Strategic Retreat

This is a topic that needs to be addressed urgently, but is not even on the agenda at COP26. So far, the agenda has been about groups of countries making grand statements concerning reducing carbon emissions sometime in the future.

As stated in my prior column, humanity emits 100 million tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every day. We have all heard the quote: “a journey of 1,000 miles begins with a single step.” Applying that to COP26, countries are saying something like “by 2030 we will be 300 miles further along on the 1,000 mile journey.” A much more meaningful statement would be, “we join other countries to reduce our carbon emissions by 10% in 2022”. That means that next year it will be down to 90 million tons a day. There is enough known about emissions that this would just be picking the low hanging fruit… something that could be done relatively painlessly.

If the world just focused on 10% less GHG emissions every year and dealt with specific reductions, almost by months, there could be an ongoing measurement of real and immediate reduction. The fact that this is not even in the realm of COP26 raises serious concerns. The climate crisis demands a complete sense of urgency and there doesn’t seem to be any commitments to start today. I think this is because not enough people attending this PR event even know what they need to do as they’ve never done it before. So, such statements…