As the world hurtles towards climate catastrophe, the prime suspects keeping the world on this track are busy blocking negotiations aimed at tackling the problem. Climate crimes are not merely the ones already visible, they include the ones that will unfold, they affect humans and other beings currently on earth and others in generations yet to come.
The fact that the suspects openly boast of their crimes, of subverting global efforts to stem the coming storms, and that a multilateral body such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) appears helpless to call them out, says a lot about policy makers’ will to take real climate action. The open boast by such an official should be seen as admittance to a felony.
A report came out last week that an official of a notorious oil company boasted that his company was responsible for articles that ensure climate inactions and promote false market mechanisms in the acclaimed Paris Agreement. He also boasted that their text was appearing in the Paris Agreement’s Rule Book which was being negotiated. The very next day after this boast, as the first week of COP24 drew to a close, four oil producing countries – USA, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia and Russia- loudly resisted the “welcoming” of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s (IPCC) special report on the 1.5 degrees temperature limit. They insisted that the report should merely be noted, and possibly ignored. These countries, and others complicit by their unusual silence, more or less spurned the clear indication by science that the world has a slim window of time to avert catastrophic global warming. This is quite shocking because the IPCC is an agency of the UNFCCC specifically set up to figure out the climate trends and needed actions based on science.
The extreme weather events that have so far accompanied the current 1degree Celsius temperature rise and the pointer from the IPCC report that the world is on course for higher temperature increases, should raise alarm signals. It is reprehensible that people, governments and corporate entities would know the wrong headedness of fossil fuel dependence and yet work to entrench it. A situation where polluters and vested interests throw spanners into the works and processes of agreeing on real climate action demands the removal of such entities from the halls of multilateral negotiations.
It is a no-brainer for anyone to believe, or to propagate the idea that the waning fossil civilization will stretch much further into the future. Good sense must become common sense. The sensible direction is the conservative position that 80 per cent of known fossil reserves must be left unextracted and unburned if we are to keep temperature increases within bearable limits. This means that oil, coal and gas companies must stop searching for new reserves, even though that is the linchpin with which they attract funds from speculators and investors.
The current epoch has been erected on the platform of exploitation, accumulation and consumption. We have gotten to the planetary limits possible for continued reckless exploitation of nature. We need an alternative logic, a radical mindset change. This is not about doing things better or more efficiently; it is about toeing a totally different track, or pathway. We need a wholesale socio-ecological transformation. This is not a pipedream. There is much thinking and organizing going on in this direction around the world. In Uganda, there is the Sustainability Schools in villages; in South Africa there is the Environmental Justice Schooland in Mozambique there is the Seeding Climate Justiceprocess. In Nigeria, Health of Mother Earth Foundation runs the School of Ecology. Similar initiatives, many in the ecosocialist mold, are ongoing in Asia, Europe, North and Latin America. They all point to what labour framed as just transition from a carbon economy.
Although the just transition idea is anchored on energy shifts and creation of decent jobs, it extends to the need to transform our societies in such a way as to protect the best interests of the planet and the peoples. It is the vision of another world that confronts the challenge of building viable and sustainable societies. Just transition demands a tackling of the increasing inequality, including in terms of wealth and resource ownership. It is at the core of a much-needed system change.
When climate activists demand system change, they are referring to concrete systemic alternatives that are getting reluctantly recognized in the formal climate negotiations. Here we are referring to issues like loss and damage, gender rights and the rights of indigenous peoples. To these must be added the essential need of reparations to territories and nations that have been ravaged, exploited and rendered doubly vulnerable to climate impacts. These deserve payment of climate debts and not grants or extensions of charity. In addition, those responsible for ecocide must be held to account and made to pay for the full restoration of damaged ecological systems.
Just transition with decent jobs may also require a change in corporate management. The visions of corporate top brass may not be as long-term as those of the workers on the short floor. How about upending the current system and enthroning cooperative leadership from below?
As COP24 drags to a close, we can safely say that there will be no backslapping as was the case in Paris in 2015. Now we know that corporate interests ensured that an inherently ineffective and boobytrapped agreement was foisted on the world. We also now know that the same forces are working hard to ensure that the Paris Agreement Work Programme is tilted to ensure business as usual and allow fictive net carbon neutrality computations and dangerous technofixes. Surprisingly, there has been wide disagreements between rich nations and the vulnerable nations on how the NDCs will be delivered and evaluated.
Nevertheless, we applaud the committed African negotiators at COP24. They largely stuck to the justice principles of the climate convention. They also resisted a crafty rewriting of the Paris Agreement and defended the interests of the continent and other vulnerable peoples. The performance of African negotiators at the climate conference was in sharp contrast to that of their counterparts who bore the flags of the continent at the recently held Convention on Biodiversity COP14 that held in Egypt in November. In that conference, the negotiators played the scripts of the biotech industry and related political jobbers, and fought tooth and nail to eliminate regulations, allow risky technologies and to generally undo the safeguards that their predecessors had carefully built. The days in Egypt were sad days for Africa. In Poland, it can be said that although the process was less than would have been expected, our delegates did not trade the continent for some cheap copper coins.
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This piece was first published under the same title in my column The Instigator in Leadership Newspaper, Nigeria, on 14 December 2018. You can also watch an interview with Democracy Now! at COP24 in Katowice here.