During COP21 there are run-off events organised to draw attention to the issues that will be strategically overlooked inside the conference headquarters. Today, the team behind what is being referred to as an “open source toolkit” gathered in the 11e Arrondisement, where just over two weeks ago the massacre happened inside the Bataclan concert hall. Naomi Klein, Avi Lewis, Maude Barlow and other Canadian politicians behind The Great Leap Manifesto stood in plenary to mobilize a grassroots critical mass that is both ambitious and feasible, enough to pressure international policy through local community activism.
The Manifesto is a comprehensive document signed by more than 150 influential Canadians and published during the last election. It's spreading around the world and being formed to fit local networks - Its relevance to the entire climate justice movement is clear and comes with specific reccomendations; Putting the rights of first peoples to govern their own land and new local green energy systems. The need to end subsidies to fossil fuel companies. The imperative to increase taxes on the world’s largest corporations and wealthiest individuals. Democratization of transport and clean rail systems from coast to Canadian coast. It also suggests that the implementation of carbon taxes must be done quickly and effectively.
Most relevant to what is happening at COP was the manifesto's take on carbon storage. The unanimous agreement that CCS is not the right step if governments are serious in their move towards renewables made the biggest impression on the crowd today. Treating carbon storage like the answer to our climate woes leaves potential solutions behind, and doesn't recognise the systemic change that is happening through bottom-up activism where small communities are fighting for their lives to survive against the development model that put them at the bottom in the first place.
Since the birth of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) in Rio 23 years ago we have seen what consequences the carbon based economic model have had on this planet. The Great Leap Manifesto describes steps that can be taken to leap, not saunter, into a justice based green economy. The speakers took stage and criticised new trade agreements like TTIP (The Transatlantic Trade and Investor Partnership) , TPP (The Trans Pacific Partnership) and their quietly implemented dispute settlement mechanisms as ones that favour corporations over government. The notion that our elected officials, trade agreements and even international institutions like the UN are here to help must be brought into question. If the UN Conference of the Parties in Paris, like the ones before it, allow their largest national energy producers to sponsor the events then why are we not discussing that conflict of interest? Naomi Klein asked: "If having big energy companies continue to lobby international conferences reserved for scientists and government not be seen as a threat to the integrity of an agreement, I don't know what is."
It’s like inviting a bartender to an AA meeting.
The larger conflict that has arisen from having big oil and gas in bed with policy starts at the state level, where it becomes impossible to divorce itself from its most industrious partnerships and keep emissions reductions promises at global summits. The outrageous, and definitively inconvenient truth that to truly tackle climate change would mean that countries would have to keep 80%, if not more, of their known oil reserves in the ground is a threat that the fossil fuel-based economic model cannot deal with. I mean let's be honest, what sane industry would agree to have itself be regulated and chopped when the deregulation of its business practices are exactly what allow it to thrive?
Keeping the polluters at the negotiating tables means no matter the outcome of this COP compared to the 20 talks before it, it will still hold the same vested interests central while omitting the real solution: an overhaul of the carbon/commodity system that got us here in the first place. It is exactly the simplicity behind this self-referential design that makes it so frustrating. It is very hard to permeate those with the most wealth and power with responsible and radical ideas on climate change, even though we all know we can't go on the way we are.
As leaders negotiate our fate at Le Bourget, it can also be difficult to come to terms with the fact that commitments made by the end of COP21 will continue to be reliant on the idea that CO2 emissions are economic externalities, so any solutions to that problem will only be generated within the same economic paradigm that drove us here. We are making no attempt at questioning what human and environmental costs are inherent to a carbon based economy as the starting point. It is exactly this dissonant reaction to our warming climate that dismantles the greatest opportunity to make radical changes to top-level policy - the only kind we can now afford if we hope to save the planet.
The objective of the COP21 members to limit the planet to a 2 degree warming is indeed not enough, though we desperately want it to be. Also... Remember when African heads of state stormed the UN floor in Copenhagen in 2009, expressing that 2 degrees would still be climate suicide for their continent? Remember when the president of the Maldives said that 2 degrees would be a death sentence to Pacific Island nations? The idea that certain nations must be sacrificed so that we can continue to exploit their resources with impunity is unacceptable and embarrassing, and that is what should come first on the agenda for the rest of the conference.
Pressure on governments to solve this crisis using technofixes is really just a fancy way to sell pie-in-the-sky solutions and does not acknowledge the need to keep carbon in the ground. And though "Net Zero" emission goals sound like something we all want, they actually end up championing more and more carbon capture & storage (CCS) solutions as well as sci-fi tech ideas like SPICE (Stratospheric Particle Injection for Climate Engineering), or Ocean Fertilization (which involves dumping iron fillings into the ocean that would cause plankton booms to capture carbon dioxide) and other large scale infrastructural eco-projects. And that's not to downplay the rise in cheap solar and wind technologies, which are capable of mitigating climate damages, but we know we are running out of time, and the delegates inside the conference know it too, but are still deflecting. The LEAP Manifesto makes sure to address that continued ownership and dominance by energy conglomerates, rather than locally derived clean energy initiatives will not get us out of this mess.
It's like there's a terribly rusty whirring fan that keeps interrupting nice dinner conversation around COP21 but no one tries to turn off because there's a sign beside it that says "Do Not Turn Me Off". Admitting to the fact that we’ve been terribly wrong and that we've impoverished countries through exploitative mining and petroleum projects for way too long is also hard to bring up at the negotiation table, especially when we can't hear our own voices other over the whir. If we can't ourselves admit to self-serving collective behaviour, or exhibit some self restraint at the carbon buffet table, then how can we expect our leaders to make more selfless decisions. I know I'm mixing metaphors.
No individual actor, no head of state, and no one single carbon entrenched CEO will demand to be punished and regulated for their own maniacal behaviour and that is the real challenge in Paris. Governments that can't stop pumping more and more carbon into the atmosphere, while congratulating themselves on innovative mitigation strategies should be considered criminals at this point. It is criminal because heralding technological supremacy over nature is where all of this started. The promotion of carbon capture schemes and net zero emissions goals is like the Teslas electrical car solution, it remains beautiful and beneficial, but only for the very rich. These all end up being discussed as tangible strategies at COP and this is how the biggest polluters are jury and judge when sentencing their own climate crimes, and how they are able to continue to weasel out of making uncomfortable concessions.
Those on the front lines of climate change have watched the destructive forces of industry stomp around in their backyards for far too long, and it is unjust that the same communities must face the worst effects of rapacious business practices. This is not a waiting game, Paris. Admit that it's already happening to most of the people on this planet and stop the corrosion of your governments by the oppressive lobbying by big oil and gas.
It's simple. We demand real change.