So, a bunch of NGOs walked out of the UN climate negotiations today. They were the so-called C7, some of which include Oxfam, WWF (the animal lovers, not the wrestling association), Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, Christian Aid and a few others.
There was a press release which was sent to journalsist on behalf of the C7 which basically said that the entire Stadion Narodowy was filled with maggot sycophants who brainlessly dance to the tunes of fossil fuel fiddlers. It blasts the Finance Ministerial for having no discussion about actual finance, the loss and damage talks for being stymied by people that live high above sea level and – getting a bit existential – the COP 19 itself for being a construct of the very people who should be taken out back and shot.
From a certain point of the view, the general expectations of the NGOs about this COP were fairly reasonable. They accepted the whole “let’s all plan to make a plan,” thinking which I wouldn’t even accept from my grandmother. They accepted all the things that follow that; like trying to make dashes on a decade-long timeline on which plans to plan will definitely be planned. They accepted that their consultation was only listened to if it sat squarely in a pre-existing agenda. They knew there would be deal-breakers, side steppers, ducker, weavers and outright liars.
They wanted countries to promise – a word that notoriously flops out of politician’s mouths like dead fish from a sewer pipe – to reduce their emissions from charcoaling lungs to merely blocking nostrils. Generally, they wanted the place to be a venue of change, not a Xanax-driven reunion of apathetic suits.
A large part of the angst that drove them to leave has to do with their expectations. Some of the NGO players here have attended every single COP since it was a little baby – when they themselves were considered to be a bunch of hippies and everyone had two-and-a-half kids, a car and a job at the asbestos plant. Those were hopeful times, when climate change was considered the fantasy of tree-huggers and mushroom trippers, and wearing neon and silly pants was acceptable.
But the hippies are now in suits and have PhDs in biochemistry and market analytics and degrees in international law. While the same people who have to make the important decisions at the UN climate talks today, are still making decisions as if they still lived back then.
Somewhere between COP11 and now, the hope has been replaced with the kind of burning anger usually reserved for public transportation and smug people. The result is that every year they downgrade what they hope the decision-makers do, and every year the decision-makers manage to find a newer low to achieve. This time, going into COP 19, the expectations were downright subterranean – applying the amount of hope you’d give a monkey trying to solve a Rubik’s cube in the midst of severe heroine withdrawal.
What it does affirm is the need to for NGOs to do NGO-type things, like climb oil rigs and make you depressed with pictures of rabbits wearing badly applied mascara. The goal being to mobilize people to actually do something when the people that should don’t.
I made the same complaints I’ve been ranting about in my past six entries to some of my much wiser colleagues. They tend to agree with me, but with the caveat that these types of discussion need to happen somewhere, so they might as well happen where they are supposed to happen. They also talk about the much finer conundrums that the rest of the world would find too complex to handle; like, what if an entire population has to move somewhere because a nearby desert started creeping up on them like a flasher on an empty street. If they’re forced across a foreign border because too many fat people drive cars on a different continent, do they then lose their sovereignty? How will they be settled? Will the settlement become a new state? And what about the state they moved into; do those people then lose a chunk of their land to chapped-lipped migrant strangers?
See? You’re glazing over already. These kinds of nuances have no explosions, no celebrities, no baby pictures and no place at the dinner table. But they are the things, it turns out, which need to be discussed. They are also the things that, despite making an entire profession out of it, still drives policy-makers into Stubborn Onset Catatonia. More ‘policy’ less ‘maker’.
The thing is, however the subtlety of the discussion, or the fragility of the politics involved, you, me and everyone else, can point at the people who are supposed to make the important decisions and say, “You fucked up.”
19 years of doing that, to the same kinds of people, and yeah, you might finally walk out.
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