Nationalism and Climate Change: A Fatal Embrace?
How to address a global problem in a tribal age.
Recently, the nations of the world gathered in Baku, Azerbaijan, to try to solve climate change. It was the 29th such meeting. Carbon emissions are still rising and 2024 will almost certainly be the warmest year on record, so it doesn’t seem like all those meetings have worked very well.
This year’s meeting — hosted by a fossil-fuel-producing country and attended by over 1,700 fossil-fuel lobbyists — didn’t make much of a difference. A lot of world leaders didn’t even show up to the meetings, and the rest spent much of their time “bickering.” The end result — an anaemic climate-finance deal — was generally underwhelming.
As much as I’d love to believe that the world will come together as one and solve climate change, it’s getting harder to have hope that such international meetings will make much of a difference.
One of the aspects of climate change that make it such a pernicious problem is the tension between our system of international relations — based on sovereign nations acting in their own self-interest — and the global nature of the problem. People have a really hard time acting for the good of all humanity; we’re tribal by nature, and we would rather focus on the welfare of people who are like us…
