Big detour on UN chief ’s ‘highway to hell’

When he opened the COP27 climate conference two weeks ago in Egypt, UN Secretary-general António Guterres issued one of his doomist statements about the world climate. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator.” Two weeks later the 45,000 delegates to the event headed home after failing to take any significant action to curb what Guterres claimed was a crucial turning point in global history. “We can sign a climate solidarity pact, or a collective suicide pact.”

The final collection of agreements signed by the nations was neither a ring of unity nor a plunge into the suicidal abyss. First, the suicide-pact line was nothing but a typical fear-mongering statement delivered daily by thousands of politicians, activists and NGOS clamouring to impose their authoritarian economic policies on a world population that refuses to take its foot off the accelerator of growth and progress. While Guterres is chanting the lyrics to the 1979 AC/DC rock ’n’ roll hit Highway to Hell, much of the rest of the world is still stuck on Led Zeppelin’s 1970 Stairway to Heaven.

Well, maybe not, but you get the point. COP27 was clearly heading for a do-nothing conclusion long before the event took place. While NGOS and second-level politicians wandered the media-thick corridors of the Egyptian meeting centre, all claiming that the world is at a turning point, the real leaders of the nations represented were off attending other global organizational platforms — at the G20 and other conflabs where more immediate concerns were on the table.

As the COP27 meetings were turning to dust in Egypt, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau was in Bangkok to meet with U.S. Vice-president Kamala Harris on the margins of the Asia-pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting. Topics on the table included Canada’s new Indo-pacific strategy, North Korean missile launches, Haiti’s chaotic situation, Iran’s human rights record, and other issues. Climate got a mention, but only after references to supply chains and the importance of Canada-u.s. trade.

The number of climate issues left unsettled on the COP27 bargaining table is so long and instructive — forgotten pledges, lost decades, interminable babble and hype — that many activists are now calling for a revamp of the whole COP regime. Alluding to another hit song (1965), one veteran UN climate adviser concluded that “What the world needs now is action to reduce emissions and as a result the COPS are no longer fit for purpose.” The only real headline-grabber in the final outcome of COP27 was a plan to establish an organization that would force rich countries, mostly in the Global North, to pay reparations to poor countries in the Global South that allegedly suffer from climate change caused by the Global North’s fossil fuel consumption. According to the COP27 “implementation plan,” the new agreement “for the first time” will set up an organizational structure that will consider matters relating to funding arrangements to cover the “loss and damage” suffered by developing nations.

As described in COP27 and UN agreement documents, the payments from the Global North will run to trillions of dollars annually. To round up that kind of cash, a special “Transitional Committee” will be struck with bureaucratic instructions to catalyze “technical assistance for the implementation of the relevant approaches at the local, national and regional level in developing countries that are particularly vulnerable to the adverse effects of climate change, and affirms its determination to select the host of the secretariat of the Santiago network by 2023 through a selection process conducted in an open, transparent, fair and neutral manner in accordance with the process outlined.”

Details on methods, dollar amounts, procedures and other subjects will be determined, perhaps at COP28, with the help of the Transitional Committee composed of 10 developed countries and 14 developing nations in Africa, Latin America, Asia and the Pacific, the Caribbean, two other “small island” states and other “least developed countries.”

Missing in the “loss and damage” process is scientific assessment of the origins of the floods, droughts and other catastrophes that routinely occur in much of the developing world. The historical scientific fact is that floods and droughts have been taking place in parts of the world for centuries.

To give one example, 21st-century floods in South Sudan are cited as justification for massive fund transfers. Bill Mckibben, founder of 350.org, wrote this week in The New Yorker that while Africa “has produced just a small percentage of the greenhouse gases now warming the Earth, it is fast falling prey to the fast-warming Indian Ocean.” Except that Sudan and other countries in the region have been ravaged by floods and droughts for centuries — even millennia. A chapter in The Ecology of Survival, an encyclopedic book subtitled “Case Studies in Northeast African History,” documents the long record of environmental disasters, including this note: “There is historical evidence also of heavy rains in the norther Sudan and Nubia in 683 BC, associated with alarmingly high Nile floods.”

If future COPS attempt to redistribute trillions of dollars from North to South, a good starting point would be to determine what is caused by fossil-fuels emissions and what is natural or brought on by other human activities.

NOW ON SIDEROAD WITH ‘LOSS AND DAMAGE’ PACT.