Climate talks 'no longer fit for purpose'? Go figure.
Even the people who have long been at the centre of the UN talks think they're a waste of time. But their solution is worse. PLUS past Battle of Ideas debates on climate change and net zero.
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On Friday, BBC News reported that ‘key experts’ have had enough of the UN’s annual climate jamborees. BBC environment correspondent Matt McGrath reports that the likes of former UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon, former UN climate chief Christiana Figueres and a former president of Ireland, Mary Robinson, are appalled by the lack of progress in agreeing to cut emissions. The fact that the current COP (‘Conference of the Parties’) and the previous one have been held in leading petro-states - Azerbaijan and the United Arab Emirates - hasn’t helped the mood.
Professor Johan Rockström, another signatory, told McGrath: ‘Planet Earth is in critical condition… There is still a window of opportunity for a safe landing for humanity, but this requires a global climate policy process that can deliver change at exponential speed and scale.’
You can kind of see their point. Back in 2021, the New York Times noted that emissions are not only not on track for the goals set out for the talks, they are not even on track to match the pledges made at previous COPs.
But ‘critical condition’ is an odd way to describe the state of the planet. Yes, it is warmer than 50 years ago, but the Earth’s people have never had it so good. Take this graph from Our World in Data. In less than 50 years, the proportion of very poor people in seven developing countries - Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Mexico, Nigeria and Pakistan - has fallen dramatically, despite rising populations.
Environmentalists love to draw our attention to the latest bout of extreme weather and gasp ‘Ah, climate change!’ - Valencia’s floods being the most high-profile example recently - but deaths from natural disasters are a fraction of what they were in the past (see below) despite world population quadrupling from two billion in 1927 to over eight billion today.
And it’s not even clear that such events are becoming more frequent. As Roger Pielke Jr has noted, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has found that no clear ‘climate signal’ has yet emerged for ‘river floods, heavy precipitation and pluvial floods, landslides, drought (all types), severe wind storms, tropical cyclones, sand and dust storms, heavy snowfall and ice storms, hail, snow avalanche, coastal flooding and marine heat waves’.
That may happen in due course as temperatures rise, but the ‘we’re all doomed’ narrative is overblown. Where there is significant loss of life, it is often because of a failure to prepare for extreme weather, not because of greenhouse gas emissions. It would be wise to take the most febrile claims of eco-warriors with a massive pinch of salt, whether it is claims that climate change is an existential crisis or that air pollution is killing millions.
But the climate talks are, it is true, bloated and hypocritical events where politicians come to show off how much they care and prove they are ‘world leaders’ when they are failing at home. Keir ‘Davos over Westminster’ Starmer and his monomaniac climate secretary, Ed Miliband, are just the latest examples. But it’s the ‘at home’ bit that’s the problem.
It turns out that the ‘change at exponential speed and scale’ that Rockström et al love to bang on about isn’t suiting the people who vote for politicians. Those voters are already sick of high energy prices and anaemic economic growth, seeing their living standards stagnate.
As David Frost noted in a speech in the House of Lords recently, the policy of building more and more renewable-energy infrastructure will make our energy bills go up even further - not down, as the likes of Miliband like to claim. Moreover, a spell of little wind or sunshine over northern Europe last week shows that unreliable renewables don’t offer much energy security either, with the UK relying on burning a lot of gas and importing electricity from Europe to keep the lights on.
So, while grand pledges have been made behind closed doors in Copenhagen, Paris, Glasgow and all the rest, the people keep pushing back. It is simply impossible at the moment to make massive cuts in emissions and maintain a functioning economy. Even in authoritarian societies like China, leaders know fine well that slashing living standards for the sake of The Planet is likely to stir up enormous trouble.
Ultimately, these ‘key experts’ know that to make the emissions cuts they claim are required to ‘save the planet’, the ‘global climate policy process’ is going to have to take democracy out of the equation so that the mega-brains of the global elite can run the world according to their own vision - and to hell with the consequences. Oh, how it must grate to know that the election of Donald Trump for a second term as US president is about to put the kibosh on their global jollies.
Battle of Ideas debates on climate change and Net Zero
CLIMATE EMERGENCY: CATASTROPHE OR CATASTROPHISING?
Battle of Ideas festival 2022
NET ZERO: CAN THE ECONOMY AND DEMOCRACY SURVIVE?
Battle of Ideas festival 2023
You can also listen on the Battle of Ideas Audio Archive.
GOING GREEN: ECO-DOGMA OR SALVATION?
Battle of Ideas festival 2021