Before you call Paris critics party poopers, double-check the guest list
by Kate Colwell, rapid response communications specialist
I wanted so badly to celebrate. As the people in the plenary room cheered and hugged and shook hands over the first global climate agreement in history, the policy analysts and COP veterans around me sat stone-faced, eyes downcast. The party was over — the gifts were unwrapped — and we had lost.
Lost who? Leaders from 195 countries decided that climate change posed a bigger threat than their individual plights. That level of global buy-in is incredible.
Lost what? Delegations would return home and get to work bringing their global emissions closer to a 2 degrees Celsius warming above preindustrial levels by the end of the century. That goal would make a huge impact.
Lost why? The agreement set a floor of $100 billion in aid to developing countries, via voluntary commitments to be reviewed every five years. A global climate finance pot could only help.
But when you play back the reel of the shining success of the moment, take a closer look at the faces in focus: mostly developed, industrialized countries built on the back of fossil fuels, holding their hands high.
We lost the native peoples of every country, whose voices were barred from the COP21 negotiations. Ask any member of the Indigenous Environmental Network, who spoke out at flotillas and marches: the agreement will not save their people. In developing and developed nations alike, people are suffering and dying from both elemental and man-made changes to their environments as sea levels rise, droughts worsen and authorities push false solutions on disenfranchised populations.
We lost the just and binding temperature cap that activists called “1.5 to stay alive.” Make no mistake, the inclusion of 1.5 as a suggestion provided a symbolic gesture of goodwill that allowed developed countries to gloss over developing countries’ life and death realities. Even with the temperature limit of 2 degrees, the world’s major ice caps may melt anyway, speeding warming and sea level rise on a global scale.
We lost any semblance of responsibility from developed nations because negotiators from industrial powers threatened to walk away from the table, right up until President François Hollande banged the gavel, to prevent mandatory financial assistance; because no developed nation committed to their fair share of climate finance for the emissions they’ve inflicted on developing nations; because the careful wording of the agreement exempts powerful countries from liability when front line communities experience irreparable loss and damage due to greenhouse gases.
As George Monbiot, opinion writer for The Guardian, described the climate deal, “By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.” Since the final agreement does not pass the People’s Climate Test, Friends of the Earth U.S. believes the agreement failed to provide the justice that affected populations so desperately need.
There’s only one reason my colleagues from Friends of the Earth International were able to stand up again, at the finale of the talks, and walk out hopeful. We know that governments will continue to push their deadlines, their targets, their bottom lines down to the floor — but the people will not.
Over the course of ten days in Paris, I saw activism on scale unprecedented in my life. Groups from every nationality, 15,000 people en masse, weaved the streets of Paris with red lines symbolizing lines we must not cross, without abandoning those most in need of our help. More than 3,000 people came in by bus, train and plane to spell the words “climate justice peace” across a map of the city just two weeks after the French government banned mass assembly. Indigenous peoples from four continents came to address the legislators directly who are threatening their ways of life, and to show the power and dignity of their cultures in the face of adversity.
It hurts to think of all the global good Paris could have accomplished, had the U.S. government not blocked binding language for shortsighted domestic politics. But my heart beats fuller, stronger than before, when I recall the faces and voices who came to Paris to meet, to talk, to celebrate their people power. Now those people have all returned home, re-energized and re-equipped to affect change with support networks, tools and knowledge.
These people are my hope. They are the future. And Friends of the Earth is proud to stand with them in 2016 and all the years of this fight to come, until we reach climate justice and peace.
