IT’S NOT EASY BEING GREEN …
ON 1 NOVEMBER, WORLD LEADERS who signed up to the Paris climate accord in 2015 will gather in Glasgow for the formal session of COP26 — the 26th UN Climate Change Conference. The leaders gathering in Glasgow should be guided by advice from a scientist, a politician and a philosopher.
The first comes to us from Albert Einstein, “INSANITY IS DOING THE SAME THING OVER AND OVER AGAIN AND EXPECTING DIFFERENT RESULTS.” In the six years since 196 nations announced in Paris their voluntary plans to attack climate change, things have gone from bad to worse.
The latest report of the International Panel on Climate Change states the world has grown warmer since the 2015 Paris conference, and predicts that without stringent action it will become hotter still, with consequences that are already becoming visible in the shape of extreme weather events. The IPCC deems it “extremely unlikely” that these events would have occurred “without human influence on the climate system”.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports there were eight extreme events in the first half of 2021 with losses exceeding $1 billion. There were only three in 1980. “Developments since 2015 have only strengthened the sense that the Paris Agreement is unlikely to even slow the growth of human influences on the climate, let alone reduce them … the world is very unlikely to zero out net emissions by 2075, let alone by 2050,” writes the well-credentialled Steven Koonin in his new book, Unsettled. Game, set and match. Paris has fallen.
THE SECOND DOSE OF WISDOM that might usefully guide the Glasgow proceedings comes from Otto von Bismarck, “POLITICS IS THE ART OF THE POSSIBLE, THE ATTAINABLE — THE ART OF THE NEXT BEST.” In democratic countries, drastic changes in lifestyles are not easily induced. Especially not quickly, and especially if they are expensive.
It is simply unrealistic to expect the world’s politicians
