Time to act

The good news from the annual climate summit just concluded in Katowice, Poland, is that the world’s governments agreed on a ‘rulebook’ intended to implement the Paris Accord, the 2015 agreement to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. The bad news is that the world is no closer to actually tackling global warming than before and the rulebook has little binding effect.

Because these annual meetings are more about symbolism than action, it is symbolic indeed that the 24th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), or COP 24, took place in Katowice, in Poland’s coal country. For added irony, the far-right Polish government announced the opening of a new coal mine days before COP24 opened, and Poland’s pavilion featured displays of everyday items such as walls and soap made out of coal.

Admittedly the bar is awfully low, but COP24 was an improvement over last year’s COP23 gathering in Bonn, Germany, when the world’s governments talked and concluded by announcing that they would talk some more. But there were some glowing press releases issued, in which participants congratulated themselves for their willingness to talk. The official COP23 website declared that “we have done the job we came here to do, which is to advance the implementation guidelines of the Paris Agreement”. Evidently, talking about those guidelines was considered sufficient to ‘advance’ the Paris Accord agreements.

COP24’s contribution to advancing the Paris Accord was to agree to a rulebook with no real enforcement mechanism. In other words, the world’s governments had previously agreed to set goals for reducing their productions of greenhouse gases but to do so on a voluntary basis with no enforcement mechanism, and now those agreements will have guidelines as to how those goals will be reported that also have no enforcement mechanism. And governments will be allowed to use their own methodologies to calculate their progress, a gaping loophole sure to be used to cook the books.

If you feel underwhelmed by all this, you shouldn’t feel bad.

It is understandable that participants would like to put a positive spin on the gathering, but COP24 president Micha? Kurtyka was arguably crossing into the territory of unreality with his summation: “[I]s impact on the world will be positive. Thanks to it, we have taken a big step towards achieving the ambitions set in the Paris Agreement. Ambitions thanks to which our children will look back at some point and consider that their parents made the right decisions in an important historical moment.”

More likely, our descendants will curse us for doing essentially nothing to combat global warming as they evacuate from flooded coastal cities and struggle to minimize large-scale agricultural disruptions. Each year that nothing concrete is done, the likelihood of catastrophic environmental damage increases. And there are not many years left before worst-case scenarios become inevitable. Just two months ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a report on the effects of global warming of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and that of 2 degrees warming. There is a significant difference between the expected results of 1.5 and 2 degrees, but the effects at 1.5 are nonetheless serious.

This article has been excerpted from: ‘World’s GovernmentIndulge in Symbolism, Not Action, at COP24’.

Courtesy: Counterpunch.org