“Its pulse is weak and it will only survive if we keep our promises”

From END Info 28 - Jan/Feb 2022 - DOWNLOAD

By Tom Unterrainer

“We can now say with credibility that we have kept 1.5 degress alive. But, its pulse is weak and it will only survive if we keep our promises and translate commitments into rapid action.”

Alok Sharma MP, COP26 President

The claim that the world is on the brink of catastrophic climate change is accepted by all but a handful of people. This consenses among and between scientists, politicians, campaigners and the public at large is of fundamental importance if we are to avoid the worst. But consensus on the facts is not a sufficient condition for saving humanity.

Take, for example, the general consensus amongst politicians - even those from nuclear-armed states - with regards to nuclear weapons. Recently, Presidents Biden and Putin issued a joint statement along these lines: ‘nuclear war can never be won and should never be fought.’ Both know that a nuclear exchange of any type could destroy all life on this planet. Yet each and every nuclear-armed state is modernising its arsenals of mass death. There is a new nuclear arms race and an increase in nuclear tensions not seen since the height of the Cold War. Recognising reality and acting rationally based on this recognition seem to be divorced from one another in the context of certain global issues.

The leaders of the world assembled in Glasgow, Scotland, in November 2022 with the promise of securing the future of life on this planet. Central to this promise is limiting global temperature rises to 1.5oC: any rise above this figure will likely see climate disaster turn into climate catastrophe. In his final statement of the conference, COP26 President Alok Sharma assured us that this aim is “alive” but that “its pulse is weak”. Not terribly reassuring given the potential consequences.

The Glasgow Climate Pact issued at the close of COP26 lists four “achievements”:

1. Mitigation: secured near-global net zero. [Emissions targets] from 153 countries and future strengthening of mitigation measures ...

2. Adaptation & Loss and Damage: boosted efforts to deal with climate impacts ...

3. Finance: mobilised billions and trillions ... to realign trillions towards global net zero ...

4. Collaboration: worked together to deliver

[Glasgow Climate Pact, Page 5]

Contrast these with the demands raised by the COP26 Coalition of NGOs, trade unions, community and youth groups, which organised a series of lively protests and workshops alongside official proceedings:

No More Cooking The Books: No To Fossil Fuels, Net-zero And False Solutions

• Fight For 1.5

• We Need Real Zero, Not Net Zero

• Keep It In The Ground: No New Fossil Fuel Investments Or Infrastructure

• Reject False Solutions: No To Carbon Markets And Risky And Unproven Technologies

Rewire The System: Start The Justice Transition Now

• Start The Justice Transition

Global Climate Justice: Reparations And Redistribution To Indigenous Communities and The Gobal South

• Fair share of effort from all rich countries

• Cancel the debts of Global South by all creditors

• Grant-based climate finance for the Global South

• Reparations for the loss and damage already happening in the Global South

[https://cop26coalition.org/demands/]

If the contrast between the demands of civil society and the world’s most powerful nations was not obvious enough, here is the COP26 Coalition’s press response to The Glasgow Climate Pact:

“This agreement is an utter betrayal of the people. It is hollow words on the climate emergency from the richest countries, with an utter disregard of science and justice. The UK Government greenwash and PR have spun us off course.

The rich refused to do their fair share, with more empty words on climate finance and turning their back on the poorest who are facing a crisis of covid coupled with economic and climate apartheid – all caused by the actions of the richest.

It’s immoral for the rich to sit there talking about their future children and grandchildren, when the children of the South are suffering now.

This COP has failed to keep 1.5c alive, and set us on a pathway to 2.5c. All while claiming to act as they set the planet on fire.

At COP26, the richest got what they came here for, and the poorest leave with nothing.

The people are rising up across the globe to hold our governments and corporations to account – and make them act.”

[https://cop26coalition.org/cop26-coalition-final-press-statement/]

Even if those gathered in Glasgow ‘keep their promises’, the COP26 Coalition and expert comentators are not convinced that sufficient commitments have been made to avert climate catastrophe.

How can it be that everyone knows of the global catastrophic risks posed by climate change and nuclear weapons but that our society and its major institutions seem incapable of seriously addressing the risks? Writing in the mid-1980s, Noam Chomsky addressed himself to the ‘Rational Basis’ of the Race to Destruction*. He wrote:

Surveying the historical record, we can find examples of socities so organised that they drifted towards catastrophe with a certain inevitability, systematically avoiding steps that could have changed this course. Our own society is an example, except that in this case the catastrophe that lies ahead involves national and perhaps global suicide. It is hardly unrealistic to surmise that we are entering the terminal phase of history.

Chomsky was, of course, writing specifically in the context of the nuclear arms race of the time, but the force of his argument applies to the risk of climate catastrophe. He continues:

The course that we pursue is deeply rooted in our social institutions and relatively independent of the choice of individuals who happen to fill institutional roles in the political or economic system. Furthermore, the steps taken towards destruction have a certain short-term rationality within the framework of existing institutions and the kind of planning they engender. Such planning is largely a matter of short-term calculation of gain.

Short-term ‘rationality’ will have determined the decision to opt for ‘net zero’ rather than ‘real zero’ carbon emissions: to do otherwise would have demanded an international transformation of economic and political systems, not least with respect to those nations which have pressing energy needs that will otherwise not be met. Such an approach will have informed the decision to construct an enormous financial system - “billions and trillions” of dollars - to allow for ‘adaptation & loss and damage’ rather than planning for a just transition away from damaging economic and industrial methods.

Such approaches are ‘wired-in’ to the global system and, for the sake of humanity, we should hope that they have some effect. We know, however, that they are incapable of solving or removing the problems that face us. Arms control systems and non-proliferation treaties make the world a safer place than it would be in their absence, but they are not the same as a decisive move to nuclear abolition.

Chomsky concludes:

The important point to bear in mind is that as long as the public is passive, desiciplined and obedient, public opinion is of no more concern to elite groups that control the state apparatus than security, survival, “human rights, the raising of the living standards, and democratization.”

This seems like an appeal to ‘resist much, obey little’ and to continue our campaigning as energetically as we can.

* The Race to Destruction - its Rational Basis, Spokesman Pamphlet No. 85, available from www.spokesmanbooks.org