Blog#89—11/14/21
AS THE PLANET DIES ALL WE GET IS BLAH, BLAH,BLAH
By
Richard Davis
This is the 26th year that world leaders have come together at the Conference of Parties (COP) organized by the United Nations. During those years the planet has been increasingly abused by humans and is now in danger of even more climate catastrophes than we have already experienced.
Climate activist Greta Thunberg has declared COP 26 a failure and she has made it clear that as the planet dies all we get are words of recognition that a crisis is taking place. What little action there has been to fix the planet has not been enough and world leaders have nothing to offer but empty promises of throwing money at the problem a few years from now.
According to CNBC, “Climate activist Greta Thunberg said Friday that the COP26 climate summit is a failure, lambasting the U.N.-brokered talks for turning into a public relations exercise. “It is not a secret that COP26 is a failure. It should be obvious that we cannot solve the crisis with the same methods that got us into it in the first place,” Thunberg said. “The COP has turned into a PR event, where leaders are giving beautiful speeches and announcing fancy commitments and targets, while behind the curtains governments of the Global North countries are still refusing to take any drastic climate action.”
One of the most important goals of any climate action is to keep warming of the planet below 1.5 degrees Celsius. That is an elusive goal because major polluters cannot come together to develop strategies to lower temperatures. China didn’t even make an appearance at COP and it is clear that even though they are a major planet polluter they will probably never agree to environmental changes in collaboration with other polluters such as the U.S.
And as CNBC has noted, “Policymakers and business leaders are under immense pressure to meet the demands of the climate emergency at COP26. Yet, even as many publicly acknowledge the necessity of transitioning to a low-carbon society, hopes of limiting global heating to 1.5 degrees Celsius are quickly deteriorating. Climate scientists have repeatedly stressed that the best weapon to tackle rising global temperatures is to cut greenhouse gas emissions — fast.”
When politicians are in charge of making change nothing happens quickly. They have to keep too many people happy and that means making compromises with major polluters such as the coal and fossil fuel industry. We have reached a point where incremental compromise and slow change will not slow the catastrophic climate change that is happening every day as environmental disasters kill people.
The human species has trashed the planet. We have refused to act in a responsible manner when it comes to our environment. COP 26 is showing us that it is probably too late for the world to mobilize to preserve the planet.
A new generation of climate activists have been protesting at COP 26 in Glasgow and they have been following world leaders to conferences only to hear the same empty promises year after year.
As Thunberg has said, “Net zero by 2050. Blah, blah, blah. Net zero. Blah, blah, blah. Climate neutral. Blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders. Words that sound great but so far have led to no action. Our hopes and dreams drown in their empty words and promises,”
Blah
It is rather interesting that faced with this challenge, world leaders have boldly come up short. We could be on the verge of ending any “intelligence” in this corner of the universe. “Eh, not a problem….”
I’m guessing that people behind the scenes with lots of money are guiding decisions for short term profits.
I think people, in general, are far more willing to make some changes than their leaders are. Wouldn’t bother me to end airline travel (a ton of carbon to take one person to Europe), or to drastically cut down on driving cars (rationing), or invest in mass transportation options (high speed rail), and so on. It could be kind of fun if everyone was working together. I have a dream!
What bothers me about the most recent agreements is that it allows for some shell game math – polluters can buy credits to continue polluting, and sometimes those carbon offset credits are counted more than once. It’s not the real reduction needed.
I guess my hope becomes something along the lines of – if it gets bad enough, business as usual cannot continue. But, until then, it seems to be pretty much business as usual. Leaders haven’t asked for any sacrifices of us.
It sort of seems like we’re deciding for the planet to do what we’d do if we had an old car that was falling apart and decided to just keep it on the road until it dies. But it could be repaired! “Eh, we’ll get a new one later…”