Not America Apart

LET’S BE HONEST. Many activists have long insisted that the international climate negotiations are bullshit, greenwashing, Kabuki. Or, more charitably, that they are simply doomed. For those in this camp, the negotiations have primarily been occasions for protest and networking, most of it “outside” the conference zones. As for the negotiations themselves, and even their greatest accomplishment — 2015’s Paris Agreement — these are seen as mere feints, overblown failures.

But if the negotiations are failures, so too is everything else. The renewables revolution has not forced the rapid retirement of existing fossil fuel infrastructure. Mainstream techno-legislative strategies have provoked changes only at the margins. The protests, even the largest of them, have not driven the emergence of a viable transition strategy. Even the frontline battles, essential though they are, have done little to stop, say, the rate of sea level rise.

The climate movement’s “inside” wing — that works within the formal negotiating system — tries its best, at every turn, to grind real wins out of a long-deadlocked and fantastically frustrating process. It is strange and often lonely work, but if you believe global governance will be needed to stabilize the climate system, then you believe the negotiations must be continued, even though, to date, they have “failed.” And you believe they are essential, even though the prospects for not only climate diplomacy, but diplomacy in general, have come to seem increasingly futile. So the question today isn’t whether the climate negotiations are doomed. Rather, it is whether the fractious nations of the twenty-first-century world, besieged by fossil capitalism and tides of cheap nationalism, will be able to cooperatively face their deteriorating conditions of existence.

The real problem has never been inside the negotiation halls. It’s that the nations that determine what happens in those halls are still locked into a catastrophically unjust system in which the political right and the fossil fuel industry can block all effective action. For instance, the United States (admittedly an extreme case) is paralyzed by its far right, to the point where we can barely imagine it doing its fair part in any global mobilization.

The story of the future is a global story. The old saw — “Think Globally, Act Locally” — isn’t going to cut it. Though, as my experiences in EcoEquity have taught me, acting globally is no simple matter, nor does one do it alone. I learned this quickly enough when I walked into my first climate COP — it was COP6, at The Hague, in 1999 — and I’m still learning it today.

The arts of coalition are daunting, even when the coalitions are local. When global coalitions are at issue, and when you’re working with a sea of actors that includes not just, say, the activists of Power Shift Africa but also, say, the government of Saudi Arabia, the coalitions are daunting indeed. Both activists and governments are trapped within them and lost without them.

To participate effectively in climate negotiations, civil-society actors form their own agglomerations. EcoEquity, for example, is a partner in the Climate Equity Reference Project — a modeling group that evaluates the fairness of national pledges of action, and a member of the Civil Society Equity Review — which publishes annual reports that are endorsed by hundreds of organizations from around the world. And it works within the international Climate Action Network, and alongside another Earth Island project, the Fossil Fuel Nonproliferation Treaty, to define and motivate a fair fossil fuel phaseout strategy, which is of decisive importance.

It’s a lot, and, as you can imagine, the work involves a lot of Zoom calls. And it all comes together at the annual Conference of Parties (COP), the next of which (COP30) will be held in Belém, Brazil in November.

We’re clearly at a historical branchpoint where we’re being challenged to avert both climate tipping points and cascading, uncontained war.

Two key issues will dominate the proceedings in Belém. The first is the critical need to flesh out the language of the COP28 decision text (from the negotiations in Dubai, United Arab Emirates), wherein the world’s nations agreed to transition 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.” The second is international climate finance — in amounts denominated in billions and trillions of dollars — to support, not just the fossil fuel phase-out, but the whole global just-transition program. We’re going to have to pull off the financing if we are to rapidly decarbonize the global economy.

There’s a lot to say here, not least because COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan, last year was supposed to lay out a plan to deliver such finance, but did not. Thus the onus has now fallen to COP30 in Brazil. The critical point is that, absent a major finance breakthrough, there will be no way to “unlock” the extremely rapid global transition away from fossil fuels that is fundamental to any strategy that could possibly stabilize the climate system.

But we head into this year’s climate talks in a changing and chaotic world. Indeed, we find ourselves now in a “polycrisis” that makes the optimism of post-Cold War years seem like a fading dream. What comes next? We do not know, though we’re clearly at a historical branchpoint where we’re being challenged to avert both climate tipping points and cascading, uncontained war. To do so, we’ll need a reinvigorated and widely-accepted global governance system and an international finance architecture capable of supporting a global just transition. Obviously, we’ll get neither if our governments slide into fascism, and it’s for just this reason that the rise of the Trumpers is a planetary, and not merely national, catastrophe.

Soon, we’ll see the next round of national climate pledges. They will be sorely disappointing, and it’s important that when we cast blame, we cast it correctly. The dysfunctionality of the negotiations is a product of dysfunctional governments, and this, in turn, is rooted in the poisons of extreme inequality that drive today’s authoritarian populism. And because such populism, with its appeals to crude nationalism (“Make America Great Again”), pits itself against international solidarity — recall, for example, the dismantlement of USAID — it is also at the root of America’s obstructionism in the climate talks.

The old question — What is to be done? — isn’t getting any easier to answer. The coordinated climate transformation we need is eluding us, and ultimately this is because a deeply unjust political-economic system with historic (colonialism) and contemporary (the rise of the billionaires) dimensions makes such a mobilization all but impossible.

The task now, as author and climate justice activist Wen Stephenson argues, is to “learn to live in the dark,” and also to act, together and effectively. Our world is at a turning point, and there will be no way forward unless we find ways of tackling the root causes of inequity — within our countries and at the planetary level.

Learn more about this Earth Island project at ecoequity.org.

Let’s be clear here. Bill McKibben is not wrong about how the solar boom is a last chance to save our climate. But we also need global cooperation. And, if I may oversimplify, everyone knows it. The recent advisory opinion by the International Court of Justice, saying that countries are legally obligated to curb emissions, makes this blessedly clear. As does the ever-denser overlap between the global climate justice movement and the movement for international tax justice. (Search “Tax Justice Network.”)

Believe it or not, it would be easy to source the hundreds of billions, if not trillions, of dollars a year we need to supercharge not just the climate transition, but also the broader justice transition that would make the climate transition possible — if we were to properly tax the polluting rich.

Not that saving ourselves is just a question of money. It’s also a question of power, and pragmatism, and — perhaps most fundamentally — of solidarity. Because we really are in this together.