(No. 11, a ±6 minute read)
A mere mention of the elephant in the room is one of COP28’s big outcomes
It seems necessary to follow up last week’s bit now that COP28 has ended. The summit ended with a surprise—the first mention of fossil fuels in what is called the “Stocktake,” the infernal document that all COP negotiations work towards, in the twenty-eight years since these assemblies began. That mention looks like this:
d) Transitioning away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science;
This “pathway” can be found on page five of twenty-one pages and follows the statement that the Conference of the Parties...
recognizes the need for deep, rapid and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions in line with 1.5°C pathways and calls on [italics per document] Parties to contribute to the following global efforts, in a nationally determined manner, taking into account the Paris Agreement and their different national circumstances, pathways and approaches:
This mention comes in the twenty-eighth pathway listed in the document, under the heading ‘Mitigation’ and really is the first time “fossil fuels” has been written in an official work product agreement of the negotiating groups. It’s like talking about the pandemic in a public health policy setting body without saying “coronavirus.” So this is the big advance achieved at COP28. After 28 summits we got to, “we need to transition away from fossil fuels.”
Well, that’s something.
John Silk, the minister of natural resources of the Marshall Islands was quoted in news sources world-wide as saying, “The Republic of the Marshall Islands did not come here to sign our death warrant,” a perfectly reasonable sentiment in the face of a draw-down plan for fossil fuels not having been struck in what really is the tenth or eleventh hour for getting shit done to make any reasonable increase over pre-industrial average temperatures. He went on to say, “What we have seen today is totally unacceptable, we will not go silently to our watery graves.”
A Pacific island nation, the Marshall Islands are low-lying, but not as low-lying as Tuvalu. This week it was announced that Australia has listed 280 visas available for Tuvaluans to migrate to Australia as “climate migrants.” Permanently. This, if it does nothing else, makes Tuvalu’s prospects in a heating climate system painfully real—it will have few, if any, on the path we are choosing. It is notable that these 280 are not being called “climate refugees”—that then becomes a legal designation that no wealthy nation wants precedent set for.
There was a fair amount of weak-kneed cheerleading in the press after COP28 ended. Nature itself scored “quite a win of its own” at COP28 in the face of “fossil fuels getting all the headlines” according to the New York Times this week. The Times story continued, writing that negotiators at the summit, “committed to halting all deforestation and forest degradation by 2030, as well as the destruction of other land and marine ecosystems.” That is a great thing—in principal—in six years there will be no more deforestation, nor any land and marine ecosystem destruction either! Recall last week that I wrote that nothing in the COP agreements is binding or enforceable. Let’s check back in 2030.
So what is this good for? Certainly it allows for a bunch of grandstanding, tense negotiating with nations like Russia who will not allow natural gas to be discussed (coal burning made no appearances either, I’m looking at you China). Perhaps the agreement allows there to be a shade thrown at those signatories who fail to meet the agreement’s pathway goals? Maybe?
There are two things in the aftermath of this event I believe necessary to understand about global warming negotiations and commitments. The first, when people are talking about emissions and not fossil fuels you can damn well bet that they are trying to snow somebody into believing that they have a way we might have our cake and eat it too: burn fossil fuels and we’ll catch that carbon. In plain speech they are trying to stall things so that they might not be left with the stranded assets of their investments in whatever it is that is a principal contributor to global warming—anything to do with petroleum production or refining, coal burning, factory farming; the usual suspects. There are no practical methods to control emissions to get us to meet +1.5ºC and maintain our current habits and there don’t appear to be any on a close enough horizon to get us there or anywhere close.
Second, we perhaps, just maybe, need to stop considering our existence on the earth as one that is always seeking growth. Unchecked growth and pursuit of profit in its modern incarnation, finds its origin after WWII and in the Bretton-Woods agreement which was essentially driven by the U.S. to secure business profits abroad as the colonial era wound down in the aftermath of the war. The war saw tremendous industrial growth in the U.S. and we wanted that exported everywhere, but during peacetime so that growth could be coupled with profit, which was somewhat limited by wartime federal strictures. I simplify, but not by much. Growth became a post-war economic mantra. Today we need to figure out how to leave growth behind and find equilibrium. There is likely only enough of our earth for equilibrium, not perpetual unfettered growth.
Let’s leave COP28 with the words of Samoa’s lead negotiator, Anne Rasmussen. She declared, “The course correction needed has not been secured…it is not enough for us to reference the science [delineating necessary action] and then make agreements that ignore what the science is telling us we need to do.” She continued, describing an agreement that will “potentially take us backwards” and with a “litany of loopholes.” Growing up in Hawai‘i there’s one thing you learn quick; when a nice Samoan lady is telling you you’re doing something wrong you figure out fast how to do it right. Rasmussen received a standing ovation after she finished speaking. It is worth watching the video above, even if only to see the pinched looks on the dias in response to her speech and as the ovation is raised.
So that’s it, all that needs to be said about COP28, Anne Rasmussen said it. She’s right on the money. Another thing right on the money last week, Masha Gessen’s essay ‘In the Shadow of the Holocaust.’ As one would expect I have been thinking a lot about memorializing and memorials for the episode of the PRX Monumental project I am a part of. We choose what to memorialize and how we do it in the service of political goals, that is the first and foremost thing to understand about memorial-making—whether rendered physically or in the stories we tell.
It’s hard not to watch the horror in Gaza and see the fallout here with charges of anti-semitism flying and censorship rearing its head and not think of how the holocaust has been memorialized, and weaponized. Gessen, one of my favorite journalist-writers working today, gets into the deep recesses of it all in her piece, there is no better way in to understanding the complexities of response happening in the aftermath of the horrific attack by Hamas and the disproportional response by the Isreali government. This “war” will be remembered, when its history is written, as one of this century’s most painful moral failings. It must end now and we must be more honest about our use of memory and language.
That’s it, until next week. As far as COP28 goes we can do no more with that agreement than inhabit Reagan’s theft of an old Russian proverb, “Trust, but verify,” and maintain low expectations that it will get us where we need to be. Gessen’s essay lays out the complexity and dangers of weaponizing memory of trauma, it’s absolutely worth a read. And I’ll go out on the best cartoon I’ve seen in a while, it’s by Maddie Dai: