To wander the halls of the Glasgow climate summit in November was to wander back through the threedecade history of our species’ organised attempts to deal with the greatest crisis it has ever confronted. The basic look and feel of such conferences were apparent by the Kyoto talks in 1997: half trade show, half high-level international negotiations. Journalists monitored talks that invariably “went down to the wire,” and “into overtime,” and then either “collapsed” (Copenhagen, 2009) or “triumphed” (Paris, 2015). And always, outside, the amount of carbon in the atmosphere kept climbing.
That is not exactly a cynical observation. Given the magnitude of the task at hand—moving coal, oil and gas out of the centre of the world economy and replacing them with something else—the process was never going to be easy. In fact, it is a task so large that for the first time in human affairs you actually need something like planetary co-operation: they don’t call it “global warming” for nothing.And so goodhearted diplomats and UN bureaucrats work on the task with unfeigned zeal for entire careers, work that’s only visible at these annual gatherings. The forum they have provided, especially to the most vulnerable countries on earth, has been very useful. We have the critical target of 1.5C on the table entirely because the UN process, with its deference to every head of state, made small island nations temporarily powerful.