COP25

This year's United Nations climate summit, COP25, which was held in Madrid after being moved there because of anti-austerity protests in Santiago, Chile, ended Sunday in total failure. You can read a summation in The New York Times or hear about it on Democracy Now! Basically the entire UN Conference of Parties process to address climate change has broken down. The principal activity now is blocking any meaningful measure, and the chief blocker is the United States.

I know from reading Naomi Klein's latest book On Fire, that if we don't radically reduce carbon emissions by 2030 civilization as we know it is in real trouble. Given that the wealthy nations are unwilling to change their ways, we're headed back to the Hobbesian state of nature.

As Asad Rehman explained on Democracy Now! --

So you would have expected governments to come knowing that this was a critical moment and to come with ambition. And instead, we saw the United States, aided and abetted by other rich developed countries, take a wrecking ball to those outcomes. So, first of all, governments came not willing to take action in terms of the lost decade, when they’ve literally done nothing in the previous decade, which has meant that the critical actions that are required in the coming decade are much, much harder. They came attempting to block any support for poorer developing countries, as you’ve just heard from Tasneem. I mean, this is absolutely outrageous.

And what they were actually asking for, not just the United States, but the European Union, as well, is basically to have no liability for the damage that their inaction is causing. And more heinous than that is not only are they not putting anything on the table in terms of genuine emission reductions or the desperately needed finance; what they wanted was loopholes, so that their big polluting companies could continue to pollute, loopholes that would basically bust the budget for the 1.5-degree guard rail. So we’re coming here with governments with no willingness to act and actually acting not in the interests of their citizens, but acting in the interests of their big polluting companies. And it was an absolute disaster.

So the question now we must ask ourselves is: What will it take for our voices to be heard? Now, the climate talks move to the U.K. in 2020. It’s an unprecedented moment. We’re at the end of the decade, the lost decade, and now we’re in the beginning of the new decade. If governments don’t come with that willingness, then — which we can only as citizens force them and hold our own governments to account at a national level so that they come with the right mandates — I think we’re talking about not just losing the 1.5 degree, but the 2 degree. And just to put that in context — because I totally agree with you, sometimes these climate words don’t quite have the resonance — but the difference between the Ice Age and now was only 4 degrees. And already in the pledges that we’ve got for the Paris Agreement, we’re seeing warming that will lead to 3 degrees. We have absolutely no idea of what the world will look like. But what we can say is that the impacts on the poorest people, on the most vulnerable around the world, will be absolutely devastating.

A system as irrational as ours eventually is going to collapse. That's what we are going to witness the next ten years, this collapse, but also the extreme measures wealthy governments employ to manage the collapse.