Post by Daniel Vockins from the UK Delegation
Walking through the halls at the UN Climate Negotiations in Poznan earlier this month, you’d be forgiven for thinking you were at the heart of the struggle to defeat dangerous climate change. Top-level ministers from every government in the world met to forge a global agreement, the contents of which will decide how the latter half of this century plays out. But in truth, the real decisions are not made at the UN.
Woven through the endless meetings, lobbying sessions, cocktail parties and plenaries was a palpable sense that we will pass the critical 2 degrees tipping point which puts us into ‘dangerous’ levels of warming. Negotiators repeated ad nauseam the party line about how CO2 concentrations of 450 parts per million will stave off the worst impacts of climate change, whilst being briefed behind closed doors about exactly how out of date this target is. Corner negotiators with questions like these and they will often admit as much. It’s exasperating to watch, because we know that the time left to act is running out.
Is there an end to this? Not within the conference halls. Negotiators appear to have little freedom to negotiate freely. One NGO put it to me that up to 90% of their platform is pre-determined before they even step on the plane. With special interests, short-termist electoral cycles and near instantaneous judgement by stock market edict, it is easy to see why governments act in this way. Operating within such rigid parameters, they are essentially players in a game. The small slice of autonomy granted to negotiators offers precious little potential for a breakthrough, and is certainly not enough to secure a deal which takes the latest scientific discoveries seriously.
So, what do we need now? Firstly, to recognise that we are a long way from where we need to be and second, to understand that our power lies in the ability to make a just agreement possible. Negotiators are not principally champions of humanity or social justice. They’re playing a game, according to the rules they’re given. Their capacity to act is limited by what is politically acceptable.
Nonetheless, politicians as individuals want to act on this – nobody who has seen the true scale of this problem couldn’t. But at the moment, taking meaningful action necessitates defying the negotiating position set by domestic governments, which means losing your job. By Copenhagen next year, where the final treaty will be agreed, the playing field must look substantially different. In essence, the ground rules must be that taking strong action on climate change is the only way a treaty can be signed because the public will accept nothing less.
To drive this point home, just a few weeks ago Climate Change and Energy Secretary Ed Miliband called for a “popular mobilisation” to make it possible for the process to move forward, whilst Al Gore has said publicly that he “can’t understand why there aren’t rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal-fired power plants.” We should think seriously about this call to action – it comes from a place of real desperation and an awareness of the limitations of a politics not yet built to deal with a problem like climate change.
Having watched the negotiations for two weeks, I can tell you that if the situation continues as it is currently, we will fail to halt runaway climate change. Poznan achieved astonishingly little but few were surprised. In the 48 weeks remaining before Copenhagen we must substantially alter the context of the debate to make it impossible not to act. Many more campaigns like those that forced through the Climate Act in the UK will be needed and on a far bigger scale. We should not underestimate the scale of this challenge, but I take considerable comfort in that the fact that we, not the politicians in Poznan, are the ones with the power of change at this moment. The next year is the most important in human history.
It’s up to us to determine how it plays out.
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Thanks for your insight. There is no doubt that it will take nothing short of a global uprising to steer the UN Climate talks in the right direction. Fortunately there are a number of groups out there already organizing for direct action and mass mobilizations for next years climate talks that will be held in Copenhagen.
For US organizing check out http://www.copenhagen.risingtidenorthamerica.org . This is just a temporary page. A new one should be up soon.
“Let me give you a word of the philosophy of reform. The whole history of the progress of human liberty shows that all concessions yet made to her august claims, have been born of earnest struggle. The conflict has been exciting, agitating, all-absorbing, and for the time being, putting all other tumults to silence. It must do this or it does nothing. If there is no struggle there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom and yet depreciate agitation, are men who want crops without plowing up the ground, they want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters.”
“This struggle may be a moral one, or it may be a physical one, and it may be both moral and physical, but it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will.” – Fredrick Douglas
Another point to consider is that the carbon issue is the first time such a serious global environmental problem arose without an easy plug-in solution (i.e., we already had substitutes for lead, DDT, and CFCs when those substances were banned). This time all the solutions are relatively painful and expensive.
Consider Al Gore’s speech at Poznan where he mentioned the necessity for a new target, i.e. 350 ppm CO2 at stabilization. This is based on James Hansen’s research into past climate. What Hansen says about this target is that the commonly adopted terminology in evidence at Poznan and in the Copenhagen target is based on a mistaken belief that there is some future date where the atmosphere will contain too much greenhouse gas and the climate change will then be dangerous.
Hansen is saying he is “stunned” to be the one to be saying this, but the point at which Earth is committed to “dangerous” climate change has already been passed, and it was 325 – 350 ppm CO2. He’s saying it isn’t too late to do anything meaningful, as he advocates turning the situation around by stabilization at the lowest possible level as soon as possible and removing some greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. He’s saying its time to change the debate from all this % reductions by dates to aiming for zero net emissions as soon as possible and moving to negative emissions, if removing GHG can be said to be negative emissions. We can’t act to stave off some future “danger”, its here, in the pipeline coming right at us already, and the best we can do is limit the damage.
Whether Copenhagen results in a meaningful agreement or not doesn’t seem that important compared to bringing the US, China, India, the EU, and the rest of the world together in some agreement that will stabilize the composition of the atmosphere as soon as possible.