CLIMATE CRISIS
GOOD COP BAD COP?
After the Glasgow climate summit it’s time to target the banks, argues Bill McKibben
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.
On the other hand, countries are at such various stages of development, and have such divergent national interests, that trying to get them to play nicely together is bound to be hard, verging on impossible. That would be true even if everyone acted in reasonably good faith: though as we’ve come to understand, the fossil fuel industry has spent most of this three-decade period lying through its teeth, delaying action by pretending that the science was dubious or incomplete. If you take those factors into account, we should perhaps be surprised that we’ve got as far as we have.