Anyone concerned about the future of our planet should be reflecting on what the Paris Climate Summit achieved, how this was done, and what happens now. Has the narrative indeed changed?
Will governments now act fast to begin implementing the far-reaching changes needed to achieve even a 2 degree global warming cap, let along the more ambitious 1.5 degrees? Or, like the UK, return at once to begin issuing licenses to explore for fracking?
We might now fruitfully ask what kinds of lobbying, what uses of the social media, what academic analyses and research findings, if any, determined the outcome of the negotiations and concurrent street happenings.
Meanwhile Heather Pierce (personal communication) calls attention to a report about action to combat climate change. Coming at the time of the Paris Climate Summit, Assessing the Wider World of Non-state and Sub-national Climate Action: An Analysis from Yale University is of particular interest for the diversity of non-State and sub-national activity on which implementing good intentions and targets will heavily depend.
This is the more compelling in a persisting neoliberal era when ‘austerity’ and cut-back in the role of the State dominate public narrative, and governments are weakened by other global interests and lobbyists.
The report from the Yale School of Forestry and Environment Studies Cities summarises how “states, regions, companies and investors are taking actions to address climate change”:
“The scope of these actions is broad, covering hundreds of jurisdictions and encompassing a significant fraction of the global economy. Citizens, too, are mobilizing through signed petitions and climate marches. This ongoing action extends beyond what is captured in the Non-State Actor Zone for Climate Action (NAZCA), which records over 10,000 climate actions from nearly 5,000 actors.
An update of the broad support for climate action across a diverse range of actors follows below:
- Over 7,000 cities from more than 99 countries, with a combined population of 794 million (11 percent of the global population) and around 32 percent of global GDP.
- Sub-national states and regions with a population of 779 million (11 percent of the global population) in 20 countries, covering over a fifth of global land surface area (29.9 million square kilometers) and 20 percent ($17.5 trillion USD) of global GDP.
- Close to 5,000 companies from over 88 countries representing over $38 trillion USD in revenue.
- Nearly 500 investors with assets under management of more than $25 trillion, one-third of total global assets.
- Over 1.55 million people who have marched for climate action between 2014 and 2015. More than 13 million people, drawn from every country in the world, have signed petitions.
The full report, Assessing the Wider World of Non-state and Sub-national Climate Action (attached below) considers in turn the part of Cities, Regions, Companies, Investors, and Civil Society. It reminds us of looked in a joined-up way at the spectrum of activities in taking stock of whether and how fast climate change is become irreversible action beyond fine words.
If the fight to contain global warming for the benefit of humankind and its myriad fellow-tenants of what we like to call Planet Earth concerns you, please talk here.
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As post-UN Paris Climate Summit euphoria dies down, appraisals, challenges and modes of resistance become evident. The weekend after, the UK Observer observed apropos the huge effect of climate change in mass migration: ‘Global issues don’t live in separate boxes. Why no mention in Paris of refugees?’ The day after that The Guardian explored step by step ‘how the deal was done to save the planet’, with the World Bank President hailing it as, inevitably, a ‘game-changer’.
More soberly next day (December 15) The Guardian’s outstanding authoritatively well informed environmental doomsayer and resource, George Mombiot, struck a different yet purposeful forward-looking note based in other hard facts:
“…there’s a long way to go. We seem to be better at persuading ourselves we have changed than we are at changing. The climate agreement in Paris was widely greeted as a breakthrough…. Shorn of targets, timetables and binding instruments, it is a highly effective programme for salving the collective conscience of the delegates, and little more… As the website climateparis.org explains, even if every pledge nations brought to the talks were honoured (and already governments such as the UK’s are breaking theirs), by 2030 the world will be producing more greenhouse gases than it does today… The festival of self-satisfaction with which the talks ended was a “mission accomplished” moment, a grave case of premature congratulation. …while the global support for renewable energy – $121bn a year – is widely decried as an outrageous drain upon the public purse, the $452bn with which the G20 nations support fossil fuels is, apparently, eminently affordable. It’s out of the question to keep fossil fuels in the ground but not, according to some commentators, to move cities in response to climate change or, as one columnist infamously proposed, to allow the tropics to be reduced to ‘wastelands with few folk living in them’.”
“The toxic stream of disinformation about climate change pumped out by companies such as Exxon mingles with a deep current of anti-intellectualism. But it is not our destiny to be swept away by this nonsense, any more than it is our destiny to resist it”. Mombiot goes on to this challenge, one surely fitting for Pascal to take up: “This is a choice we take both alone and together. We have a remarkable capacity to make and to unmake social norms…”
A different reaction came from Euracoal’s secretary-general Brian Ricketts. As coal company shares dropped in value he ‘lashed out at what he called “mob rule” by a cabal of world governments and protesters at the Paris climate summit which posed a threat to democracy itself. “The world is being sold a lie, yet most people seem to accept the lie, even if they do not believe it,”... “The UN has successfully brainwashed most of the world’s population such that scientific evidence, rational analysis, enlightened thinking and common sense no longer matter.” How does CSR play out in areas where companies and their shareholders really do also fear the future, but in a different sense?
How did the environmental lobbyists see it? According to Greenpeace “Something historic happened at the weekend: nearly 200 countries came together to sign a global agreement to fight the worst effects of climate change.
This didn't happen in isolation, it didn't happen without a fight, it happened because of people power. It happened because people took to the streets as well as their personal computers to tell our leaders – the time for inaction was over.”
The deal, though far from perfect, “has changed the direction of travel fundamentally. But of course the agreement is worthless if governments don’t walk the walk, too”… so Greenpeace advises on the next steps in sustained campaigning.
ActionAid likewise found the climate deal “historic. We’ve never had a legally binding agreement that so many countries have signed up to before – almost 200 of them. On top of that, it includes a global goal on climate adaptation – something thousands of ActionAid supporters campaigned for.”
Moving to another related crisis area however (just as mass migration and climate change are causally connected): “unfortunately the goal we got, and the agreement overall, aren’t strong enough, and won’t do enough to repair the damage climate change causes to the lives of the world’s poorest women and children”. So the same lesson as from Greenpeace - campaign on: “it felt so empowering to be part of this huge community of activists calling for a fair climate deal. We’ve learnt so much from everyone we met this weekend, and we feel equipped to go home… and continue the campaign.”
Other examples can be multiplied from different countries: from Sweden, Austria, Estonia, Australia, and on behalf of countries as different as Burkina-Faso. In the words of the Yale study cited in an earlier OTB posting “Cities, states, regions, companies and investors are taking actions to address climate change. The scope of these actions is broad, covering hundreds of jurisdictions and encompassing a significant fraction of the global economy. Citizens, too, are mobilizing through signed petitions and climate marches.” In the UK other politically oriented social activist websites like Action 38 combine celebration of victory with a new call to signing and crowd-sourcing for renewed pressure on governments to match words with deeds.
It remains to be seen how far the narrative has been altered and whole communities, local to national, have learned of shared interest and destiny beyond the local actions that produced the acronym NIMBY – Not in my Back Yard. Even my local free throwaway local paper devotes a page to ‘changing the world by degrees’; combining an informative and educative piece on the UN story since the Stockholm meeting in 1972 and the activism of the local District UN Association with the personal account of a local green activist who was on the streets in Paris.
Can we through OTB develop a better understanding of how local community action feeds into global action beyond political resolution? What does the Paris Climate Summit work, outcome and aftermath tell us about what kinds of academic research and activity by ‘public intellectuals’ inform and educate civil society? how mass civic movements whether by street rallies or social media mass campaigns work? and what secures that a better informed citizenly learns to learn and to act more effectively and well?