COP19 part VI: The little UN thing that could

Roxanne,

You don’t have to wear that dress tonight.

Walk the street for money,

You don’t care if it’s wrong or if it’s right.

--The Police, 1978

Apparently some people think that when you have a locomotive that’s going nowhere it’s a good idea to throw the engineer into the furnace.

That’s pretty much what happened today. Mr. ‘I Fondle Coal Lovingly’ Korolec, the Environment Minister of Poland, will now be referred to in the past tense. He was unceremoniously sacked in the middle of the UN climate conference which he helped organize. Well, there was slight ceremony; the Prime Minister of Poland held a press conference in which he said, “I sacked the Environment Minister. This is the new guy,” while fondling a lump of coal he keeps handy for special occasions.

The new guy’s first words as Environment Minister of Poland were essentially that he planned on fracking Poland so hard the whole country would break apart like crackers under a hydraulic hammer. Here, in the conference center, if you listened really closely, you could hear the sound of synapses misfiring throughout the building.

You may have heard of the G7, G8 and G20? Let me introduce you to the G77; the group of small island nations who have had to adopt wearing hip-waders as part of their traditional attire. They’re here to negotiate the terms of ‘loss and damage’. It’s a hot topic in a hot world (har har). The idea is that, if they – despite taking the best available steps to keep it from happening – suddenly find themselves under six feet of water, they can ask for money from a central fund.  Essentially, it’s insurance on their insurance, using the basic calculation that burning fossil fuels leads to climate change and climate change leads to a lot of people standing around with toilet water up to their necks. Following on this, if they are victims of the developed world’s politicians crack-whoring to the fossil fuel industry, they may as well get some cash out of the deal.

Naturally, the crack whores are less than eager to pay if they’re not getting any crack out of it. So at six this morning, after negotiating for more than twelve hours, the G77 got up, gave the crack whores whatever their version of the finger is, and walked out of the building.

Frankly, when you consider that they’re only seeking compensation after bad weather breaches their first lines of defense, I think all 77 of them showed quite a bit of restraint. If I was with 77 people that were annoyed at the same thing I was, I’d seriously consider forming a mob to pelt the developed countries’ delegations with wet objects we’d found around our homes.

Today the bathrooms were packed with men in suits who had just shit themselves. The reason: China announced that it was “seriously preparing ground for its post-2020 mitigation contribution.” In plain English, this means that they’re trying to make a plan to help out the G77 when things get shitty. I’m not sure why this caused such a stir for a few reasons: One is that currently parts of China are so shrouded in polluted smog, cases of mistaken identity run amok. Paying the damages when chunks of that smog float over and roost on Taiwan seems fairly reasonable. Another is that ‘preparing ground’ sounds suspiciously like one of those overly used non-committals, wrapped in tentativeness, coated in fairy-dust sentences you hear a lot of. In fact, most of the stuff that’s said around here is so slippery you need a javelin to pin it down.

But, I guess in light of countries like Australia and Canada – so called ‘Annex 1’ because they are developed, produce pollution, can apply a carbon tax and should pay into the loss and damage fund – congratulating each other like retarded frat boys for giving a grand 'fuck you!' to carbon taxes and small Islands, and the EU’s pathological commitment to stumbling into itself, China’s ‘preparing ground’ sounds delicious.