Episode 46 - The Emperor Still Has No Clothes

In this episode we examine the fact and ways in which the current global system for tackling climate change is broken,  how our false optimism that it will somehow magically succeed has stopped us from considering viable, effective alternatives, and what those alternatives might be, particularly one that I'd like to propose, for a World Parliament.

Transcript

Sovaida: 0:08

Hello and welcome to Reimagining Our World, a podcast dedicated to envisioning a better world and to infusing hope that we can make the principled choices to build that world. Before I begin, I wanted to share some good news with you. This is our 46th episode. You can now listen to all the episodes of Reimagining Our World on your favorite podcast platform. You can also still watch and listen to them on the CPGG YouTube channel as you've always been able to do but I did want you to know that they're available now, at your urging, as audio podcasts. So please let your friends know. All right, our episode today is going to examine the fact and ways in which the current global system for tackling climate change is broken, how our false optimism that it will somehow magically succeed has stopped us from considering viable, effective alternatives, and what those alternatives might be, particularly one that I'd like to propose. One of the struggles that we seem to have as humans is the struggle of seeing and accepting reality for what it is, seeing things as they are, not better than they are and not worse than they are. Why is that important? Because as a result of this mindset we tend to repeat behaviors that fail to yield the results that we want, all the while lulling ourselves into the belief that this time the outcome will somehow magically be different. We tell ourselves a story that we're being optimistic. But in fact, what seems to be happening is that we're in denial, that the optimism is not genuine, that it is in fact unfounded. A prime example of this is what we call the COP, C O P, system for making decisions on arresting global warming and mitigating the effects of and adapting to climate change. You will all have heard in the news about the latest round of COP meetings. These are member states who get together annually to negotiate agreements, that is the hope anyway, for reducing global warming and mitigating the effects of climate change. As a recent article in Politico put it, optimism in the face of overwhelming evidence is one of the things that keeps the delegates returning to these conferences year after year. For the past three decades, these annual meetings have been humanity's main tool to avoid the nightmare of a planet heated by two degrees Celsius or more. Now, the problem with engaging in this kind of behavior, which is repeating the same behavior hoping for different results, is that it is the very definition of insanity and madness. We continue to do the same, year after year, 29 years on now. The real problem with taking this approach, sticking our heads in the sand and repeating behaviors that don't work, is that this approach stops us from making conscious choices about strategies that could be truly effective in tackling climate change. Reaching out and making conscious choices in the face of reality, I believe, is the true definition of optimism. Let's look at the current system that we have in place. I know for some of you, the use of the acronym COP can be a little confusing, so let me just give you a little bit of a background. Back in 1992, the world came together and created a treaty, the first proper treaty on climate change. It's called the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Its goal was to prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system. After 1992, there have been annual meetings of the Conference of the Parties. So all the members get together annually to hash out agreements to arrest global warming and tackle climate change. We just finished our 29th annual meeting in Baku, Azerbaijan. You may recall the term, the Paris Agreement. This is an agreement that was the result of the 21st meeting of the Conference of the Parties. In Paris in which the nations of the world agreed on a very specific goal that was the centerpiece of the treaty, and that was to limit global warming to one and a half to two degrees Celsius over pre industrial period, because based on the science, we figured if we could keep temperatures from warming beyond that, while the results would be dire, they would not be absolutely catastrophic. So let's honestly assess where we are after these 29 years of meeting after the Paris Agreement. Here's the truth. The Paris Agreement has not, its goals have not been met and cannot be met, given the way the COP system is structured. Since 1992, when we first started this whole sequence of meetings, annual greenhouse gases are actually up, the emissions are up 44% and the world is currently, regardless of our goals, on track to warm more than two and a half degrees Celsius. This is a future that scientists consider absolutely disastrous. Remember we said the goal of the Paris Agreement was to limit it. The goal was to keep it actually as close to one and a half degrees as possible. At worst, two degrees. And now we see that we're on track to warm the planet by at least two and a half degrees above pre industrial period. We see this in the news all the time. We see all these extreme weather events: floods and wildfires and droughts and famine rising waters, disasters of all kinds. This suffering that ensues as a result of these extreme weather events is simply going to intensify as long as we fail to recognize that the system we have in place for tackling climate change is not working. As the suffering intensifies, it will force us to reconsider and re conceptualize a new system. We really oughtn't to wait until things get so dire, but that seems to be the way in which humanity is going. However, to give us a chance to reconsider earlier and course correct, let's look at some of the flaws in the current COP system and why it is that it's failing. And that'll give us a sense of what we need to do to create an alternative system that works. So the first flaw is that we rely on voluntary pledges. Let's take a look at that. Under the Paris Agreement, each country is to tell the rest of the world what its pledges are, what its nationally determined contributions are to reducing emissions and adapting to the effects of climate change. Now, here's the reality. Even if all the countries who signed on to the Paris Agreement were to fulfill the pledges they've given, the current reports estimate that temperatures will still likely rise beyond the two degrees Celsius outer limit we've set ourselves. Now that's if all the countries were to fulfill their pledges. The reality is that many countries are nowhere near fulfilling their pledges, putting us on the path to rising temperatures at levels between 2.5 and 2.9 degrees centigrade by the year 2100. The other really stunning thing is these pledges have failed to take into account what the International Energy Agency has told us that if we're to succeed in managing climate change, there can be no new oil and gas projects. And we know that there are so many of them. Okay, so the second flaw in the COP system is that there is no system for holding nations accountable to fulfilling their pledges under the agreement. There's absolutely no mechanism for ensuring that they're accountable and that they're punished or penalized if they fail to meet their commitments. The world has got to come up with a system that ensures that enforcement is possible. The third problem is inadequate funding for activities like mitigation and adaptation and even research and development into alternative clean energy sources. These have all proven generally very challenging and unsuccessful, with poorer countries generally finding themselves supplicating, cap in hand, while the richer countries respond by ducking, bobbing, and weaving, and doing whatever it takes to limit their exposure. We just saw this with the COP 29 that ended in Baku, Azerbaijan, where the developing nations had requested 1.3 trillion dollars to help them with mitigating climate change and at the end of this torturous conference, the richer countries pledged only 300 billion in support. The fourth flaw in the current COP system is the requirement--and this is just honestly such a childish one, given where humanity is at-- of consensus in decision making. Essentially what you do is you grant each member country veto power, because if one country disagrees then the whole agreement falls apart or the proposed agreement. This started in 1991, just before the first climate change agreement came into being when the Saudi negotiators insisted that all climate decisions must be taken by consensus. And it's no big surprise that very often the result is paralysis or at very best agreement based on the lowest common denominator, which is not what we human beings deserve. We deserve better and we owe it to ourselves to do better. So these are the four main flaws in the current system that we need to be willing to look in the eye and it's only once we do that and say,"Oh yes, the system is really broken, is really flawed, is really not working, is really not serving the best interests of humanity," that we will be willing to consider our options. There is hope, there is a way out. And that hope will not manifest itself until we have come out of denial about the way the current system works. We have to be willing to think creatively and out of the box. This is the hope that we create a global World Parliament or World Legislature that is essentially a forum for collective decision making in the face of collective and global challenges. This parliament needs to be democratically elected by the peoples of the world and equipped with the authority to pass binding international laws in areas like climate change, which are global in nature and demand global solutions. So let's look at some of the key features that need to characterize this World Parliament. The first is that the World Parliament must be endowed with the authority to pass binding legislation. This means that the Parliament should be granted or ceded authority by all the countries of the world to pass legislation, for instance, to schedule a universal phase down for the quantities of fossil fuels that each nation can burn. The Parliament should also be able to pass binding legislation about what kinds of fuels each nation can burn, and in what quantities, and then set that schedule. It also needs to pass laws to regulate the emissions of methane. The parliament could pass a law, for instance, to ban new coal fired power plants. Since 2021, for instance, the number of these coal fired power plants has surged in China, sparking fears that policy makers there are prioritizing energy security and economic growth concerns over climate pledges. The Parliament could also pass legislation to regulate the production and use of plastics, which are destroying our environment and severely impacting human health. We need only look to the events of the past week to see that an attempt by the countries of the world to come to an agreement on a global plastics treaty has ended in failure. This is their fifth round of negotiations. The idea was to curb plastic pollution, but a number of countries who produce plastic got in the way and objected to any language that would curb their ability to produce plastic, and they wanted everyone to focus merely on recycling more plastic. Once again, the system was hampered by the requirement imposed by the same country mentioned before that all decisions be made by unanimity or by consensus. And so all it took was a couple of oil producing countries who also produce plastics that are a product of oil to say, sorry, we object. And the whole thing fell through in the work of all these nations. All this laborious work came to naught for now. Now, another feature of the of the world parliament is that it needs to be democratically elected. I just wanted to make sure that we understand that just as we elect our representatives to our state councils, local councils, national councils, federal councils, or bodies, so too we should be able to elect our representatives to a World Parliament so that our voices are heard. Okay, the other feature that the Parliament must be endowed with is the ability to raise funds through a limited power to levy taxes. We need to have these taxes. Again, just as we pay taxes at the local, state, national, federal level, so too we should have to pay taxes at the global level so that the funds exist for adaptation and mitigation of climate change and research and development and to create things like the loss and damage fund intended to help the developing world tackle climate change, the damage wrought by climate change. The Parliament could also, for instance, impose a carbon tax. And if it's binding on all nations, because the Parliament has the power to pass binding legislation, then we won't end up with situations that several countries have faced. For instance, in Canada, Mr. Trudeau had a flagship climate policy that he's had to back down on in some aspects because there was so much public resistance. He essentially ended up agreeing to a three year delay on the imposition of levy on home heating oil because of public resistance. Similarly, Mr. Macron in France, who was impacted by the Yellow Vest protest movement that began in 2018, you'll remember, over fuel taxes, called for a regulatory pause on new green measures. And in the UK, we had former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who delayed bans on the sale of new gas boilers and new petrol and diesel cars, again, because there was stiff public opposition. These are all problems that we can forestall by having these decisions made at a global level by a democratically elected Parliament in a way that is binding on all nations. Now, the other feature of a World Parliament is that we would shift the decision making from consensus to majority voting. We'll have to come up with some system of majority voting that appeals to the nations of the world, maybe a two thirds or other sort of majority vote, as opposed to unanimity. As we saw, the Global Plastics Treaty was stillborn because the Saudis, again, required unanimity in decisions and so, with objections from a handful of nations, the whole agreement was scuttled before it was born. And lastly the World Parliament will need to have a system by which nations are kept accountable. So certain reporting requirements, which are at the moment very confusing, to the extent that they exist, because there are different levels of reporting required by different jurisdictions. There are different regulatory regimes and it's very hard for governments to keep up. Fortunately, there are a couple of initiatives like the Global Reporting Initiative and the ISSB that are trying to get a hand on these and trying to create a global disclosure system, which is the first step in keeping nations accountable, but we also need a mechanism of enforcement. So these are just some of the features of a World Parliament that it is time that we create as an alternative system to the COP. We need to drop the COP, so to speak, and try something different. If you are interested in a more detailed exposition on the structure of this World Parliament, then I urge you to go back to some episodes in which we covered this in more detail, episodes 9, 10, and 11 of Reimagining Our World, that's available now on audio podcast as well. So that's it for now, and I hope that this particular episode has been useful to you in helping unpack why it is we don't seem to be able to get a handle on tackling climate change, what the flaws are in the current system, and what is possible. That's the exciting part. Reimagining our world, right? Recognizing that we can reach for and choose something different. We can choose something more constructive, empowering, effective, efficacious, that actually meets the needs of humanity at this stage in its growth and development as it approaches collective maturity. All right, thank you very much. I'm going to take a quick look at the comments. Interesting point, Nola, you say that to move towards a World Parliament there needs to be an infusion of trust in institutions. I would suggest that we need to craft institutions and processes that inspire trust in people. In other words, they need to be crafted in ways that ensure that all our voices are heard, that we're all represented. That in itself creates trust. But also to ensure that they're incapable of being taken over and being corrupted. And there are ways of doing that. Unfortunately, systems in many parts of the world and governments lack those safeguards. And so we're seeing misuse of systems and corollary decline in trust in public institutions. And yes, we need to raise climate issues to a higher level and public discourse, hence this podcast. So feel free to share it with your circles of friends. We're in the middle of it. The truck is barreling down the road right at us. In fact, it's already started to steamroll over us. We're all suffering the effects. And what's fascinating is that even communities that thought they were immune from climate change, and we heard about the poor folks in Asheville and what happened to them with the flooding and the landslides and so on, who thought we live in a part of the country in the United States where we're not going to be, we're going to be safe from climate change, the ravages of climate change. And oh, how wrong they ended up being. There is no safe haven for anybody. So we're all in this together. The ship of humanity is sinking. It's hit an iceberg and we need our life rafts. And I would submit that creating a World Parliament is one of those key life rafts that will get us all to safety. All right. Thank you until next month. Bye bye. That's all for this episode of Reimagining Our World. I'll see you back here next month. If you liked this episode, please help us to get the word out by rating us and subscribing to the program on your favorite podcast platform. This series is also available in video on the YouTube channel of the Center for Peace and Global Governance, CPGG.