No such thing as a good COP
United Nations climate change negotiations are considered by almost all climate activists to be ineffective. But breaking the hegemony of imperial and corporate powers over the process compels climate justice movements to engage in the process as a site of struggle, and of solidarity.
This article originally appeared in Consented Magazine in the U.K. Order a copy of the latest, and final, edition, “Environment” by visiting their shop here.
I often have moments during United Nations climate change summits where I imagine an asteroid striking the venue and obliterating us all. I doubt I’m the only person to fantasise about such a release from the annual Conference of Parties (“COP” for short). But the negotiations roll on from year to year — December 2018 saw COP24 in Katowice, Poland — and each year I drag myself along with them. Why?
The impetus to deal with climate change is now so well-entrenched it almost doesn’t even bear repeating. But Arundhati Roy urges us “To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you […] To never look away. And never, never to forget”. So we must begin by reminding ourselves of the context.
2017 was the third hottest year on record. 2016 was the hottest and 2015 the second. 17 of the 18 hottest years on record have occurred this century. The planet has warmed 0.8°C-1.2°C above pre-industrial levels and continues to warm at a rate of 0.2°C per decade. The last time there was this much carbon in the atmosphere was 3 million years ago; the last time global average temperatures were 2°C warmer, the world’s oceans were 25 metres higher.
These abstract numbers mask a violent and current reality: massive crop failures are driving thousands of farmers to suicide and putting hundreds of millions in hunger; extreme weather and slow-onset events are leaving hundreds of millions displaced; climate breakdown is causing the permanent loss of species, irreparable damage to ecosystems, and the worsening of every existing form of injustice.
With the planet all but guaranteed to warm a further 0.5°C, and with disturbingly high probability of much more warming, we are hurtling into a world which cannot sustain an organised global community. Within this century much of South Asia — where 20% of humanity currently live — will be too hot for humans to survive. The region is already routinely devastated by drought. Some people speak about the “new normal” of climate change. There is nothing normal about this. The global climate system isn’t going to stabilize at 1.5°C warming. This is a new, deadly, weird.
Following the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) October 2018 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5°C it is now widely understood that the window of opportunity in which to tackle the crisis is tiny and continually shrinking. Even with their negotiated, understated projections the IPCC experts said in so many words what many people already know: capitalism is killing us and the planet. Either it goes or we do.
We know that most of humanity bears little responsibility for this unfolding crisis. The lion’s share of that responsibility instead falls variously — depending on how you determine attribution — upon a handful of corporations (100 companies are said to be responsible for 70% of all CO2 emissions); a handful of industrialised countries with high levels of historic and per-capita pollution (the United States, Canada, Europe, Australia, and Japan have emitted 66% of all emissions with less than 25% of global population); or a small percentage of the global population (10% are currently responsible for 50% of emissions, whereas 50% account for a mere 10% of emissions). Both the causes of and impacts from climate change can be seen along highly racialized, gendered, and class-determined lines.
Many activists are rightly sceptical of individualistic attempts to respond to climate breakdown — admonitions to eat less meat and take shorter showers — instead they focus on changing the system. I drag myself along to COP after COP (and they are all bastards) because I recognise the importance and utility of contesting multilateral spaces. It is in these political spaces that we can help determine collective, global action, and where we have some possibility to attack the system. In such spaces we cannot afford to have meek social movements.
The United Nations is supposed to be an institution under whose umbrella countries are to work together on global challenges. Unsurprisingly, it is dominated by rich “developed” countries, international financial institutions, multinational corporations and national elites, whose imperialist and capitalist interests it serves. We should therefore understand international fora such as the climate change negotiations as spaces of encounter between past colonial powers seeking to (re)assert dominance and formerly colonized nations seeking to rebuff them. The abstraction of talking about countries squashes certain nuances — no country is homogenous — but it is helpful to state that at the United Nations we are dealing with the histories of, and relationships between, nations. And we are talking about the responsibility of nations.
The 1994 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is the product of a particular moment in world history, when there was stronger political unity and vision among countries of the global South. Before politicians both North and South realised just how drastic and sweeping the changes would need to be in order to address climate change. When trust in institutions of multilateralism had not eroded so fully and fascism was not on the ascendency.
With general willingness to address global problems collectively the UNFCCC adopted its mission: to limit climate change to safe levels without undermining poverty alleviation and the development priorities of the global South. It acknowledged that countries have differing levels of responsibility and capability. These equity principles — “common but differentiated responsibilities”, “respective capabilities”, and “historic responsibility” — are the pillars of climate justice in the international arena. That everyone should do their “fair share” is not a radical idea — most tax systems in the world at least in theory demand more from the rich and less from the poor — but it now seems like one.
At precisely the moment we need international cooperation based on everyone taking up their fair share of the collective effort we instead have a few countries ardently pursuing an agenda that will doom us all. To be effective, our response to climate change must also be fair. Equity is the pathway to ambition. The urgency of the crisis demands coordinated global action and cooperation at an unprecedented scale. No matter what it does, no single country can solve the problem. Instead all countries must act together. To do this they must perceive that the approach is, broadly speaking, fair. The people who created the mess and have all the tools to deal with it should be the ones to do most of the clean up.
However, the position of the global superpower, the United States, is shaped by powerful fossil fuel, mining, automotive, chemical, and agribusiness lobbies which ensures that the main aim of the United States in the negotiations is to shirk its twofold responsibility to a) reduce its own emissions and b) repay its massive climate debt through climate finance for the global South. This has been the case regardless of who sits in the Oval Office. It has deployed all manner of dirty tricks in the negotiations to get its way, from spying and bullying to negotiating in bad faith, intentionally weakening the rules of potential agreements before refusing to be bound by them.
The United States never ratified the 1997 Kyoto Protocol because as George W. Bush said at the time, the “American way of life is not up for negotiation”. To accommodate it, the world abandoned the Protocol’s top-down, science-based targets and timetables in favour of a truly ineffective “pledge-and-review” approach which was eventually codified in the 2015 Paris Agreement. In this approach countries determine their climate policies based not on what science and justice demand but on what decision-makers deem to be politically easy.
The result is tragic and foreseeable: these pledges, the “Nationally Determined Contributions”, if fully realised, would only limit global average warming to roughly 3°C. The real kicker is that now the United States is withdrawing from the Paris Agreement — providing cover for others to possibly follow suit — and withholding its already inadequate pledges of finance from the Green Climate Fund, meaning that developing countries will have an even harder time in meeting their climate targets. The United States has always been bad, now it is just worse. And the contagion is spreading.
Even when leftist governments have emerged, as in Bolivia, Ecuador, and Venezuela, they have, for many reasons not to be explored here, been unable to offer more than symbolism and rhetoric in support of the transformative change required. They have not provided a powerful enough counterforce to the corporate-driven agenda of the global North. The vulnerability of many developing countries gives Europe and the U.S. enough leverage to root out potential unity. After all, the countries well practiced in colonization know how to run a successful divide and rule game.
For these reasons the fight for climate justice that rages on in the negotiations might seem like an exercise in Sisyphean futility. I’ve been to eight COPs and countless smaller meetings so I know the feeling of pushing the rock up the hill only to see it roll back down. But the fight only seems futile because we are weak and divided; in the same way that it seems futile to struggle against what Ursula Le Guin described as the “inescapable” power of capitalism or the “divine right of kings”. We’d do well to remember what she went on to say: “any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings”.
To change everything we must fight everywhere, at once, in coalitions that may bristle with contradictions even as they find common ground. There are many fronts in the defence of life, and while each requires different strategies and tactics, they are all connected. We must identify opportunities for gaining ground on each front and grasp opportunities that open up further possibilities. We must commit to collaboration rather than competition, make common plans and broad strategies, and build collective social power.
The negotiations are one front of many in the fight for climate justice. As frustrating as it can sometimes be the space will continue to exist. Like a rash, ignoring it won’t make it go away — it will only make things worse. The enemies of climate justice understand the strategic value of contesting the space. So must we. Fights over policy, politics, and discourse have material impacts on the lives of many people as well as on our ability to bring about transformational change. We will lose these fights if we don’t show up. In fact, not showing up is one of the reasons we are in this position in the first place.
Registering a critical, dissenting voice is important. Without doing this the idea gets out that everything is under control with the technocrats — we have the Paris Agreement, what need for system change? Countering dangerous distractions such as carbon markets and geoengineering is also crucial. Likewise, challenging corporate control of decision making spaces is a must if we are to have any hope at all of averting the worst-case scenario of climate breakdown. And, in this era of populist xenophobia, demanding international cooperation to achieve deep, equitable emissions cuts can send a powerful signal. There is no adequate response to the climate crisis that is not global. But not everybody realises this.
Approaches to tackling climate change that are not rooted in justice are liable to fail. These are the approaches we will be left with in the absence of much stronger movements for climate justice that use the arena of the negotiations to advance political demands. We have to change the balance of power and redefine the terms of debate. It’s not easy, but if we don’t strive for our dreams we will live our nightmares.
Notes
[1] A broad coalition of civil society organisations have conducted an “Equity Review” which elaborates a methodology and set of principles by which to calculate a country’s “Fair Share” of the required collective climate action — www.civilsocietyreview.org
[2] The most recent effort to bridge issues and constituencies is the attempt, initiated by the Global Campaign to Demand Climate Justice, to articulate a set of People’s Demands towards COP24 — www.peoplesdemands.org.
