Thread by @dwallacewells

“It’s now 12 days down for COP26, the climate conference long called ‘make or break’ for humanity, with less than one to go.” A long thread on the growing gap between increasingly alarmist hyperbole from world leaders and actual policy action. (1/x) nymag.com/intelligencer/…

“If ‘make or break’ sounds hyperbolic, rhetoric at the conference itself has set the bar just as high — which is to say, perhaps, impossibly high.”

“On its first day, COP26 president Alok Sharma called the gathering ‘our last best hope,’ echoing earlier comments by John Kerry, who called it ‘the last best hope for the world,’ and Prince Charles, who called it ‘literally the last-chance saloon.’”

“‘It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock,’ Boris Johnson said in his opening remarks. ‘We are digging our own graves,’ Antonio Guterres said, admonishing the world to stop ‘treating nature like a toilet’ and declaring, starkly, ‘either we stop it — or it stops us.’”

“There have been some bits of good news in Glasgow: a net-zero pledge from India, a commitment from the U.S. and China to work together, a toothless but still significant global agreement to reduce methane emissions.”

“But a preliminary analysis published by Carbon Brief suggests that, all told, the agreements coming out of COP26 may shave just 0.1 degree Celsius off of future warming.”

“Which means that, even if you set aside for a moment the much more urgent demands of climate activists and some scientists, and merely take seriously the existential language of those typically cautious and pragmatic world leaders, the conference has been an inarguable failure.”

“Forget Greta Thunberg or Vanessa Nakate or the now-familiar rhetoric of climate-vulnerable nations or the 100,000 outraged and frustrated protesters who rallied in Glasgow this week…”

“The conference is a failure by the standards set by the very faces of the meliorist, technocratic global political Establishment — the American climate envoy, British prime minister, COP conference chairman, and U.N. secretary-general — barely more than one week ago.”

“That isn’t to say that doomsday will arrive at the close of the conference or that all hope for progress should be dashed, only that the conference itself has not delivered anything resembling a step-change so much as a confirmation and consecration of the existing status quo.”

The status quoted has been - relatively speaking - encouraging lately: the grimmest futures seem much less likely now, even as the window of opportunity for a relatively comfortable landing has closed, too.”

“In the first days of COP26, a slew of new analyses of recent ‘net zero’ pledges were released, each suggesting that if those pledges were all enacted, getting below two degrees might be possible, too. Perhaps it will be, but that math is full of wishful thinking.”

“COP26 didn’t change any of this, one way or the other — this was the lay of the land two weeks ago, and two months ago.”

“And while the stated goal of COP26 has been to keep the ambitious Paris goal on track — ‘keep 1.5 alive’ in the simple shorthand —  it may well have already passed out of reach before COP26 had even begun.”

“To continue to believe in the possibility of 1.5 degrees means believing that the world can decarbonize perhaps three times faster than current policies imply, indeed even faster than implied by those net-zero targets…”

“…that methane emissions, which have grown dramatically in recent decades, can be brought dramatically down, too; and that large-scale, multi-gigaton carbon removal can be achieved in the next several decades, growing to ‘planetary scale’ in the second half of the century.”

“There may be different ways to make the math work, but the basic picture is the same: Everything has to go as well as could be imagined, and perhaps better, while also going faster than any country seems to believe is possible, starting immediately, without any complication.”

“Which makes it all the more striking just how vividly and full-throatedly the world’s leaders embraced and underlined that 1.5-degree goal in the run-up to Glasgow, and how dramatically they described the consequences of failing to meet it.”

“They must’ve known how hard that would be, and must have known how out of line their rhetoric was with the policy it implied. They must’ve known, well ahead of time, what progress was likely, or even possible, at Glasgow, and what kind was not at all on the table.”

“So what were they doing? What were they thinking?”

“One generous interpretation is that, however disconnected the rhetoric was from any actual policy they were willing to consider, they believed it anyway — that this rhetoric was, among other things, a self-indictment.”

“A second related interpretation is that they were trying to rally the troops.”

“A third possibility is that they were basically bullied into playing the part of genuinely concerned, conscientious leaders by those activists, who intimidated them even before they began their protests, though apparently not enough to put more aggressive action on the table.”

“But a final and cynical interpretation connects many of these dots: that these leaders viewed rhetoric as a substitute for real action…”

“…preferred the existential theater of climate speechifying to the hard work of enacting global transformation…”

“…believed that enough of those watching around the world would accept, in place of real policy commitment, a rhetoric of recognition, which described the urgency of the moment and the global stakes in roughly the ‘right’ terms…”

“…and did not worry that they would pay any price for the widening gap between what they were doing and what they were saying. Or, perhaps, that anyone would even notice, amid all the canned self-congratulatory applause.”

“In the U.S., it has become a commonplace of the political commentariat to lament that policy does not matter, that partisanship is now pure culture war, that elections can swing on trivialities and tribal grievances.“

“That is what Andrew Breitbart meant by ‘politics is downstream from culture,’ and liberals reckoning with the rise of Donald Trump and its aftermath have found it an illuminating, if distressing, bon mot.”

“But the strange present state of climate geopolitics—in which slow-moving centrists go full Greta when the lights flip on—is a reminder that the same politics of virtual reality can govern the progressive side of things as well, including when the stakes are existentially high.”

“Hypocrisy is a blunt, often irrational criticism of climate advocates, since politics is the method by which we aspire to be better together than as individuals (and since climate can only be addressed at scale through systemic changes that must be at least midwifed by policy).”

“But the same exemptions can’t apply to the actual people in power, who now find themselves embracing, in ever more heated and urgent language, temperature goals that are simultaneously growing ever more out of reach.”

“Hyperbole doesn’t reduce emissions on its own, but our politics — climate and otherwise — increasingly puts it front and center anyway.” (X/x)