” Ghosh adds. “Even in the very progressive state of Massachusetts, where I’m teaching, people couldn’t be bothered with this. Similarly, in Europe. People’s movements need to point out how this is against not just the interests of the developing world, it’s against the enlightened self-interest of people in the rich countries as well.”

A similar problem applies to the power of the rich within countries. “There’s a need for tax justice at the global level, and not only with the rich countries with all governments involved in setting the tax rules, especially from the global south,” Jens Martens says. “We have a tax system with the highest rates much below what we had in the 1970s or even the 1980s. The international community recently established a minimum tax of 15 percent for transnational corporations: this is a very minor first step at the global level.”

“We had suggested 25 percent,” Jayati Ghosh adds, “which is the median of corporate tax rates globally. But it isn’t just increased tax rates. It’s important to emphasize redistribution. Regulatory processes have dramatically increased the profit share of large companies. Before we get to taxation, we have to look at the reasons they’re able to have these very high profits. We allow them to profiteer during periods of scarcity or assumed scarcity. We allow them to repress workers’ wages. We allow them to grab rents in different ways. So, we need a combination of regulation and taxation to rein in large capital and to make sure that the benefits ultimately produced by workers come back to workers and society as a whole.”

“In the last decade of the twentieth century, we managed to make these corporations villains,” points out Madhuresh Kumar. “But today they are not seen as the villains. Governments in the global North and in the South have given them a platform. There is muted celebration if we are able to shift these corporations toward providing more renewable energy, which they have done by diversifying. But if we can’t shift the power imbalance, we won’t achieve any equality in global governance, in the financial architecture, or anywhere.”

Where Does Change Come From?

In March 2022, Jayati Ghosh was named to a new High Level Advisory Board on Effective Multilateralism created by UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres. The dozen board members come from different countries and perspectives.

“We have to have a bit of a reality check on what commissions and advisory boards can achieve,” Ghosh points out. “We can advise. We can say this is what we think should happen, this is how we believe the international financial architecture must be changed. Everything else really depends on political will, which is not just governments suddenly seeing the light and becoming good. Political will is when governments are forced to respond to the people. Until that happens, we’re not going to get change no matter how many high-level boards and commissions come up with excellent recommendations that we can all agree with.”

After the 2008-9 global financial crisis, former World Bank economist Joseph Stiglitz headed up a UN-created commission. “It came up with some really fine recommendations, which are still valid,” Ghosh recalls. “But they were not implemented. They were not even considered. I don’t know if anyone at the IFIs even bothered to read that whole report.”

Multistakeholderism has elevated the status of corporations in high-level climate negotiations. But this is precisely the wrong strategy. “When the World Health Organization negotiated the Tobacco Control Convention, they decided to exclude lobbyists from the tobacco companies from the negotiations,” Jens Martens points out. “In the end they agreed to a quite strong convention, which is now in place. Why can’t we convince our governments to exclude fossil fuel lobbyists from negotiations in the climate sphere because there’s a conflict of interest?”

In the end, Martens is not so pessimistic: “I see a lot of social movements occurring in the last couple years as a counter-reaction to nationalism and the inactivity of our governments: Fridays for Future, Extinction Rebellion, Black Lives Matter. It’s very necessary to put pressure on our governments, because they only respond to pressure from below.”

Jayati Ghosh sees some positive momentum, particularly around the growing trend of acknowledging the rights of nature. “Ecuador and Bolivia included the rights of Mother Earth in their constitutions,” she reports. “But there’s also a movement of civil society groups fighting for the rights of nature in many countries including Germany. If nature is a subject by law, then we can have better instruments to protect nature. We also have discussions at the global level about alternatives to GDP that focus on well-being.”

“Can the world save the world?” she asks. “Yes, the world can save the world. Will the world save the world? No, not at the current rate. Not unless people actually rise up and make sure that their governments act.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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First, the COVID-19 pandemic is obviously far from over. While global vaccine distribution continues to be spotty and a matter of economic and political privilege rather than equality and fairness, new variants of the virus such as Omicron continue to emerge and suggest that the largest global health crisis in at least a century is here to stay for the foreseeable future.

It is tragic that the shortsighted, irresponsible attitude to just and equitable global vaccine distribution has now become the root cause for a seemingly infinite loop of viral mutations and spread. Indeed, the policies that are adopted by some countries allow new variants to incubate where vaccines are scarce, only to soon boomerang back to nations that are hoarding doses and patents alike.

Water World: Is Climate Change Driving Our Future Out to Sea?  

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Second, the rapidly deteriorating situation, the stunning collapse of the status quo and public order, and the ongoing humanitarian and human rights crisis in Afghanistan remind us of the inherent vulnerability and fragility of the international order and its institutions. Afghanistan is but one example of a fundamental shift in global and regional geopolitics and balance of power that is now ubiquitous. The consequence is that human security and justice seem to become even more disposable than before.

Third, the 6^th Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) affirmed that the global climate crisis is not only real and impactful but certain to increase, perhaps exponentially, and become even much more destructive, disruptive and deadly than previously projected.

Keeping the Goal Alive

At the same time, the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow reinforced the widespread fear that it is increasingly unlikely that the 1.5˚C goal sealed in the Paris Agreement — perhaps even the 2˚C fallback position — can still be reached, meaning that unimaginable threats like mega heatwaves, floods, droughts, hurricanes and blizzards, food crises and famines, mass migration and violent conflicts are to be expected to rise throughout this century.

COP26, unfortunately, was more of the same: cynical delegations of certain industrialized countries, as well as ruthless fossil fuel lobbyists, coerced poor countries already hit hard by climate change into a defensive mode and dictated a watered-down compromise that is far from adequate. Despite some mitigation pundits — typically white, male and Western — praising COP26 for “keeping the 1.5-degree goal alive,” the point is not about what’s hypothetically feasible but is very much about what has been done and continues to be done to this world’s poor, marginalized, underdeveloped, disenfranchised and remote people?

Much of the Conference of Parties process carries the handwriting of neoliberalism and neocolonial rule. If those people in the South Pacific, Africa, the Middle East, Latin America and elsewhere count, then why has the 2009 promise of COP15 in Copenhagen to make $100 billion in support of adaptation needs available still not been met, even to 50%?

Why do the world’s worst greenhouse gas emitters still refuse to pay a single penny for the loss and damage to developing nations that they are responsible for? How dare wealthy carbon-emitting countries refuse to commit to immediate and drastic emission reductions knowing that their selfishness will kill millions of people, wipe out entire species and make much of this planet uninhabitable?

See a pattern? What COVID-19, Afghanistan and climate policy as a global phenomenon have in common is the toxic mix of short-sightedness, selfishness and ruthlessness with which international solidarity, collective action and the noble cause of pursuing equality, dignity and justice in international relations are being sacrificed for short-term gain, dominance and privilege.

Forty years of largely unregulated capitalism, economic globalization and neoliberal rule have not furthered the spirit and goals of the UN Charter. They have ruined our planet, its ecosystems and habitats, and left humanity in a state of shock, turmoil and disintegration — closer to what Hobbes’ “Leviathan” described as the state of nature.

International Threat

By the way, climate change adds to other global risks and threats: It is intersectional, cross-cutting and compounding. , and therefore epidemics and pandemics, are on the rise also because of changing climates, temperatures, precipitation, humidity, biomes and expanding human habitats. Wars such as those in Sudan, Yemen and Syria have been precipitated by climate change, desertification, water shortage, crop failure and hunger — as is forced migration as a mass phenomenon. The list goes on.

We simply can no longer afford a business-as-usual approach or even a moderately progressive approach, let alone a backward approach. This century of complex crises requires a whole new type of global action and response unlike anything before it because peace, security, prosperity and statehood are at risk globally. New, innovative and disruptive legal, economic and political tools are needed, paired with technological advances, ethical and sustainable investments, social movements and large-scale behavioral change.

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Ultimately, the climate agenda — and with it, many other issues of global concern — is a matter of global justice and survival. Measures and instruments must be atoned to yield the safety and well-being of the poor, the marginalized, the disenfranchised and the underserved. The resilience of the weak will determine the fate of the whole. If that is the case, humanity — and alongside it, other species, ecosystems and the planet — will benefit as a whole. If it isn’t, today’s hubris, ignorance and selfishness will come back as a mighty boomerang, much like Omicron, to haunt many wealthy nations.

*[This article is submitted on behalf of the author by the HBKU Communications Directorate. The views expressed are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the University’s official stance.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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Money, money, money. Why is it always about money?

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Finance has always been a key issue at the UN’s Conferences of the Parties, and a sticky one at that. In this sense, COP26, held in Glasgow, Scotland, in November, was no different. Climate finance is key because it cuts across all other issues. It is required for mitigation efforts such as expanding renewable energy production; for adaptation efforts such as introducing early warning systems and constructing flood barriers; and, some suggest, it is now also required to pay for the loss and damage caused by climate change, such as destroyed infrastructure and soil rendered infertile by floods or drought.

Take a Breath

One of the big things to come out of COP26 was the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero. GFANZ — also referred to as the Carney initiative, after its chair, the former head of the Bank of England Mark Carney — that to align private capital with science-based targets to finance the investment in a net-zero economy. Representing over 450 major financial institutions, GFANZ claims to mobilize a staggering $130 trillion toward a net-zero future. This is an unbelievable number, mening that GFANZ can make a real difference if it succeeds in changing the direction of such vast monetary flows.

Kelly Clark, director of Finance & Capital Market Transformation at The Laudes Foundation, could not hide her : “The entire financial system has, in theory, accepted that there is a higher purpose for them … I think we should take a little breath here and celebrate this amazing, amazing new world that we are in.”

Not everyone shares Clark’s optimism. Concerns have been raised over the fact that the $130-trillion figure is misleading because it contains double accounting, does not represent new, allocatable money, and that the initiative leaves open significant loopholes for while overestimating the role of .

Nigel Topping, UK’s high-level climate action champion at COP26 and one of the leaders of the GFANZ initiative, that “the 130 [trillion US dollars] is real in the sense that it is a massive signal. It is not real in the sense that if you add it up, you get 130 because there’s overlap, and it is not real in the sense that it is not available to be spent today.”

If we follow Clark’s advice and take a little breath, we will hear our high school physics teacher reminding us that the climate does not respond to signals but only to actual emission reductions. If we venture further and take a second breath, we can recall that the history of COP is full of good intentions and signaling that never translated into actual emission reductions. A third deep breath allows us to remember that our previous experiments with big market-based carbon-offset schemes were largely unsuccessful, such as the that had “fundamental flaws in terms of overall environmental integrity.”

While GFANZ is surely an interesting initiative to follow because of its potential to move a lot of money in the right direction while giving civil society a specific framework within which it can hold the companies who commit to the scheme accountable, Clark’s celebration of an “amazing, amazing new world” is much too premature.

Climate Finance

Some also celebrated at COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, when the so-called developed nations promised to mobilize $100 billion annually to the so-called developing nations by 2020 and through 2025 to finance both climate mitigation and adaptation measures.

COP26 started with the acknowledgment of the failure by the developed countries to fulfill this promise in time. Now not expected to be until 2023, this between wealthier and poorer nations. However, there is now an agreement to come up with new and larger finance goals to go into effect after 2025 and to dedicate a team of technical experts and ministers to see these through. A post-2025 climate finance goal, with a floor of $100 billion annually, is to be set by 2024.

Even though it is obviously problematic that wealthier nations failed to mobilize the $100 billion they promised by 2020, an arguably bigger issue than the exact quantity of climate finance is the quality of it. In 2020, that around 80% of public climate finance is provided in the form of loans and other non-grant instruments, and that climate-specific net assistance may be five times lower than reported by developed nations. This is largely because developed countries often count the full amount of loans at face value and classify funding for projects that have limited or no relevance to environmental issues as climate finance.

This means that a lot of the climate finance counted in the $100-billion goal is de facto to those who need it. Janine Felson, the lead on finance for the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS), Carbon Brief that the credibility of the Paris Agreement relies on climate finance being scaled up and being predictable, accessible and grants-based.

One reason for these transparency issues is that there currently is no multilaterally agreed of climate finance. While developing countries have called for a clear designation of the term in order to improve transparency, the US and the EU strongly the idea.

The suggestion by AOSIS to establish a Glasgow Loss and Damage Facility to provide the short-term finance required to deal with the effects of climate change was also met with resistance. The facility would be in addition to the $100-billion promise, which is earmarked for mitigation and adaptation. Although the idea was supported by G77 + China, from the EU, the US and the UK, historically the largest global emitters, meant that the mechanism was not established.

Follow the Money

There is no doubt that developed countries have an obligation to deliver on the climate finance promises they have made. Not least because they have agreed to implement the Paris accords in a way that reflects equity and to carry the larger share of the burden by acting in accordance with the of “common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities.”

If we consider that developed nations both have a historical responsibility for causing climate change as well as current per capita emissions that far exceed the global carbon budget for 2°C, let alone 1.5°C, they have a second and, at least as important, obligation to bring their own emissions down to levels that reflect an of the remaining carbon budget.

There is a strong coupling between GDP growth and greenhouse gas emissions. Regardless of how much climate finance the developed nations had managed to mobilize by 2020, how much it will mobilize by 2025 and how much they agree to mobilize after 2025, this is an issue we will have to face. We can do this with a sense of optimism and excitement because it is, indeed, possible to create better lives in an economy that is not growing — as long as we .

There are at least two issues with seeing GDP growth as a desirable end in itself. First, GDP is a general measure of economic activity that doesn’t distinguish between different types or qualities of that activity. Weapons production, oil spill clean-ups and forest clearing, for example, all increase GDP. Simon Kuznets, the inventor of the GDP measure, us already in the 1930s that GDP should not be used as an indicator of social progress or as a measure of human welfare as the only thing it measures is economic activity, both good and bad.

Second, if the global economy grows 2.5% per year, it will double by 2050. It is difficult enough to decarbonize all economic activity at current levels; decarbonizing an economy twice the size is going to make it a hell of a .

Green Decoupling

This is why we get ideas like green growth that rely on the notion of absolute decoupling. The key point is that we can keep growing the economy in a sustainable way because we can decouple economic output from the environmental impacts in a way that is global, permanent, equitable and rapid. There is, however, no empirical indications that this is happening or is even within any meaningful timeframe, making green growth a very .

Part of the problem is our on speculative negative emission technologies. NETs are politically useful to artificially inflate the size of our current carbon budgets because we assume that future generations can remove that carbon again. However, since these only have “limited realistic potential” to remove carbon from the atmosphere, we are kicking the problems down the line to future generations and to other parts of the world that are going to suffer from climate change.

It is “an unjust and high-stakes gamble” by the — who have high levels of income and exceedingly high emissions per capita — to place all bets on a green growth strategy of NETs-dependent net-zero targets placed in a comfortably distant future.

Instead, developed nations ought to prepare for a post-growth world by reducing their dependence on economic growth and exploring more sufficiency-oriented strategies that respect equitable allocations of the remaining .

Even if developed nations answer the climate finance question by, for example, mobilizing the $100 billion they promised in 2009, the economic questions remain. Should we rely so much on NETs and the idea of green growth? Can we live good lives in the wealthy parts of the world without growing the economy further? If so, how? These questions, the last one in particular, are questions we need to pursue much more seriously.

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From this perspective, we can answer our initial rhetorical question by saying that it is not all just about money. It is also about our conceptions of what we call “the economy” and the ideological context it is situated within. Climate finance is not just a matter of cold cash and tangible tables with neat numbers; it is about sticky issues of intergenerational justice, about catering to very different and often conflicting interests, and about the ideological context that shapes the way we understand and approach our common problems and their possible solutions.

If we continue to rely blindly on green growth, keep our fingers crossed that absolute decoupling will, against all odds, happen at the required scale, and continue the intergenerational buck-passing by shunning the difficult questions, the chances of staying below 2°C, let alone 1.5°C, are just about net zero.

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Fiji’s Women Are Living the Reality of Climate Change

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Climate change, as the skeptics like to remind us, does occur naturally. Analysis by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)  that temperatures during the last interglacial period, which began 130,000 years ago and lasted somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 years, were 0.5˚C and 1˚C warmer than in pre-industrial times and up to 2˚C or even 4˚C warmer during the mid-Pliocene Warm Period, around 3 million years ago. But while there are natural processes in place, the pace of climate change over the past century has demonstrated the devastating effect of anthropogenic activity on the delicate balance of life on Earth. 

The Seas Are Rising

What is significant about the IPCC assessment is that during the last interglacial period, sea levels were likely between 6 meters and 9 meters higher, possibly reaching 25 meters during the mid-Pliocene. That may sound farfetched, but modeling suggests a 2.3-meter rise per 1˚C of warming. Globally, the average sea level has already  by 0.2 meters since the late 19^th century, starting at a  of 1.4 millimeters a year from 1901 to 1990 and accelerating to 3.6 millimeters a year between 2006 and 2015.

This spells disaster for the coastal areas. A  published in Environmental Research Letters earlier this year suggests that, even with no net global emissions after 2020, “the carbon already in the atmosphere could sustain enough warming for global mean sea level to rise 1.9 (0–3.8) meters over the coming centuries,” meaning that currently, anywhere between 120 million and 650 million people — or a mean of 5.3% of the world’s population — live on land below the new tide lines. 

Even if warming is kept under the upper limit of the Paris Agreement of 2˚C above pre-industrial levels, multi-century sea level rise can reach 4.7 meters, threatening the livelihoods of double the number of people, the authors assess. In 2019, the IPCC estimated that this number could reach  by 2050. The panel predicts a rise of anywhere between 0.29 meters and 1.1 meters by 2100 relative to 1985-2005, depending on emission rates. A paper published in Nature concluded that if we stay on the current emissions course heading for 3˚C warming, we will reach a , with the Antarctic ice sheet alone adding 0.5 centimeters to global sea levels each year. 

According to the authors of a 2019 study on sea-level rise and migration, rising waters are  to be the “most expensive and irreversible future consequences of global climate change, costing up to 4.5% of global gross domestic product.” A 2018  by C40, a network of mayors of nearly 100 global cities, estimated that a 2˚C rise could affect 800 million people in 570 urban centers by mid-century. As the authors of a 2021 study , “Although there is large variability in future sea level projections, due, for instance, to the uncertainty in anthropogenic emissions, there is consensus on the potentially catastrophic worldwide impact of SLR.”

A 2˚C rise puts land that houses over half the population of Vietnam and Bangladesh and over 80% of those living in the island nations like Kiribati, Tuvalu, the Bahamas and the Marshall Islands . The , with 80% of its 1,200 atolls not even reaching 1 meter above sea level — the , with its highest elevation point of just 2.4 meters — is particularly at risk; there is literally nowhere to hide. In May, the minister for the environment, climate change and technology, Aminath Shauna,  CNBC that if current trends continue, the island nation “will not be here” by 2100. “We will not survive. … There’s no higher ground for us … it’s just us, it’s just our islands and the sea.”

Water, Water Everywhere

It is clear that Alisi Rabukawaqa, project liaison officer at the International Union for Conservation of Nature, she has given this a lot of thought. When I ask her about the reality of climate change in what many would consider to be a tropical paradise — her native Fiji — she doesn’t stop talking for nearly 10 minutes. She remembers a time when devastating cyclones were “lifetimes apart.” Now, category 5 storms are a regular, looming threat. 

“And if it’s not cyclones, it’s the drought. And if it’s not the drought, it’s the saltwater intrusion that’s impacting where people plant; and if it’s not that, it’s seeping into drinking sources and boreholes from outer islands,” she tells me from a Fiji so hot, everyone is bracing for another cyclone.

While for most communities affected by sea-level rise and saltwater intrusion relocation is still “further down the line,” traditional land ownership laws mean that you can’t just pack up and move anywhere you like, even if, unlike in the Maldives, there is higher ground. In 2017, the government’s  identified over 830 vulnerable communities, 48 of which were in urgent need of resettlement. The plan was developed a year after , which hit Fiji in February 2016, significantly affected around 350,000 people. That is a high number by any standard; here, it’s more than a third of the population. 

“Fiji is a small place relatively, so all those things combined, it’s made us more vulnerable,” Rabukawaqa says. “In the past, it was just the issue of development, thinking of proper development, like, How do we do this right? How do you ensure it’s sustainable? Reforestation. Those seem like simpler times.”

Saltwater intrusion is what is having a major impact on the coastal community of Barishal in Bangladesh, home to Kathak Biswas Joy, district coordinator with Youth Net for Climate Justice, member of the advisory team with Child Rights Connect and the founder of the non-profit Aranyak. It was his work on children’s rights that made him realize that “in Bangladesh, everything is related to climate change.” As it exacerbates existing inequalities,  from the countryside — where salinity and flooding are destroying farmland — to the coastal cities, child labor and child marriage become ever more commonplace. 

So does disease. Increased  has been linked to numerous problems during  and , hair loss and skin diseases, dysentery, hypertension, risk of miscarriage and changes in menstrual cycles as well as difficulty with maintaining hygiene. The deadly dengue fever, already the “fastest growing vector-borne viral disease in the world” as a result of a , has  Bangladesh alongside the COVID-19 pandemic. In a country where water is everywhere, it seems to bring as little relief as it did to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ancient .

Rabukawaqa echoes this sentiment. In a nation that depends almost entirely on the ocean, the traditional and cultural relationship with it is turning from “a beautiful, loving, caring one … into one where the ocean is suddenly becoming our enemy. And we don’t want it to be that way.”

On Your Doorstep

If you think that Alisi Rabukawaqa’s and Kathak Biswas Joy’s problems are far from your world, think again. While  out of 10 top large countries at risk from sea-level rise are located in Asia, no place is safe. Many of the world’s most vibrant cities already face a considerable threat from flooding by as early as 2030 — less than a decade from now. , a nonprofit, has used data from “peer-reviewed science in leading journals” to map areas most at risk over the coming century. While the creators warn that the mapping is bound to include errors, its scope of doom is frightening. 

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If global warming is not halted, cities as diverse as Bangkok, New Orleans, Lagos, Rio de Janeiro, Hamburg, Yangon, Antwerp, Basra, Dhaka, New York and Dubai may see entire neighborhoods submerged. On average, coastal residents experience a sea-level rise of around 8 millimeters to 10 millimeters a year for every 3-millimeter rise in sea levels due to  — the slow sinking of land that occurs in river deltas that can be exacerbated by the extraction of resources like groundwater and oil. 

Tokyo, for example, sank by 4 meters over the course of last century, Shanghai, Bangkok and New Orleans by 2 meters. The Thai capital, built on what is known as “,” saw the water-logged areas it sits on drained to accommodate for agriculture and urban expansion, making flooding a recurring problem, exacerbated by a six-month-long rainy season. 

In Shanghai alone, China’s financial hub that sits in the Yangtze River estuary surrounded by lakes, nearly $1 trillion of assets are at risk as a result of rising waters, according to  by the Financial Times. The Pearl River Delta Economic Zone, which  20% of China’s GDP and 3.8% of global wealth, is one of the areas most at risk of sea-level rise. In May, China’s Ministry of Ecology and Environment  that its coastal waters were 73 millimeters above “normal” average for the period between 1993 and 2011, with temperatures 0.7˚C above the 1981-2010 range.

In Venice, the aqua alta, or “high water,” usually occurs between autumn and spring caused a combination of tide peaks, sirocco winds and the lunar cycle. The city that encompasses some 100 lagoon islands has been threatened by water for centuries, but according to , Venice had experienced as many inundations over 1.1-meters aqua alta levels in the last two decades alone as over the whole of the previous century. The 2019 flood that  80% of the city, killing two and causing devastating damage to historical landmarks and $1 billion of losses, saw the second-highest water level in its history.

Mozambique, with one of the longest coastlines in Africa that spans 2,470 kilometers and is home to 60% of the population, is in danger of losing an estimated 4,850 square kilometers of land surface by 2040, according to an  by USAID. With 45% already living below the poverty line, 70% currently depend on  living conditions. According to a 2021 study published in the Journal of Marine Science and Engineering, 20% of the population relies on fishing as the main income, contributing some 10% of the country’s GDP, alongside 5% brought in by tourism.

Coastal erosion and increasing extreme weather events like Cyclone Idai, the deadliest storm in the history of southern Africa, and Cyclone Kenneth, that hit Mozambique in 2019, threaten all of this — as well as the country’s fragile ecosystems like coral reefs. Idai and Kenneth caused ; at around 22% of the country’s GDP, that’s about half the annual budget. 

If the current projections are correct, 12 of  may be under 1 meter of water by the end of the century. Mumbai, the country’s economic capital, and Kolkata, India’s third-largest city built in the lower Ganges Delta, rely on drainage systems dating back to colonial times. Consequently, Mumbai experiences floods every year these days. According to IPCC assessment, Kolkata  more than any other studied city between 1950 and 2018, by 2.6˚C — ahead of  Tehran’s 2.3˚C and Moscow’s 1˚C — and may see its one-day maximum rainfall rise by 50% by 2100. 

While the United Kingdom is not exactly known for sunny climes, the Albion has been experiencing record-breaking rainfall, more frequent storms and flooding, at a cost of £1.4 billion a year in damages, or around £800 million per flood,  to government figures. With the temperature already a  than a century and a half ago, storms like Desmond, which caused £1.6 billion worth of devastation in 2015, may become . 

In the Thames floodplain,  like Tower Bridge, Hampton Court and the London Eye are at risk by 2050. Earlier this year, flooding in central London influenced Queen guitarist Brian May’s  to pack up and leave, one of the more high-profile climate refugees escaping the rising seas.

In its latest report published in September, the World Bank suggested that as many as 200 million people could be  as a result of climate change, an upgrade from its 2018 figure of 148 million. The Institute for Economics and Peace put the number of  at 1.2 billion. While it is difficult to predict how people will respond to the new circumstances over the coming decades,  by Brookings suggests that of the 68.5 million displaced in 2017, approximately one-third was on the move due to “’sudden onset’ weather events — flooding, forest fires after droughts, and intensified storms.” 

Conflicting studies on migration flows demonstrate just how difficult it is to model human behavior in the face of crisis. But we are highly adaptable and can move relatively freely (in the absence of border restrictions). In the animal kingdom faced with loss of vital habitats and fragile ecosystems, up to a third of all the world’s species can go  as a result of climate change by 2070, or more than half under a less optimistic emissions scenario. It is a tragedy the scope of which merits its own elegy. 

A Drop in the Ocean

To quite literally stem the tide, many countries are adopting new technology in the hope to secure their future. China launched its “” initiative in 2015, with the aim to absorb and reuse 70% of rainwater by 2030; some 30 cities are taking part in the scheme, including Shanghai. Egypt’s historical city of , where landmarks like Cleopatra’s palace and the famed lighthouse are in danger of submersion, has opted for widening its canals and rehousing people living alongside them. 

The Netherlands, a  of which already lies below sea level, has been building flood defenses for , and now prides itself on one of the most advanced systems in the world, including the giant sea gate of Maeslantkering that protects the harbor of Rotterdam. Last year, Venice managed to  the waters for the first time in 1,200 years with the help of the €7-billion  that have been under construction for nearly two decades. 

Farmers in Bangladesh are turning to the centuries-old practice of , while Mumbai has been working to conserve its  that can help absorb the impacts of cyclones and dissipate flooding. 

The Maldives is planning to start the construction of the Dutch-designed  in 2022, a first of its kind, to complement the artificial island of  and its City of Hope, a reclamation project that is currently home to around . Miami is set to spend at least  over the next four decades to fund storm pumps and 6-foot-tall sea walls to protect against a once-in-five-years storm surge. 

The Thames Estuary 2100 Plan has been developed to “protect 1.4 million people, £320 billion worth of property and critical infrastructure from increasing tidal flood risk” as well as “enhance and restore ecosystems and maximise benefits of natural floods” and enhance “the social, economic and commercial benefits the river provides.”

This is all good and well, but if we don’t halt the warming of the planet, all this effort will be but a mere drop in the ocean in the long run. 

I ask Rabukawaqa how she feels about all these high-tech, high-cost efforts to keep back the waters. As a scientist, she thinks technology has a place, but says that in this instance, it’s not enough: “If we are going to look for and promote new technology that only results in us mining and extracting more from our lands and, in our case, most likely our oceans through deep-sea mining, it makes absolutely zero sense.” Across Fiji, there is widespread extraction of materials like sand and gravel, as well as copper and bauxite ore, which is only compounding the existing problems. “Maybe it’s not profitable, the way we are living and moving on this planet,” she says. “We need to move slower in this world.”

The Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow — home to the Industrial Revolution — was  as the “’last, best chance’ to keep 1.5˚C alive.” With much fanfare and squabbling over minutiae, the summit closed with its president, Alok Sharma, reduced to tears by India’s last-minute watering down of commitments on phasing out fossil fuels. On the same day, India’s capital  experienced levels of pollution that forced it into lockdown. While it is already one of the world’s most polluted cities, the symbolism of the timing is hard to dismiss. 

Just as it is most at risk to sea-level rise, Asia — including Australia — is the world’s biggest  of coal, accounting for three-quarters of the global total. With India setting its net-zero commitment to 2070, China to 2060 and the US announcing that it is unlikely to bolster its COP26 pledges to reach net-zero by 2050 in the coming year, it feels like a losing battle for low-emitters like Fiji and Bangladesh. Biswas Joy is disappointed that world leaders ended up blaming each other instead of coming up with a concrete plan for climate financing for developing nations. “It is not a relief — it is our needs,” he says. “We are not begging.”

“We deserve to continue to exist. But our existence really depends on everyone in the world coming to agree,” echoes Rabukawaqa. Both feel that their futures have been traded for profit margins. With just  Pacific Island leaders present in Glasgow vis-à-vis over 500  representatives, it is an unsurprising sentiment.

According to  (CAT), the Glasgow agreement has left a major credibility gap, with the planet still on course to produce twice as many emissions by 2030 as are necessary to keep the temperature rise below 1.5˚C. Without long-term target amendments, CAT calculates that we are on course for a 2.4˚C increase by the end of the century based on pledges alone. Projected warming under current policies is 2.7˚C. The most optimistic scenario, if all pledges are implemented, still has us on course for 1.8˚C by 2100. 

Does all this mean that our future is out at sea? Both Biswas Joy and Rabukawaqa are hopeful. There were good things that came out of COP26, like the deforestation pledge and the fact that decades of activism by small island nations — or large ocean states, as they like to call themselves, Rabukawaqa jokes — have finally moved the needle on fossil fuels. Biswas Joy plans to continue his activism — and vote, when he is finally old enough. “Tomorrow, we come in, we try again,” says Rabukawaqa. “It’s big work.” But for her, “Optimism is not a choice. We have to do this.” She laughs, contagiously.   

*[Correction: An earlier version of this piece stated that Cyclone Idai alone caused $3.2 billion worth of damage in Mozambique in 2019. This article was updated at 16:45 GMT on December 13, 2021.]

*[With thanks to  for his help with fact-checking the article.]

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Fiji’s Women Are Living the Reality of Climate Change

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When leaders of almost 200 countries get together regularly under the Conference of the Parties (COP) banner, bringing their diverse set of social, financial and environmental challenges to solve the climate change diabolical problem, words do matter. But then those words need to be followed by action. Urgent action!

And if the previous 25 COP summits have taught us anything, it is that the promises and pledges have missed the mark, and actions have left the global problem of climate change wanting — and wanting a lot more than it has received so far. By that, I mean the promises and subsequent actions have fallen short of ensuring with a level of certainty that global warming remains below 1.5°C by 2100.

Nevertheless, the more optimistic observers believe that the 1.5°C target is still alive. But in the of Alok Sharma, president of the recent COP26 summit in Glasgow, “its pulse is weak, and it will only survive if we keep our promises. If we translate commitments into rapid action.”

The Bad News

So, what has COP26 promised future generations? Or how long is a piece of elastic band? I don’t mean that to be a cynical question, because setting targets, making long-term promises in a rapidly changing world is indeed a very difficult task for any world leader. Ultimately, will the collective promises, even if implemented, be enough to keep global warming below 1.5°C?

Clearly, we won’t know what the resulting carbon abatement outcomes will be. And therein lies one of the problems of all COP26 outcomes: great uncertainty. That’s because there are many moving parts, many variables and unknowns, many players.

Depending on who one listens to, the likely outcome of COP26 could be anywhere between limiting global warming to within 2°C and 3.6°C. The analysis suggests widespread agreement between a number of assessments and that current policies will lead to a best estimate of around 2.6°C to 2.7°C warming by 2100 (with an uncertainty range of 2°C to 3.6°C). 

If countries meet both conditional and unconditional  (NDCs) for the near-term target of 2030, projected warming by 2100 falls to 2.4°C (with an uncertainty range of 1.8°C to 3.3°C). If countries meet their long-term net-zero emissions promises, global warming would be reduced to around 1.8°C (1.4°C to 2.6°C) by 2100, though temperatures would likely peak at around 1.9°C in the middle of the century before declining. But that’s if all the “ifs” do actually take place.

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And what happened to the 2015 Paris Agreement of limiting warming to 1.5°C? The reality is that to meet the Paris accord, coal must be phased out of the power sector in member states of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) by 2030 and globally by 2040. As there’s a lot of coal “in the pipeline” in China, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam and Australia, there’s little chance of that happening. And the best COP26 was able to deliver was a “” (not out) of fossil fuels.

The other main problem with COP agreements and pledges generally is that countries develop and express their own promises in isolation, which in aggregate are supposed to achieve the slowing of global warming. As such promises — expressed through NDCs — are not legally binding, the best pressure that can now be applied is a new cost (the penalty for exceedance). To date, only diplomatic pressure has been used, a name-and-shame form of influence on the international stage.

Was There Any Good News?

Not that there isn’t any good news — there is. The three main pillars of attention (adaptation, mitigation and finance) have been strengthened. And there’s evidence that emissions are being reduced. Let’s not forget that just seven years ago, it seemed quite plausible that the world was heading toward 4°C warming by 2100, and a number of factors have resulted in the warming curve being significantly flattened.

COP meetings involve numerous sessions, side events, different agendas and groups that explore, present and discuss the many aspects of climate change. So, what the general public receives is a summary and highlights of the parties’ promises and pledges, and the main decisions and outcomes. So, we don’t always hear about the minor achievements.

For example, a significant achievement was that more than 100 countries promised to end and reverse , which has in the recent past led to a significant reduction in much-needed carbon sinks.

The Paris Rulebook, the guidelines for how the Paris Agreement is to be delivered, was also , after six years of discussions. This will allow for the full delivery of the landmark accord, after agreement on a transparency process that will hold countries to account as they deliver on their targets. This includes a robust framework for countries to exchange carbon credits through the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). 

To promote approaches that will assist governments in implementing their NDCs through voluntary international cooperation, the framework now allows a price on carbon, which countries exceeding their NDCs would bear.

As before, and necessarily, there has also been much emphasis put on adaptation programs and financial support from developed countries for developing countries already affected by the impacts of climate change.

Then there are other minor changes that will be taking place. The International Sustainability Standards Board will the new global standard next year to replace a confusing mixture of disclosure practices that some companies now use to assess the impact of climate change. The new standard will see companies provide a more complete view of enterprise value creation — showing the inter-connectivity between sustainability-related information and financial information. This should make the data on which investment decisions are made more reliable and comparable.

What Now?

So, what happens next? Leaders have been “encouraged” to go back to their desks and strengthen their emissions reductions and align their national climate action pledges with the Paris Agreement.

COP26, more than all previous COPs, has heightened the participating countries’ awareness of the severity of climate change and its impacts, particularly on developing countries. It has led to a much higher level of awareness of the urgency of actions required. There’s also now no doubt of the enormous tasks ahead to avert the anticipated global impacts.

Watch this space, while the universe looks on.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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What’s astonishing is that people outside the United States had a much better understanding of what was going on inside this country. By all objective standards, America was doing a terrible job back in 2020. We had the highest number of infections and the highest number of deaths. We had critical shortages of personal protective equipment, and hospitals in a number of cities and rural areas were completely overwhelmed. Contact tracing was sporadic and masking requirements inconsistent. The federal government was incoherent, to put it mildly, and states veered off in very different directions, some of them suicidal.

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So, how could nearly half of America give a thumb’s up to such a nightmare? Part of it was pure nationalism (whatever America does is by definition great), part ideological (whatever the Trump administration did was by definition great), and part of it simply ignorance (the pandemic was a hoax, the numbers were exaggerated, it’s bad all over).

This perception gap between outsiders and insiders does not bode well for the global response to the climate crisis. After all, the tendency has been to point fingers at others and rarely at one’s self. Everyone has criticized China for its expanding carbon footprint. The Global South has criticized the industrialized north for producing the lion’s share of carbon emissions over the last 150 years. The United States has been attacked for its devotion to fossil fuels, its radical swings in policy and its ungenerous arrogance. They are all correct. But rarely are such judgments balanced by self-criticism.

The domestic-international gap in perceptions is not quite as large on climate change as it was on the pandemic back in 2020. For instance, 39% of non-Americans surveyed by Pew in 2021  the US record on climate change as “good.” A much larger number of Americans, 49%, that opinion. More troubling is the ideological in the United States, with 67% of those on the right and only 26% on the left thinking that the US record is good.

At COP26 in Glasgow

Such gaps in perception were on full display at the big climate confab that’s taking place in Glasgow. Last week, leaders gathered to make declarations while critics mobilized in the streets to decry the insufficiency of those efforts. This week, the negotiators try to transform the declarations into numbers.

A couple of those declarations look promising. A deal on beginning to reverse deforestation by 2030 would be a great step forward (of course, a similar agreement in 2014 would also have been a great step forward). A pact to cut methane levels by 30% by 2030 is certainly welcome, but the biggest sinners in this regard (India, Russia and China) are not yet on board.

The assembled leaders agreed to what they have called the “Glasgow Breakthrough Agenda” five sectors that account for half of all carbon emissions: power, road transport, steel, hydrogen and agriculture. This collection of initiatives is meant to create 20 million jobs and increase global GDP by 4% over what it would otherwise be by 2030.

Deeply troubling in all of these declarations is the continued reliance on private finance to lead the way toward a carbon-neutral world, like the pledge from the captains of finance to push for cleaner technologies. Unfortunately, they are not making a comparable commitment to stop investing in fossil fuels.

Just as citizens of countries tend to view the climate policies of their own governments more favorably than outsiders do, the leaders of the international community generally have a self-congratulatory approach to their own efforts. Those on the outside of the Glasgow meetings, on the other hand, were harshly critical. “Blah, blah, blah,” said climate activist Greta Thunberg in one of her latest jeremiads against the insufficiency of response. Let’s be clear: it’s not nothing.

Going into the Glasgow meeting, the cumulative impact of all the pledges countries have made to reduce their carbon emissions would have led to the world heating up to 2.1 degrees Celsius (over pre-industrial levels) by 2100. Factoring in the pledges made at Glasgow, to the International Energy Agency (IEA), will bring down that number to 1.8 degrees.

It’s not the 1.5 degree level that represents the consensus of scientists and activists who want to avoid the worst effects of climate change. But it’s also the first time that the international community has managed to get below the 2-degree mark, which was the upper level established by the 2015 Paris Agreement. But wait, this analysis comes with a number of important asterisks.

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First, despite all the fine words surrounding the Paris accords, countries have largely not met the agreement’s voluntary limits. Five years after making those commitments, countries on track to reduce carbon emissions by a mere 5.5% by 2030 compared to the minimum requirement of 40-50%. That’s probably a generous estimate. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, meeting the Paris commitments would only result, by 2030, in a 1% reduction from 2010 levels.

Both estimates, in any case, are probably off because, as The Washington Post  this week, the data is incomplete and sometimes falsified outright. Algeria hasn’t reported since 2000, Qatar since 2007, Iran since 2010, China since 2014, Libya and Taiwan since, well, never. In all, 45 countries haven’t reported data since 2009. No country claims the carbon emissions from international travel and shipping (more than a billion tons a year). Countries like Russia and Malaysia have subtracted carbon emissions from their balance sheets based on their forests, and sometimes those estimates bear little relationship to reality. Even the emissions they do report don’t line up with the estimates of independent assessments. According to The Post, as much as 13.3 billion tons of carbon each year goes unreported.

Compounding this problem is the so-called brown recovery. The modest reductions in carbon emissions that took place during the COVID-19 economic shutdowns are being obliterated by the burst of post-pandemic economic activity. The world could have built back better in a sustainable manner. Instead, it is back brown.

So, let’s take another look at the IEA prediction of substantial progress after Glasgow. The UN’s own estimate,  this week, suggests that the combined reduction in global temperature as a result of the Glasgow pledges — given the failures to meet earlier commitments, the gaps in the data and the current upsurge in post-pandemic emissions — will be a mere .1 degrees, not .3 degrees. And the world is heading not toward a 2.1-degree Celsius increase by the turn of the next century but 2.5 degrees.

So, the gap between perception and reality has some very dangerous consequences indeed. To narrow that gap, activists will have to continue to push governments to do better. Individuals think they are doing enough, think that their governments are doing enough and, on the whole, consider climate change to be somebody else’s problem. They have to be persuaded otherwise.

Bridging the Gap

One of the great compromises — or grand delusions, if you prefer — at the heart of the Breakthrough Agenda is encapsulated in the phrase “green growth.” At Glasgow, the luminaries promise millions more jobs and a boost in global GDP. Political leaders are not in the business of taking things away from people, of promising belt-tightening, of Scrooging everyone’s Black Friday buying spree. At Glasgow, like pretty much everywhere else, politicians promised more jobs (green ones), more energy (the clean kind), more gadgets (like electric cars).

More, more, more has been humanity’s mantra for the last 150 years or so. It used to be only the watchword of the rich. The Industrial Revolution democratized the phrase. The problem, however, is that the planet can no longer accommodate our collective voracity. There just isn’t enough stuff to go around.

Oh, yes, of course, sunlight is unlimited and will be for the next umpteen million years. But the resources it takes to capture that sunlight — the materials for the solar panels, the energy to build those panels, the land to site solar farms — are not unlimited. The same applies to wind and waves and geothermal.

So, we’re going to have to have a serious sit-down about this problem of economic growth and our unexamined assumptions about more, more, more. That needs to be a global conversation, but the north continues to out-consume the south by an order of nine to one, if you  the per capita carbon footprint of the United States (15.53) with that of Indonesia (1.72). So, global equity has to be part of this conversation as well — transferring resources to the Global South on an unprecedented level to ensure an equitable green transition.

It’s not just a bill of reparations for what the industrialized world has extracted — often through outright theft — over the last few hundred years. It would also need to reverse the current outflow of resources from the Global South. As I wrote recently, “By one estimate, the Global North enjoys a $2.2 trillion annual benefit in the form of underpriced labor and commodities from there, an extraction that rivals the magnitude of the colonial era.” And that doesn’t even count the debt repayment outflow. Or the costs associated with ongoing climate change, which disproportionately affects the Global South.

Here, the gap in perceptions turns deadly. Consumers can believe that they are doing their part by buying electric cars. Americans can believe their government is going the extra mile with the clean energy provisions of the new infrastructure bill (all those charging stations) and perhaps one day the Build Back Better bill as well. Europeans can feel good about themselves by meeting the  of their new Fit for 55 provisions (which mandate a 55 percent reduction of carbon emissions from 1990 levels by 2030). The international community is awash in self-congratulation after the meeting in Glasgow and all the promises made.

But all that good feeling will leave us thinking that we’ve done enough. In this case, the perfect needs to be the enemy of the merely good. As the waters continue to rise, good simply is no longer good enough.

*[This article was originally published by .]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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COP26: Can People Power Save the World?

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The impacts of climate change are no longer just an environmental or political issue but also a complex social problem with immense repercussions for the well-being of women, girls and marginalized groups who already face injustices due to gendered power dynamics and a lack of control over the use of resources. Studies have that women and girls are 14 times more likely to die or be injured than men due to a natural disaster. They are subject to a number of secondary impacts, including gender-based violence, loss of economic opportunities and increased workloads.

Knowledge and Understanding

Not only are women more affected by climate change than men, but they also play a crucial role in climate change adaptation and mitigation. Women have the knowledge and understanding of what is needed to adapt to changing environmental conditions and to come up with practical solutions.

But their knowledge and expertise are still largely untapped resources. Restricted land rights, lack of access to financial resources, training and technology, as well as limited access to political decision-making, often prevent them from playing a full role in building resilience in the face of climate change and other environmental challenges.

Wealthier nations, which have often used colonialism, territorialism and capitalism as means of defining progress, have caused irreversible damage to the environment, largely contributing to the deterioration of climate worldwide. Today, the Pacific Islands may be a group of nations most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, with some facing possible obliteration.

In 2021, as the fear and uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic seemed to be the biggest immediate threat facing the global community, the Pacific region was not spared from catastrophic climatic events. The year began with tropical cyclone Zazu affecting American Samoa, Samoa, Niue and Tonga, and tropical cyclone Yasa landing in Fiji and Vanuatu within the span of a week.

The Pacific is most definitely experiencing more frequent and intense cyclones than ever recorded. For example, Yasa became the most powerful tropical cyclone of 2020, beating Goni with a minimum barometric pressure of 899 mb (26.55 inHg) and a maximum wind speed of 250 km per hour (155 mph). It was also the fourth most intense South Pacific tropical cyclone after Winston (2016), Zoe (2003) and Pam (2015), while Zazu dissipated into an extratropical cyclone.

With this trend of disaster in the region, the need for resource allocation is great. In 2018, Global Humanitarian Overview shows that $23.17 billion in was received in worldwide appeals. According to the Lowy Institute’s Pacific Aid Map, $132.11 million was committed to the Pacific in that year, a mere fraction of the global effort. The Pacific’s biggest continue to be Australia and New Zealand.

The United Kingdom’s of £290 million to help countries prepare for climate change is welcome. However, past pledges by wealthier industrialized regions have failed us. For example, the commitment to raise $1 billion in climate funding has not happened and continues to be discussed at COP26. These resources are crucial for the countries and people most vulnerable to climate change.

Lived Realities

The lived realities of women in the communities are often silenced given the limited representation women have in decision-making. The stories we do not hear are of those most impacted by climate change, stories that affect the livelihood and well-being of communities. At the Women’s Fund Fiji, our goal is to shift the power imbalances that prevent the full participation of women, girls and marginalized groups by providing equitable and flexible access to resources that will help women’s and feminist groups, networks and organizations better respond and adapt to the climate crisis.

The women in the rural remote communities of Fiji are among the most vulnerable groups of people battling climate change in the world. Women in Namuaimada Village in Rakiraki specialize in harvesting nama (Caulerpa racemosa) — an edible seaweed, also known as sea grapes, which is found in shallow waters near the reef. The harvesting of nama is done mainly by women, who go out in fishing boats to the reefs during low tide and spend about four hours harvesting the seaweed.

According to the Women in Fisheries Network  funded by Oxfam and the Women’s Fund, women are expert fishers in the coastal zone and the dominant sellers of seaweed, crustaceans and mollusks, with many fishing for household needs and selling the surplus contributing to the income and livelihoods of their families. With rising ocean temperatures, the production of these onshore and coastal marine resources will continue to decline, eventually causing loss of income and increased food insecurity for the fisherwomen.

The assumption that only the livelihoods of coastal women are affected is debunked as we investigate the plight of the fund’s grantee partner, , who are already experiencing the onset of climate change and exacerbated natural disasters creating both short-term and long-term hurdles to their work. The group of 31 women dairy farmers located in the interior of Fiji’s main island of Viti Levu run family-owned dairy farmsteads and are shifting social norms like patriarchy and contributing to decision-making epicenters in a male-dominated industry.

Floods and tropical cyclones have continually disrupted their farm infrastructure and their ability to supply milk to the Fiji Dairy Cooperatives Limited, the nation’s main dairy organization that purchases their milk on a contractual basis. With temperatures expected to continue to rise, their cattle will face greater heat stress. In hotter conditions, lactating cows feed less, leading to a fall in milk production. If climate change continues along the current trajectory, these women will be faced with income reduction and may not be able to support their families or maintain their current independence. 

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This is the unfortunate reality faced by women of Fiji specifically and women of the Pacific at large. Under the guise of the technical and scientific study of climate change and climate-induced disasters, the voices of women in all their diversity are often not heard. Our experiences of the many challenges we face as a group of the population that is most vulnerable are not necessarily accounted for when decisions relating to climate change are made.

This year, leaders of just three of the 14 Pacific Island states made it to the discussions to Glasgow due to COVID-19 restrictions, making it “the thinnest representation of Pacific islands at a COP ever,” to Satyendra Prasad, Fiji’s ambassador to the United Nations. Given that international negotiations are still, in the words of Britain’s former Energy Minister Claire O’Neill, very much a “,” women’s groups are left to bear the brunt of shrinking spaces and resources when it comes to mitigating the challenges of the climate crisis in the Pacific.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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On Sunday, he Congressman John Curtis, a Republican who uncharacteristically acknowledges the reality of climate change. If only other countries emulated the US, all would be well. Knowles politely challenges Curtis with this observation: “The Republican Party has been way behind when it comes to accepting the reality of climate change.”

COP26: Can People Power Save the World?

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Curtis jumps on the occasion to wax sentimental about a trip to the top of a mountain as a Boy Scout that left him with a “deep desire to leave this Earth better than we found it.” He concludes: “I actually think all conservatives, Republicans, have those same feelings — maybe some stronger than others.” In the US, feelings always trump action.

To close the interview, Knowles poses an even more obsequious rhetorical question to Curtis: “Should the U.S. be prepared to lead with new commitments in terms of reaching net-zero emissions?” This allows Curtis to have the last uncontested word as a cheerleader for the Republican Party, generously committed, as always, to responding to the world’s needs: “Republicans want all options and hands on deck to solve this problem.”

Knowles’ Tuesday article focused on the made by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. He misleadingly quotes the New York representative as asserting that “America is back.” Knowles failed to mention what The New York Times’ Lisa Friedman , namely that the celebrated member of “The Squad” traveled to Glasgow as part of Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s congressional delegation. It consisted of 20 Democrats making the trip under the banner of “America is back” slogan as a PR operation for the Biden administration and the still imperiled and largely insufficient Build Back Better bill.

Knowles’ article devoted to Ocasio-Cortez maintains to the very end that the US commitment to solving the climate crisis is already underway and is destined to succeed. In contrast, Friedman details the reasons why none of the legislation Ocasio-Cortez and Pelosi are championing in Glasgow has been passed. She explains why it may not be passed, largely due to opposition by Democrats such as Joe Manchin to its cost. It goes without saying that Curtis’ Republicans will unanimously oppose the bill.

On Monday, Knowles produced an article based on an with Samantha Power, administrator of the United States Agency for International Development. Among the various quotes, Power praised her boss in these terms: “President Biden is the first president to declare fighting corruption a national security imperative, and of course he considers the climate crisis a national security threat.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Fighting corruption:

A mission adopted by one type of regime whose policies are determined by moneyed interests against other types of regimes whose policies are determined by moneyed interests

Contextual Note

In a 2006 in “Third World Quarterly,” Alice Hills noted that the George W. Bush administration “broadened the remit of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) in such a way as to make it a quasi-security agency.” In other words, an agency presumably dedicated to helping the developing world become fully integrated into the security state and the military-industrial complex.

This was already the trend well before the Bush administration. As by France’s School of Economic Warfare, “the CIA nevertheless uses USAID to infiltrate certain political milieux, for example in Latin America, to destabilize socialist regimes in the 1970s and 1980s.”

That is why Knowles can be accused of a certain lack of curiosity when he uncritically reports Power’s formulation of USAID’s mission with regard to the climate crisis: “We want to do more to help countries around the world, especially developing countries, accelerate their clean-energy transition, address pollution, and ensure the world we all must share a cleaner, safer, healthiest planet. And we have an obligation to help.”

Instead of challenging her on the operations USAID engages in and on its ambiguous role in geopolitics, he takes this statement as proof that “Power firmly believes that creating climate equity is a moral imperative.”

Power applauds President Joe Biden’s “pledge to donate $3 billion annually to help developing nations adapt to climate change.” But she “acknowledged that addressing rampant corruption in countries that will need those funds could prove challenging.” Having made such a complaint, one can only presume that Power is aware of how corruption works. But there may be good reasons to suspect some hypocrisy.

The idea she puts forward is that of a generous rich nation, the US, giving away money to small, struggling nations that are somehow afflicted with a cultural disease known as systemic corruption. This means that money made available by magnanimous benefactors is routinely stuffed into the pockets of self-interested local politicians. How regrettable that these backward people have retained such uncivilized and unproductive behavior.

Presumably, Power has, at some point, found the time to consult John Perkins’ , “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” who defined in his preface what the job he exercised when he worked for Chas T Main consultants consists of: “They funnel money from the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and other foreign ‘aid’ organizations into the coffers of huge corporations and the pockets of a few wealthy families who control the planet’s natural resources.” They “cheat countries around the globe out of trillions of dollars.”

Power presents things a little differently. The problem isn’t the operations conducted by global businesses working hand in hand with the CIA. Instead, it’s the fact that the poor countries of the world haven’t solved a problem that no longer exists in the US — corruption: “I think it’s really important for donor countries to do what the United States has done, which is to elevate the anti-corruption agenda and mainstream it across development financing.”

Historical Note

Although both Perkins and Power have conducted their professional lives in the same context, their views could not be more divergent. Is it possible that Power hasn’t had time to read Perkins’ book? Or does she believe that what he doesn’t exist? The real problem is that they have two different views not just of the political organization but of history and the notion of corruption.

Corruption has existed throughout history. It is a standard feature of human relations. At its simplest level, it is an exchange of favors between two people. It becomes more complex when those favors create a conflict with other interests, responsibilities and stated moral commitments.

The truly complicating factor is money, precisely because, unlike a lot of personal favors, it has no . The greatest contribution to the history of the shared Anglo-Saxon civilization initiated by England and perfected by the US was to put money at the core not only of all human activity but of morality itself. When financial success becomes the unique measure of social respectability and when personal interest is elevated above social responsibility, corruption becomes a way of life.

The greatest innovation came with globalization, an inevitable consequence of 500 years dedicated to colonial conquest. It enabled wealthy countries to create a sophisticated, indirect system of corruption that they could even call democracy while condemning the more primitive type of corruption that consists of granting direct favors. Democracy that depends on corporate financing of politicians’ electoral campaigns is an example of systematic, institutionalized corruption.

This is now considered moral. Political leaders of formerly colonized countries who skim money off from aid or loans offered by wealthy nations and corporations provide the example of traditional, “immoral” corruption.

In a series of decisions, the US Supreme Court formalized the distinction between the absolute domination of money over politics — now considered normal and moral — and immoral corruption. Conveniently, people like Joe Manchin are normal (i.e., not corrupt), but leaders of African countries who are manipulated by corporations and supported by the US security state can be critiqued as not living up to the high standards of American democracy.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Climate Around Climate Is Far From Sunny

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Yet the planet has, so far, only warmed 1.2 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. We already have the technology we need to convert our energy systems to clean, renewable energy. Doing so would create millions of good jobs for people all over the world. So, in practical terms, the steps we must take are clear, achievable and urgent. 

The greatest obstacle to action that we face is our dysfunctional, neoliberal political and economic system and its control by plutocratic and corporate interests, which are determined to keep profiting from fossil fuels even at the cost of destroying the Earth’s uniquely livable climate. The climate crisis has exposed this system’s structural inability to act in the real interests of humanity, even when our very future hangs in the balance.      

Looking at COP26

So, what is the answer? Can COP26 in Glasgow be different? What could make the difference between more slick political PR and decisive action? Counting on the same politicians and fossil fuel interests (yes, they are there too) to do something different this time seems suicidal, but what is the alternative?   

Since Barack Obama’s Pied Piper leadership in Copenhagen and Paris produced a system in which individual countries set their own targets and decided how to meet them, most countries have made little progress toward the aims they set in Paris in 2015. Now, they have come to Glasgow with predetermined and inadequate pledges that, even if fulfilled, would still lead to a much hotter world by 2100.

A of UN and civil society reports in the lead-up to COP26 have been sounding the alarm with what UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres has a “thundering wake-up call” and a “code red for humanity.” In Guterres’ opening speech at COP26 on November 1, he that “we are digging our own graves” by failing to solve this crisis.

Yet governments are still focusing on long-term goals like reaching “net zero” emissions by 2050, 2060 or even 2070. These targets are so far in the future that they can keep postponing the radical steps needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius. Even if they somehow stopped pumping greenhouse gases into the air, the amount of GHG in the atmosphere by 2050 would keep heating up the planet for generations. The more we load up the atmosphere with GHG, the longer their effect will last and the hotter the Earth will keep getting.

Wealthy Nations

The United States has set a target of reducing its emissions by 50% from their peak 2005 level by 2030. But its present policies would only lead to a 17% to 25% reduction by then. The Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), which was part of the Build Back Better Act, could make up a lot of that gap by paying electric utilities to increase reliance on renewables by 4% year over year and penalizing utilities that don’t. But on the eve of COP26, US President Joe Biden dropped the CEPP from the bill under pressure from Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and their fossil fuel puppet masters.

Meanwhile, the US military, the largest institutional emitter of GHG on Earth, was exempted from any constraints whatsoever under the Paris Agreement. Peace activists in Glasgow are demanding that COP26 fix this huge in global climate policy by including the US war machine’s GHG emissions, and those of other militaries, in national emissions reporting and reductions. At the same time, every penny that governments around the world have spent to address the climate crisis amounts to a small fraction of what the United States alone has spent on its nation-destroying war machine during the same period.

China now officially emits more CO2 than the United States. But a large part of China’s emissions are driven by the rest of the world’s consumption of Chinese products, and its largest customer is the United States. An in 2014 estimated that exports account for 22% of China’s carbon emissions. On a per capita consumption basis, Americans still account for three times the GHG emissions of the Chinese and double the emissions of Europeans.

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Wealthy countries have also on the commitment they made in Copenhagen in 2009 to help poorer countries tackle climate change by providing financial aid that would grow to $100 billion per year by 2020. They have provided increasing amounts, reaching $79 billion in 2019, but the failure to deliver the full amount that was promised has eroded trust between rich and poor countries. A committee headed by Canada and Germany at COP26 is charged with resolving the shortfall and restoring trust. 

When the world’s political leaders are failing so badly that they are destroying the natural world and the livable climate that sustains human civilization, it is urgent for people everywhere to get much more active, vocal and creative. The appropriate public response to governments that are ready to squander the lives of millions of people, whether by war or ecological mass suicide, is rebellion and revolution. Non-violent forms of revolution have generally proved more effective and beneficial than violent ones. 

Demanding Action

People are rising up against this corrupt neoliberal political and economic system in countries all over the world, as its savage impacts affect their lives in different ways. But the climate crisis is a universal danger to all of humanity that requires a universal, global response. 

One inspiring civil society group on the streets in Glasgow during COP26 is, which proclaims: “We accuse world leaders of failure, and with a daring vision of hope, we demand the impossible. … We will sing and dance and lock arms against despair and remind the world there is so much worth rebelling for.” Extinction Rebellion and other climate groups at COP26 are calling for net-zero emissions by 2025, not 2050, as the only way to meet the goal of 1.5 degrees Celsius agreed to in Paris.

is calling for an immediate global moratorium on new fossil fuel projects and a quick phase-out of coal-burning power plants. Even the new German coalition government, which is expected to include the Green Party and has more ambitious goals than other large wealthy countries, has only moved up the final deadline on Germany’s coal phaseout from 2038 to 2030.

The Indigenous Environmental Network is bringing people from the Global South to Glasgow to tell their stories at the conference. They are calling on the northern industrialized countries to declare a climate emergency, to keep fossil fuels in the ground and end subsidies of fossil fuels globally.

Friends of the Earth (FOE) has published a new titled “Nature-Based Solutions: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing” as a focus for its work at COP26. It exposes a new trend in corporate greenwashing involving industrial-scale tree plantations in poor countries, which corporations plan to claim as “offsets” for continued fossil fuel production. 

The UK government that is hosting the conference in Glasgow has endorsed these schemes as part of the program at COP26. FOE is highlighting the effect of these massive land-grabs on local and indigenous communities and calls them “a dangerous deception and distraction from the real solutions to the climate crisis.” If this is what governments mean by “net-zero,” it would just be one more step in the financialization of the Earth and all its resources, not a real solution.

As it is hard for activists to get to Glasgow for COP26 during a pandemic, activist groups are simultaneously organizing around the world to put pressure on governments in their own countries. Hundreds of climate activists and indigenous people have been in protests at the White House in Washington, and five young Sunrise Movement activists began a there on October 19. 

US climate groups also support the “Green New Deal” that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has introduced in Congress. The bill, known as , specifically calls for policies to keep global warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius and currently has 103 co-sponsors. It sets ambitious targets for 2030 but only calls for net-zero by 2050.

The environmental and climate groups converging on Glasgow agree that we need a real global program of energy conversion now as a practical matter, not as the aspirational goal of an endlessly ineffective, hopelessly corrupt political process. 

“Blah, Blah, Blah”

At COP25 in Madrid in 2019, Extinction Rebellion dumped a pile of horse manure outside the conference hall with the message, “The horse-shit stops here.” Of course, that didn’t stop anything, but it made the point that empty talk must rapidly be eclipsed by real action. Greta Thunberg, the Swedish climate activist, has hit the nail on the head, slamming world leaders for covering up their failures with “blah, blah, blah,” instead of taking real action. 

Like Thunberg’s “School Strike for the Climate,” the climate movement in the streets of Glasgow is informed by the recognition that the science is clear and the solutions to the climate crisis are readily available. It is only political will that is lacking. This must be supplied by ordinary people — from all walks of life — through creative, dramatic action and mass mobilization, to demand the political and economic transformation we so desperately need. 

The usually mild-mannered Secretary-General Guterres made it clear that street heat will be key to saving humanity. “The climate action army — led by young people — is unstoppable,” he world leaders in Glasgow. “They are larger. They are louder. And, I assure you, they are not going away.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

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The Wicked Problem of Climate, Blah, Blah, Blah

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Chakwera highlights the hypocrisy of nations who publicly claim to endorse the idea promoted by the United Nations that urgent action is required while, at the same time, lobbying behind the scenes against the specific recommendations the UN has put forth. To justify their hypocrisy, they create the illusion that it is an equal contest between protecting the planet and protecting a form of economic organization that is destroying the planet.

When they do accept to act, the wealthy countries propose what they call “energy transition,” a sensible approach that nevertheless requires investments that less wealthy nations are incapable of making on their own. President Chakwera notes that “wealthy countries are also imposing energy transition on Africa that risks doing great harm.” He cites the example of forcing African countries to transition by suppressing the use of “natural gas, the cleanest fossil fuel.” Typically, he writes, the ban “only applies to poor countries, while richer countries face few bans on developing or importing gas.”

In other words, Chakwera characterizes the standard attitude wealthy countries put forward to solve global problems. Despite having massively abused the environment for centuries, they say they are willing to make sacrifices now, but only on condition that those who have not contributed to the abuse make the same sacrifices. The blanket gas ban they propose will penalize those who have suffered both directly and indirectly from the wealthy nations’ past and present levels of consumption. “A more nuanced approach,” the president calmly notes, “is needed if climate equity and justice are to be respected.”

Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

Nuance:

The art of taking into account important variables and subtle differences, often exemplified by reasonable politicians in their electoral discourse and eschewed by populists in theirs, but in all cases promptly abandoned by both when proposing and implementing real policy decisions

Contextual Note                                                                                                     

President Chakwera reminds readers that the 2015 Paris accord recognized the principle that “countries that had become rich through hydrocarbons had a duty to cut emissions faster to allow poorer countries to develop.” It also meant that “those same countries had a responsibility to help undeveloped countries adapt to the adverse conditions they did not create.” He provocatively concludes with a challenge. Noting that after the wealthy nations failed to mobilize “the promised billions in climate aid,” he legitimately wonders on what moral grounds they could possibly expect “those with more modest means … to do so.”

In the context of COP26, Yahoo announced what appeared to be a scoop concerning a deal the Biden administration claims to have worked out with six of the biggest banks in the US. It promises of “tens of trillions of dollars,” presumably in the new industries created to respond to the technological challenge of mitigating climate change.

John Kerry, the US special envoy for climate, teased the press with a forthcoming announcement that would clarify the commitment. Kerry hopes to reach “an agreement in Glasgow during the next two weeks that will commit all countries to steep enough cuts in greenhouse gas emissions to ensure the world doesn’t tip over into catastrophic climate change,” Yahoo .

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Kerry revealed an easily forgotten truth. There are many trillions of dollars in private hands sitting out there that could be productively invested in technology designed to stave off a climate catastrophe. Much of that wealth is in tax havens or cryptocurrency, but whatever its origin, people of goodwill could theoretically mobilize it not just to respond to globally-shared needs, but even for profit, since the market for such technology will rapidly grow.

There is, however, a problem Kerry is unlikely to evoke. Money affected to projects of public interest, even if it produces a handsome profit, tends to get blocked in those interests, a state of affairs those who control massive wealth find uncomfortable, if not intolerable. The best-laid plans of Wall Street-dominated politicians, just like those of Robert Burns’ mouse, are likely to go awry. 

The world should nevertheless thank Kerry for reminding us that those mountains of private money exist at a time when every government complains that they have no choice but to practice austerity (partly, of course, because the IMF gives many of them no choice). Which brings us back to Africa. President Chakwera might be the first to encourage Kerry to succeed in his vaunted plan. Except for one thing. Kerry didn’t bother with nuance. He appeared to adopt the very position Chakwera objects to, that obliges “all countries” to commit “to steep enough cuts in greenhouse gas emissions.” He fails to distinguish between the needs and capacity of wealthy countries as opposed to poor ones.

If Kerry hopes to complete the deal, he must be aware of the fact that there are two challenges. One is to convince the people who control the trillions to dedicate it to a cause that is presumably in the interest of the entire globe. The second is to find a way of applying it in an equitable manner by adapting the rules to help developing nations. Kerry seemed to admit as much in a CNN when he observed that “developing countries, even some big ones like India, can’t do this on their own.”

If Kerry can solve the big challenge by getting the banks and their wealthy clients on board, he will easily dismiss Chakwera’s objection to the idea that all countries observe the exact same constraints. Malawi and most African countries will have no voice and no choice. Even with assistance from wealthy countries, they will be disadvantaged. Getting the trillionaires on board is clearly the bigger challenge. They run the global show. They are unlikely to consent to a principle based on public interest that risks, by its example, undermining the one that has produced such wonderful results for them in the past: naked greed.

Historical Note

Starting with President George W. Bush’s to withdraw from the Kyoto treaty a mere two months after taking office in 2001 — far quicker than Donald Trump’s similar decision to of the Paris accord in 2020 — the US has either avoided the question of climate change or only addressed it rhetorically. In 2015, President Barack Obama signed the Paris Agreement primarily because it was so toothless but good for his image. 

In 2001, The Guardian that the two reasons Bush cited for opposing the agreement were that “it exempted developing countries and would harm the US economy.” This mentality has been a constant in Republican politics in the US. But Democrats have consistently followed their lead, content that Republicans accept to bear the blame and appear publicly as the scoundrels. 

Twenty years later, Lazarus Chakwera is echoing the judgment of Gerhard Schroder, the German chancellor at the time. Schroder insisted that it was “important that the US accepts its responsibility for the world climate. They are the biggest economy in the world and the heaviest energy consumers.” Since then, things have considerably changed. Thanks to its rapid economic expansion, China has now become the world’s number one energy consumer. What this means is that some politicians in America, especially those who have built their brand on denying climate change, now have the excuse of complaining that China must act first to reduce its emissions before the US will commit to anything.

The nuanced strategy is simple. Always claim you will act when others first make the effort. The status quo is clearly the most powerful force at work today in human society. Inertia rules. Even when a change of direction is seen as absolutely necessary for survival, there will always be good reasons for keeping things the way they are. Especially if the only recognized driving force for change is money. And more especially if trillions are required.

*[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on 51�Թ�.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post The Climate Around Climate Is Far From Sunny appeared first on 51�Թ�.

The post Jim Naughten’s Photographic Explorations appeared first on 51�Թ�.

In 2019, a estimated that 75% of land and 66% of marine environments “have been significantly altered by human actions,” with livestock production claiming over a third of the world’s land and nearly three-quarters of freshwater resources. This human advance means that at least 1 million animal and plant species currently face extinction.

Jim Naughten’s Photographic Explorations (Interactive)

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Anthropogenic climate change a big part in this staggering loss of biodiversity. With the planet warming faster than at any time in the past 10,000 years, habitats are being destroyed or altered dramatically, driving the proliferation of invasive animal species, affecting food chains, and causing physiological and genetic changes.

The meat industry is thought to around 14% of greenhouse emissions associated with human activity. Each year, livestock burp and fart the methane equivalent of over 3 gigatons of carbon dioxide. The World Resources Institute estimates that between 2001 and 2015, was responsible for the loss of 45 million hectares of lost forest, an area roughly the size of Sweden. According to Greenpeace, a of global greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture and deforestation. Despite all the individual efforts people may make in their daily lives to reduce their climate footprint, since 1988, just have been responsible for over 70% of global emissions.

While humans make up just 0.01% of all life on Earth, according to a comprehensive , we have managed to destroy 83% of all wild animals and half the plants. Wildlife, whose ancestors roamed the planet for millennia before Homo sapiens even evolved, makes up just 4% of all mammals in existence today. This loss is between 1,000 and 10,000 times higher than the .

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British Jim Naughten’s new show, “Eremozoic,” which opened on October 7 at London’s , has man’s relationship with nature at its very heart. The title refers to what American biologist Edward Wilson has described as the “age of loneliness” that is the result of our devastation of the planet. Naughten’s work is striking and eye-catching, but it sends a disquieting message to the audience about our disconnection from the natural world.

With the crucial climate summit due to open in Glasgow on October 31, 51�Թ� talks to Jim Naughten about what drives his work, his vision for the future and, most importantly, hope.  

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Anna Pivovarchuk: First of all, Jim, I want to congratulate you on your very successful show in London. The work in this series is based on dioramas — a 3D model representing a scene we usually see in natural history museums — and, first of all, it is striking. The first thing you notice about the works is how beautiful they are. But then it slowly becomes a little unnerving as you notice that something’s wrong: the colors, the setting, the dimension. What effect were you hoping to achieve here? What reaction did you want to provoke in the viewer?

Jim Naughten: With the current series, with “Eremozoic,” I think what I was trying to explore is what I think is our fictionalized, rose-tinted view of the natural world. I’ve known for about 10 years that it’s in fairly serious trouble. As a long-suffering Guardian reader, I’ve been reading George Monbiot and lots of books about our ancestors and how they were completely intimately connected to the natural world and how, since we’ve become modern humans, we’ve become entirely disconnected from it. It’s a huge and profound shift from the agricultural revolution. What we are now doing is attacking nature and destroying it.

I’ve grown up watching natural history documentaries and thinking that all is well in the world — we live here, the lions live over there, the orangutans live over there. In actual fact, we’ve lost, we’ve destroyed 83% of all the wildlife on the planet since the agricultural revolution. It’s all these things that I think people are beginning to learn about and wake up to and all — well, some of humanity is discovering.

I went to an exhibition in Chicago, in the Field Museum, about five or six years ago, when I was working on the “.” That project was a little bit goofy and frivolous, a sort of historical timepiece; it was supposed to be quite a fun project. When I was making that work, there was quite a lot of humor in the images and how I was making them.

While I was at the Field Museum, it was completely packed to capacity. You couldn’t move because there were so many people there, school buses and tourists. Upstairs there was an exhibition on extinction — not a single person in there; it was completely empty. It was quite weird. You could see people going up to the introduction board, getting halfway through the first sentence and rushing off at high speed to go and see T-Rex or all the animals that are already extinct. I was thinking, It’s tragic. Everyone wants to look the other way.

The statistics were really breathtaking. On the first board, you saw that 30,000 species per year were going extinct due to human activity. Below that they had a little digital read-about which said that since 8 o’clock this morning, 20 species have gone extinct; as I was watching it, it said 21, and there was this big sinking feeling.

Firstly, the statistics were horrifying. But secondly, the fact that there was no one in there, no one was interested. I thought, I have to try to do something about this. I just felt committed. I thought I’d try to make a project and the pictures have to be very eye-catching and they have to be beautiful and engaging. I haven’t quite worked out how it would translate into fictions, but I knew that I had to try. That was the genesis of the project.

Pivovarchuk: You preempted me a little bit. You have that a lot of your work “deals with historical subject matter and attempts to make connections with the past or reanimate history in some capacity.” Projects such as “Animal Kingdom,” “Re-enactors” and “Mountains of Kong” definitely follow this line. But “Eremozoic” has a very different feel, like you are drawing on the past to make a very strong comment about our future. The use of the pink color scheme is such a striking message — this was deliberate, wasn’t it?

Naughten: Well, in a way, it’s trying to create a fantasy world, trying to make a fiction. The reds are quite alarming. It’s interesting, because once the work’s in on the wall, it starts taking on a life of its own and people start interpreting the images in different ways, which I think is fantastic. That’s when art starts working quite well and functioning. I’ve had people say that they think the pictures are absolutely beautiful and joyful — and I am thinking, Ooh, well… And other people say that they find them really disquieting and almost a little bit unnerving. In a way, that’s fantastic, because you have the gamut of different responses and people thinking about the work differently.

But the original idea with the colors is to make them very eye-catching. What you are looking at is a fiction, even before I’ve altered it and colored it, adding layers of fiction on top. So we have a fictionalized view of the natural world, which is in incredible trouble, really. The extinction rate is extraordinary. This hasn’t happened since the dinosaurs were wiped out, 66 million years ago. This is the first time in the 542 million years of life on Earth that a single species has been annihilating all the other ones. It’s never happened before.

There is another fiction, the fact is that there’s a disconnection from the natural world. Obviously, I’m a modern human, so I’ve never been connected. I feel a sense of loss learning about our ancestors and how connected they were to the natural world. I think a lot of people feel that there is something slightly easy about where we’re going. And this fiction that we are disconnected is another one, in a sense that we are actually still part of the natural world, we are primates, we are subject to the rules of nature, and we are also susceptible to things like viruses, for example.

The other idea for the work is to think about how we are disconnected from it, how we regard it and put it in a kind of box — natural history happens over there, you only see it on TV or in a zoo; this is our world, and natural history is a little pocket of it.

Pivovarchuk: Before we dig deeper into the environmental angle, I wanted to ask you about your process. You started out as a painter, only later warming to photography. Could you explain your process of creating these images? What is the hardest bit? Because they are so intricate, so deep and real — and surreal at the same time. How long does it take to make one?

Naughten: So the natural history dioramas are from the late 1800s and through to the early 1900s. They are really beautifully made. Originally, they look incredible. What I do is I photograph them with very, very high-resolution camera. Some of them are made up of elements, so I’ll add skies or move elements around; other ones are just the case of altering the colors. But that’s very, very detailed. It’s usually a very long process. Working out with which colors work can be a very long process.

Some of them work very, very quickly, almost instantly, and then others can take months. “The Kudus” or “The Orangutans” both have 14 or 15 different incarnations as different colors, differently arranged. They just go on and on and on, like an oil painting.  

It’s quite tough. I really miss paint and I’m desperate to go back to it. But there is something you can do with photography — and PhotoShop — if you do it well. I think these images work.  

Pivovarchuk: Let’s get back to the heart of the matter here. You care very deeply about the environment. For instance, I know that you are a committed vegan, which is quite a commitment in itself. These themes are clearly close to your heart. What role do you think art can play in alerting people to the climate issue? Do you think artists are doing enough? Should they be doing more? Is it art for art’s sake, or art as activism, or something in between? Where do you see yourself on that spectrum?

Naughten: It’s really difficult to say. There probably is a lot of art on climate, less so on biodiversity loss. I’m a little bit worried I am in an echo chamber along with Greta and the kids, but it feels like there is a groundswell of people beginning to wake up to the situation. I am sure there will be more art created along the themes of biodiversity loss. I haven’t seen huge amounts. It’s good with this project that it’s caught attention and it’s engaging and hasn’t sent people the other way. I just hope that I get the message across.

And it’s not difficult being a vegan — I don’t see it as a sacrifice. The food is absolutely amazing. Once you start cooking, it’s a different mindset. It’s just wonderful.

Pivovarchuk: We have just had the first awarded by the duke and duchess of Cambridge. How do you feel about such events? Are they a good way to raise awareness of the issue, or is it just glitz and no action?

Naughten: That’s a good question. I find that if I read The Guardian too much, it just gets incredibly depressing, and I can be overwhelmed with the “ecogrief,” I think it’s called. What’s infuriating is that we know what to do, we know how to fix the planet, but we are trapped in these incredibly complex systems. I would say the financial sector driving fossil fuels and Xi Jinping not coming to COP26, for example — it’s just insane. It can get so overwhelming.

Something like the Earthshot Prize: I really enjoyed watching it, even though I am not a royalist. It’s just that you have to have some hope, and you have to have some positivity. So for me, even though it’s got the dramatic BBC music at the end and it seems a little bit overblown, it is really important to keep spirits up and to keep hope going. I think that’s critical.

There’s another person who does that for me: Jane Goodall. She’s incredible. She has a podcast called . She’s absolutely fantastic. She’s got a book called “The Book of Hope.” She talks a lot about how important a sense of — I don’t know if spirituality is the right word, or a kind of a love — she’s worried about science when it’s too cold. I think that’s a really interesting idea. I love listening to her, and that gives me some hope.   

Pivovarchuk: I wanted to ask you about other projects, the Hereros, a Namibian tribe that developed a sartorial tradition of dressing in Victorian-era garments and military uniforms. Again, the images are absolutely beautiful, striking and stark. Obviously, the subjects have made the garments their own, but you cannot unspool the colonial influence there. What is your connection to these images? Why did you find this [tradition] particularly interesting? What do they tell us about our history of colonialism and the way it is still around us these days?

Naughten: The clothing is extraordinary, and what is so interesting about it is the clash of cultures that happened around 1895 when the German missionaries first arrived in Namibia. They first met the Herero tribe, and they obviously tried to Christianize them. They wore animal skins — they looked incredible before they got the Victorian costumes.

Because the history isn’t really written about what happened in the early days, no one quite knows whether they took to them originally or if there was a certain amount of coercion; I’m sure there’s a combination. But now, it is an incredibly important symbolic thing to wear the dress. What they added over the years is the African color and made them their own.

Because they are cattle herders, they are pastoralists, they are completely obsessed with cattle. So the headdresses represent cow horns. It’s quite extraordinary that they would walk or glide, and you’re not supposed to see the feet — they are supposed to almost represent the way a cow moves. They do a cow dance. It’s just a very strange thing.

What happened in 1907 is that the Germans decided they would then take all the land for themselves — it’s a lot more complicated than that — but the Herero fought back and the Germans decided that they would try to annihilate the whole tribe, basically committing the first genocide of the last century.

So the dresses are extraordinary as symbols of survival and defiance. If you see a Herero, you know they are a Herero and you know they survived, you know they’re here. Eighty percent of the tribe were killed in really horrific ways. It’s amazing to see them walk around in these costumes — they are so bold, and you see them set against the desert background.

During the Herero-German wars, if a Herero killed a German soldier, he would take the uniform and wear bits of it, like the helmets, the jackets and boots, so they’d have these very strange, cobbled-together outfit. What that meant was that it was taking the spirit of the German soldier and taking the power from the German soldier, and that was symbolic of having subsumed the power.

That also stuck as a kind of tradition. The Herero have a symbolic army, which is called the paramilitary because it doesn’t actually fight, but it’s there to honor the ancestors. They have a fire that goes all the time, the smoke goes up and connects them to the ancestors, so there’s always a direct line, and the people who were killed are still there.

Pivovarchuk: There is an exhibition that has just opened at Somerset House, called “,” that draws the origins of climate change to colonialism, to the Industrial Revolution and the extrapolation of resources. How do you think colonialism ties to the present climate catastrophe that we find ourselves in? Is it a reflection of how little humans care about the world?

Naughten: Oh, that’s a difficult question. As the Industrial Revolution started to take hold, it’s just one of these things, like a runaway train. People are constantly looking further and further afield for more land to exploit, more opportunities to exploit, especially when they are going to Africa. It continues. It feels now, with hindsight, that it was inevitable that it would happen once the ball starts rolling.

I’m really interested in our evolutionary history and how we got to where we got to. Homo sapiens is really, really, really young — we are 200,000 years old, a blink of an eye. During these 200,000 years, for 99% of it, we were hunter-gatherers, we were foragers and we existed in small bands. We were directly connected to the natural world, we didn’t have a monotheist god, we were completely egalitarian — men, women, children. This idea that humans are more important than animals is a modern idea. You could be slightly rose-tinted about it, but it was a fundamentally different existence from the one we have now.

That changed very recently, 10,000 years ago, with the agricultural revolution. We were, they think, between 6 and 10 million humans on the planet at that point, and what we are now, since we started farming, we are 8 billion. We’ve exploded, exponentially, like a huge mushroom cloud all over the planet, and we are just taking all the resources. Before we were farming, we were living very, very, very, very lightly on the land, and had we not started farming, we would continue in this way for as long as the planet would allow us to. We certainly wouldn’t have climate change.

Before the agricultural revolution, humans made up less than a percentage point of all the mammals on the planet. The remaining 99.5% were wild animals. Fast forward 10,000 years, the tiniest amount of time in evolutionary terms: Humans now make up 36% of the mammals on the planet, our livestock, our caged, brutalized animals, make up 70%, and wildlife makes up 4%. And it’s reducing, very quickly. It’s just completely insane.

Yuval Noah Harari, who wrote “Sapiens,” [“Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind”], who is an incredibly clear thinker and is extraordinary to read, says that industrial farming of animals, in terms of pain and misery caused, is definitely humanity’s greatest crime. I think that’s true.

Pivovarchuk: To come back to hope. Your show opens in the same month as COP26 in Glasgow. Are you hopeful about our planet’s future? What’s going to happen to us?

Naughten: I think like everyone, probably nervous, very nervous. And you hear different points of view that people say it’s a mess, it’s not going to happen. It’s very difficult to have any faith in Boris or any of the leaders there — they all just seem utterly useless. I don’t know the answer to that to be honest.

I was thinking about the situation with how damaging the meat industry is to the planet, and that is one thing that is very difficult to get into the media, for example, or the politicians to talk about. They don’t want to talk about meat because they eat meat. It’s such an unpopular thing to say, even if it’s one of the biggest drivers of climate change, habitat loss. Even when you’re talking to zoologists or ecologists, they might eat meat and they can’t say, Don’t eat meat. So I think we are sort of, pardon the pun, hamstrung a little bit.

I’m an artist, I’m not an expert on these things. I don’t think anyone knows how this is going to go. I’m fearful, I’m nervous, I’m hopeful — I think I got all kinds of emotions. Biden seems to be very encouraging; he seems to be making the right noises. You read something, and you think, Ooh, there’s hope, and then you read something else and you think, Oh my god, this is horrific. So yes, it’s a cliché, but it’s a rollercoaster.

I secretly hope that China is taking it more seriously. Wishful thinking: maybe China is understanding it. But at the same time, idiotically, they are investing in coal, and you think, Oh, come on, you can’t have it both ways. They perhaps understand the problem, they want to address the problem, but they also want to be in the lead.  

As you find in “Sapiens,” he talks about the fact that these enormous problems facing the world are global problems, and it’s incredibly difficult because you have these different nation-states with different ideas who want to be in charge of the other ones. I don’t know. We’ll see. What do you think?

Pivovarchuk: I do have a lot of hope in the young generation. I think they are incredible.

Naughten: Yeah, I went on Extinction Rebellion marches and I went on the school strike [Fridays for Future], which was great. I got there and it’s just thousands and thousands of kids, walking up to Parliament Square, and there was a lump in your throat. I started welling up when I got there — it was really emotional. It does give you some hope, which is really important. Hopefully, the kids are a bit more woken up. My godson, he’s great. He’s 21, he’s such a force for conservation. We talk a lot. So yeah, I’m kind of hopeful — you have to be, really.  

*[“Eremozoic” is on at until November 18. The show is supported by ; 10% of all proceeds from the show will go to FFI.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect 51�Թ�’s editorial policy.

The post Jim Naughten’s Exploration of the Age of Loneliness appeared first on 51�Թ�.