Will Climate Action Be Another Casualty of the Paris Terror Attacks?

With less than the two weeks to go before the COP21, the Paris attacks have perhaps done more harm to the UN conference than domestic climate-change deniers could ever have hoped to achieve — a perverse and happy outcome for the fossil-fuel-dependent Islamic State, which, according to U.S. Defense Secretary Ashton Carter, derives $40 million a month producing and exporting oil.

The site for the climate conference, at Le Bourget (north of Stade de France), was already considered remote and isolated from people gathering in Paris from around the world who care most about climate change. Now the increased security around the site, already intense, will ensure it becomes a VIP bubble, insulated from any kind of civic participation.

On November 29, the eve of the Climate Conference, as many as 100,000 environmental activists had been expected to assemble in the Place de la République for a march through the same streets of Paris targeted by terrorists.Now that long-planned climate demonstration, as well as one scheduled at the conclusion of the conference on December 12, will not happen.

The decision was announced late Wednesday (November 18) by the French Foreign Ministry (which holds the COP21 presidency). The fear is threefold: (1) that such a gathering of people invites snipers and suicide bombers; (2) that terrorists might blend in with the demonstrators and, through firecrackers or other loud noises, create panic and stampedes; (3) that the police necessary to oversee the demonstration should, instead, be attending to other, more serious security concerns.

As for the conference itself, negotiators are reportedly now more pessimistic than ever about achieving a once hoped-for “big” climate deal, as their national governments — not to mention the constituents they represent — find in-your-face terrorism of more pressing, distracting concern than the abstract future of a warming planet.

In this regard, the terrifying randomness in which innocent café-and-concert goers in Paris’s 10th Arrondissement were cut down was not unlike being on the receiving end of a drone strike in the middle of a Mideast desert. No wonder, as Andrew Cockburn argues in his book “Kill Chain: The Rise of the High-tech Assassins,” drone attacks only inflame the passions of our adversaries. Meanwhile, the “stick monkeys” manning the drones comfortably back in the United States see their prey as mere dots on a computer screen — as abstract and unreal as climate change.