Support Global Warming
By Lance Gould
GLASGOW — “It’s one minute to midnight,” warned UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the opening ceremony of COP 26, the UN-brokered climate summit in Glasgow held earlier this month.
As host head of state, Johnson — hardly a champion of the environment — was making a metaphorical point that, in terms of the negative consequences of the climate crisis, we don’t have a lot of time left. (Which just goes to show that even a broken clock like BoJo could be right twice a day — or in this case once an Anthropocene.)
As important as the conference was, the two-week COP summit had mixed results. Some important agreements were indeed reached, such as on deforestation (agreements to halt and reverse it by 2030) and on methane emissions (an agreement to reduce 30% of emissions by 2030). There was also an agreement to phase “down” — but not phase “out” — coal use. And most significantly there was an agreement to kick the can down the road when it comes to the critical goal of limiting average planetary temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius. The decision was made to revisit that idea — and to announce more ambitious emission-cutting targets — at next year’s COP 27 in Egypt. So the rallying cry of “1.5 to Stay Alive” still has life for at least another year.
But disappointingly there were at least 503 representatives of the fossil-fuel industry in attendance in the conference’s official Blue Zone — far outnumbering any single country delegation at COP 26.
And given where the hands on that clock are, we’re only rocketing quickly toward planet destruction. The sad truth is, we’ve already begun to see irreversible negative impacts on the climate, in sea-level rise, in melting ice caps, in raging fires, in desertification, and in the unpredictability of weather patterns, including a collapse of the Gulf Stream. Some of these changes were articulated in the UN’s IPCC report, a report that UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres called a Code Red for humanity.
This will have far-reaching negative impacts for humanity, particularly those living in developing countries, which, with a couple of exceptions, are the least responsible for the crisis.
And even when there are seemingly breakthrough agreements on climate — such as 2015’s COP 21 in Paris — that language is mainly voluntary and not strictly enforceable.
So are climate conferences actually worth it?
WORTH THE CARBON FOOTPRINT?
This was the third climate conference I have attended, having previously been to Rio de Janeiro for the very first Earth Summit in 1992, and then to Paris for the widely acclaimed COP 21 in 2015. The question I get asked most often about these conferences is: are they worth it?
Skeptics often point out the seeming hypocrisy of climate conferences that have massive carbon footprints, with so many thousands of diplomats, scientists, journalists, and activists assembling in a different locale every year.
While this is true, the gathering of so many people with (mostly) an active interest in saving the planet, convening and sharing ideas that offer scalable solutions to the climate crisis, actually gives me hope (much more so than the watered-down treaties and agreements).
And there is an international framework for moving the needle on planetary-saving actions. The Sustainable Development Goals, a.k.a. the SDGs or the Global Goals, are a blueprint unanimously adopted by the UN in 2015 to chart a course for saving the planet in 17 different sectors, ranging from climate action to stopping poverty and hunger to achieving gender equality and more parity in health and education.
In my opinion, the most important SDG at the moment is SDG 17, Partnerships, which seems to me to be recognition by the UN and other global leaders that the public sector will never on its own be able to raise the trillions of dollars every year necessary to achieve the other 16 SDGs. So in that sense it is an olive branch to the private sector and civil society, to take whatever legitimately beneficial work they are doing under the social good umbrella and tie it to this international framework, thus getting 1) more visibility and 2) more actual impact for that work.
If we’re going to have any chance at survival, we need the public sector, the private sector, and civil society to, as best possible, take off their organizational hats and break down silos to collaborate under SDG 17.
This past fall, my company, Brooklyn Story Lab, launched GOALS Post, a platform for the very best next-generation solutions to the SDGs, featuring two nonprofit partners, Enactus and UNLEASH. And what I saw in Scotland does give me hope that there are enough concerned citizens and activists and entrepreneurs out there working tirelessly for climate justice — despite the skepticism, cynicism and corruption of many governments, businesses, and other bad actors.
There are too many to name, but a smattering of those that inspired me include:
I heard about a sustainable-fashion solution that helps combat desertification in Mongolia caused by breeding cashmere goats — the answer is “yak-shmere.”
A group of Kuna women from Panama crafted the world’s largest mola sail to call attention to the plight of indigenous people around the world.
A college — Glasgow Caledonian University’s — that has made the SDGs a central tenet of the school curriculum.
Young activists like Mexico’s Xiye Bastida and the U.S.’s Alexandria Villasenor made the journey, and held the feet of those in power to the fire.
And just as impressive were the senior citizens, like Margaret Roberts from Manchester, who was sitting quietly outside the Blue Zone in a religious coalition. “It’s very much a part of my faith to hold people to account for climate justice and to pray for the Earth,” she told me.
Another senior citizen, Philip (he declined to give his last name), 74, was born in the States and lives in London. He was with the global environmental-activist group Extinction Rebellion, and was holding a provocative sign that read “Human life is Overrated. Support Global Warming.”
“People my age won’t live through the worst of this [crisis],” he told me. “We need to find ways to decarbonize quickly — and people need to do this themselves, because we’re not going to get politicians and companies to act. We need to act so that our children and grandchildren will have a planet to live on.”
