Zero hope

I stare at the for­est dom­i­nat­ing my home. I breathe good air. I think of the trees and plants that are so much the face of Cat­alo­nia. I can­not see the coastal re­finer­ies around which so much life re­volves, de­pends.

So here we go again. An­other cli­mate sum­mit. Hope springs eter­nal, but I shud­der to think what will be said and done this time. Will they ever do enough? Or will it be fur­ther, damn­ing ev­i­dence of a gen­er­a­tion’s ad­dic­tion and ab­ject dere­lic­tion?

COP26 con­venes in Britain this month. It is not one more cli­mate sum­mit. It is every­thing, a wa­ter­shed mo­ment. It is our one world need­ing to face up to a stark re­al­ity and will be, must be, life chang­ing. It will build on the land­mark in­ter­na­tional ac­cord signed in Paris in 2015, a com­mit­ment by 195 na­tions to com­bat cli­mate change and adapt to its im­pacts, with clear tar­gets. That com­ing to­gether was a huge ad­vance in as­pi­ra­tion and co­op­er­a­tion. But.... green­house gas emis­sions and tem­per­a­tures con­tinue to rise. The words fos­sil fuels, coal, oil and gas do not ap­pear in the Paris agree­ment even though it is ac­cepted that to meet the Paris goals the vast ma­jor­ity of hy­dro­car­bons need to stay in the ground.

Why am I so neg­a­tive? So far noth­ing has added up.

The blunt re­al­i­ties are that coun­tries re­main eco­nom­i­cally re­liant on fos­sil fuels and pro­duc­ers want to ex­ploit their re­serves quickly while they still can; that COP26 is a gath­er­ing of the pow­er­ful, funded by those with the most to lose; that mak­ing the fast and deep changes to the un­sus­tain­able life as we now know it ur­gently re­quires a quan­tum leap in pub­lic un­der­stand­ing of - and sup­port for - the need to rad­i­cally re­think and adapt, to brace for the shock­wave of re­forms for all of us, the fam­i­lies, com­mu­ni­ties and na­tions cur­rently de­pen­dent on oil.

We need to watch and lis­ten so at­ten­tively to what is said and what is on the table (and what is not) at COP26, for we are just about out of chances.

The main­stream media will again miss the point and ob­sess about per­son­al­i­ties. Thank your god Trump is ab­sent. Britain’s pop­ulist prime min­is­ter, how­ever, will gush and blither, wal­low­ing in the glare. Pre­pare for fur­ther ef­forts by him to un­der­mine any per­cep­tion of re­al­ity re­gard­ing mean­ing­ful pol­icy. He is a mas­ter of gaslight­ing – oh the irony – but keep an eye on whether he al­lows the vast Cambo oil field off the Shet­land Isles to go ahead.

For nearly three decades the UN has been bring­ing to­gether al­most every coun­try on Earth for global cli­mate sum­mits – called COPs – which stands for ‘Con­fer­ence of the Par­ties’.

Yes, the Paris com­mit­ment to aim to keep warm­ing in­creases to 1.5 de­grees is crit­i­cally im­por­tant be­cause every frac­tional rise will re­sult in the loss of many lives and liveli­hoods. But were they being re­al­is­tic? And one of the key things that wor­ries me is the term “net zero” now em­bed­ded in plan­ning.

Do you think it means zero emis­sions? It is alarm­ing how many peo­ple do.

Net zero means cut­ting emis­sions, yes, but by no means stop­ping. It means bal­anc­ing on­go­ing emis­sions by yet to be de­vel­oped, untested car­bon cap­ture tech­nolo­gies as well as tree plant­ing etc. Re­ally? It is hugely dan­ger­ous to as­sume we can de­sign our way out of this. It feeds com­pla­cency and in­ac­tion while lev­els con­tinue to rise and forests con­tinue to be felled. We con­tinue to sleep walk. Net zero is about pro­tect­ing busi­ness as usual, not the cli­mate and the planet.

New re­search by the In­ter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund es­ti­mates global fos­sil fuel sub­si­dies are about $6 tril­lion an­nu­ally, up from $5.2 tril­lion in 2017. That is the re­al­ity.