“The truth is that we have failed to avoid an overshooting above 1.5C in the next few years. And that going above 1.5C has devastating consequences. Some of these devastating consequences are tipping points, be it in the Amazon, be it in Greenland, or western Antarctica or the coral reefs.”
—António Guterres, UN Secretary General
By bluntly stating what is at stake prior to the UN conference on climate change, and the failure of the Paris 2015 conference’s aspiration to stop a global temperature rise of 1.5 Celsius, António Guterres is publicly demanding that next week’s gathering of nations in Belém, Brazil vigorously negotiate in good faith to curb further lapses of climate action.
This will not be easily achieved, particularly since billionaire Bill Gates recently threw a wrench into COP30 negotiations by declaring that while climate concerns are real, the world should—bizarrely—separate the impact of climate realities such as intensified droughts and floods from ongoing work that raises the levels of health and overall economic prosperity of the poorest people. Climate-carbon mitigation technology will come in due time, Gates proclaimed.
Suggesting that we must choose either climate programmes or poverty alleviation is a false dichotomy. Gates says, “Our chief goal should be to prevent suffering, particularly for those in the toughest conditions who live in the world’s poorest countries.” Has he not watched with horror what has happened to the Caribbean island of Jamaica as a consequence of Hurricane Melissa and rising ocean temperatures, or Vietnam receiving 5 feet of rain recently in 24 hours? Health is directly impacted by climate.
Gates’ term “Green Premium” means, in his own words, “the difference in cost between a product that involves emitting carbon and an alternative that doesn’t.” To bring that premium to zero, as for example electric vehicles costing the same as internal combustion vehicles and thus eliminating the extra cost—the “green premium”—of buying an electric one, will initiate a far better prospect for climate stability because the electric car pollutes far less. Until that happens, self-proclaimed “climate activist” Gates believes we must prioritize general poverty issues and cool our heels until green technology costs the same as the old fossil fuel technologies. He says, “This is a chance to refocus on the metric that should count even more than emissions and temperature change: improving lives… But remember that climate change is not the biggest threat to the lives and livelihoods of people in poor countries, and it won’t be in the future.” https://www.gatesnotes.com/
Yet the opposite is true: it is precisely the unprecedented temperature increase in the last 100 years that is preventing people in the poorest countries from transitioning to a better future. Colonialism’s handmaiden, fossil fuel, frustrates people’s aspirations for a just society.
The Guardian newspaper covers climate regularly and reported recently on a study from respected medical journal The Lancet: “Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed. It says the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.” https://tinyurl.com/person-dies-each-minute
Why bother listening to the opinions of billionaires? asks long-term writer and climate activist Bill McKibben in a devastating rebuttal to Gates’ assertions.These billionaires take all the oxygen out of the scientific discussions on climate change or biodiversity loss. McKibben accused Gates of playing into Trump’s climate denial narrative. Indeed, Trump thanked Gates for exposing the “climate hoax”, even though Gates never claimed that climate science was spurious.
McKibben isn’t alone in denouncing Gates’ essay or its publication just before COP 30. “Despite his efforts to make clear that he takes climate change seriously, his words are bound to be misused by those who would like nothing more than to destroy efforts to deal with climate change,” says Michael Oppenheimer, director of the Center for Policy Research on Energy and the Environment at Princeton University.
For decades people have mumbled that governments and individuals will change their pro-oil and gas policies once there are uncontested catastrophic events linked to climate disruption. The spiel goes like this: “What we unfortunately need to turn around this iceberg-directed Titanic-like disaster called climate breakdown is to have local disasters that hit us really hard and then we will be true believers and change our ways. When the roofs are torn off and a neighbourhood is decimated even the frequent flyer will get off the flight and not take a cruise ship.”
It hasn’t happened, because a litany of destruction hasn’t made us change course. I suppose what always peeves me the most is that the so-called instructive catastrophe always takes place in someone else’s town to teach a rich population brutal climate lessons but needn’t inflict their home with suffering. Sacrifice the next village to make the story point, and maybe this is the point: the 10% richest people (us) refuse to help those populations that are getting hit by real-life floods and sea-level rises. Ask the residents of Miquelon about rooting up their entire village to higher ground. An article titled “How do you move a village? Residents of France’s last outpost in North America try to outrun the sea” says it all. https://tinyurl.com/French-islands
Brazilian diplomat André Aranha Corrêa do Lago will preside over COP30, which runs from November 10 to 21 and will be preceded by the heads of state climate summit on November 6 and 7. (It’s still uncertain whether Mark Carney will attend. Trump, it goes without saying, will have nothing to do with it.) Lago laments: “There is a new kind of opposition to climate action. We are facing a discredit of climate policies. I don’t think we are facing climate denial… It’s not a scientific denial, it’s an economic denial.” This brashness is vividly exposed in Trump’s slash and burn tactics to rid all regulatory impediments that get in the way of profits.
Atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations are increasing at alarming rates. Given that, it doesn’t help that the Brazilian state oil company, Petrobras, has been given a permit for exploratory drilling off the Amazonia coast. “The approval is an act of sabotage against the COP and undermines the climate leadership claimed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva,” says Climate Observatory, a network of environmental organizations from Brazilian civil society.
The UN Emissions Gap Report, which came out this week, compares what countries have acted on and what they must do to lower their fossil fuel emissions and concludes that their achievements have been woefully inadequate. The report is bleak: a 2.8C rise above pre-industrial emissions is forecast unless rich nations in particular drastically revamp their carbon emissions goals.
The Union of Concerned Scientists had this to say: “Years of grossly insufficient action from richer nations and continued climate deception and obstruction by fossil fuel interests are directly responsible for bringing us here.” It should be added that for rich nations this includes their citizens’ obsession with jetting off to places like the Galápagos Islands or Costa Rica to ponder Nature’s abundance while the world burns.
To learn what we can expect at COP30, see https://unfccc.int/cop30 Included on the website are UN reports showing that nations are forging ahead to limit their greenhouse gas emissions. In two weekswe will have a better idea whether this is just one more conference on climate that plays the world for a fool and the hundreds of lobbyists sent to Belém, Brazil go home satisfied the world is open as ever for business as usual, or whether nations will overturn 30 years of inaction to seize their citizens’ right to a healthy Earth.
We can be sure that there will be a strong presence in Belém of people keen to hold the COP to account. Saturday, November 15 is a Global Day of Action. Climate protests will be taking place around the world.