CoP will fail us: again
The climate-negotiations system wasn’t designed to succeed
By Rupert Read
Few global events are synonymous with failure over a span of a quarter-century. Regrettably, the yearly meeting of world leaders to prevent global overheating is one.
The 27th edition of this meeting – the Conference of the Parties (CoP) – has now begun, in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt. Since the Paris Agreement was signed at CoP21 in 2015, governments have brandished paper pledges to be ‘net zero by 2050’, in place of actually cutting greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon emissions hit record levels again last year while governments spent more on fossil fuel subsidies than when the Paris Agreement was signed.
You might think this makes a mockery of the Paris Agreement but, really, this is how it’s supposed to ‘work’. That is to say: The CoP system was designed to fail. An international agreement actually intent on reducing CO2 levels would imitate the 1987 Montréal Protocol on ozone-destroying chemicals. That system had built-in enforcement mechanisms: trade sanctions. The UNFCCC system, which oversees CoP’s negotiations, does not. The Montréal protocol reversed ozone depletion, but to vested interests it was a dangerous precedent of forceful public action. A similar process for addressing manmade climate change would hurt profits far more than Montreal; thus, in this age of neoliberal triumph, we have CoP, CoP, CoP, instead. Each year of talk talk talk substitutes for walking the walk.
So the CoP system has failed, as neoliberals intended. There have been 26 meetings of the climate CoP since 1995 and 24 years where carbon emissions increased. Arguably, the diplomatic victory of the Paris Agreement mainly prolonged hope in a largely impotent system.
Paris’ promises were never backed by enforcement, so our ‘plan’ for addressing the fact that we’re inches from the 1.5°C ‘safe’ warming limit, and traveling at record speed, is to hope harder. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) says global emissions must peak before 2025 and be reduced by 43% by 2030, just so we only exceed 1.5°C warming slightly within the next ten years. The best option the IPCC can offer us for getting under 1.5 in the long term is hypothetical deployment of carbon removal technologies on a stupendous scale, dragging temperatures back down by this century’s end. Technologies that are wholly unproven and unscaled.
And so I’m calling it already, now: CoP27 will fail. It may claim to keep “1.5°C alive” through hope unsupported by action. It will in fact produce only new proclamations, repeating old patterns.
Just before CoP26 last year, the science journal Nature published a survey of top climate scientists. Just 4% of respondents thought limiting overheating to 1.5°C was likely. A majority expected a catastrophic 3°C of overheat.
The world is becoming chronically unsafe, especially in poor countries on the front line of climate breakdown who contributed least to the climate crisis, and among the children of tomorrow who contributed nothing.
What should we do? Hope the techno-utopians will geo-engineer solutions for cooling the planet? Despair at humanity’s folly and live off-grid until the apocalypse comes? The real solution is obvious: it begins with admitting the collective failure of institutions entrusted to address dangerous climate change.
Admitting failure could prompt new, deeper, wider waves of anguish, grief, anger and – crucially – determination. It could pave the way to an engaged acceptance of the existential crisis we’re in.
Admitting failure means leveling with the public about what really needs to happen to stay below ‘well below 2°C’. And it means preparing for what living in a 1.5°C+ world will inevitably bring. In particular, realistically planning transformative adaptation to the concrete consequences of our failure – rather than focusing solely on unrealistic emission cut ‘promises’ – can prompt far greater seriousness about damages being sustained on the climate ‘front line.’
Alternatives to CoP must be invented, such as perhaps global citizens assemblies. Thinking bigger still: a new, sleeker ‘climate coalition of the willing’ could be formed among states that are truly ‘up’ for international sanity on climate – making binding commitments among themselves that others won’t – leading by example. The Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty provides an example of the form this could take. After resisting this treaty overwhelmingly a year ago, this past month the European Parliament overwhelmingly endorsed negotiations to create it.
We should aim for international seriousness along these lines, beyond CoP. But experience shows we can’t rely on it. So we should also act now wherever we have power in our lives. Local community action will reduce ongoing harm, and build resilience to rising climate chaos. Workplaces and professions can lead (and lobby) where governments fail. Religions must also step up; for Creation is being destroyed.
So forget CoP. We have to force the action, mostly from the bottom-up. As we start to admit that CoPs will never deliver, it becomes inevitable that hundreds of millions will, for the future’s sake, step into the vacuum of responsibility that then becomes apparent.
Why not be among the first?
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Dr. Rupert Read co-directs the Moderate Flank Incubator. His latest book is Why Climate Breakdown Matters.
