COP21, like the United Nations climate conferences before it, appears to be floundering over international non-binding showcase “commitments” to reduce carbon emissions — and is emitting effusive illusions of progress. Pleas of island nations fall on deaf ears. The negotiators are ignoring the scientific evidence that the reductions they are talking about fall far short of what is necessary to keep the planet habitable in the coming decades.
Meanwhile, a new set of players or “stakeholders” has appeared on the scene. Bill Gates, one of the richest men in the world, retired from his position as CEO and creator of Microsoft, is now overseeing one of the biggest philanthropic foundations in the world, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. He is forming a group of 28 leading world investors called the “Breakthrough Energy Initiative.” This group of investors is aligning with governments in a new public-private venture called “Mission Innovation.”
Gates has pulled together billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook), George Soros (consummate currency trader), Jack Ma (Alibaba), and Saudi Prince Alaweed bin Talal, in a massive effort at venture philanthropy. With their government allies, these guys are taking the powers that be directly down the wrong road. Their goal is to invest in Research and Development (R&D) of new low or no-carbon energy production technologies over the next five years. Their billions of private and public dollars could be much better spent on direct climate mitigation efforts urgently needed now.
First, we don’t have time to bet on the optimism of wealthy technophiles. No, not all problems in the world can be solved by some new (likely energy-intensive) technology. The Climate Crisis is NOW. We must apply all possible existing scientific and material resources to reduce carbon emissions in the present, rather than betting on yet to be proven technologies that may be invented and developed in a few years.
Second, all new technology, especially the high tech stuff almost universally favored by venture capitalists, is energy intensive in both its development and its deployment. We need just the opposite: low-tech or existing technologies. Neither existing solar nor wind technologies need new R&D investments to be deployed now.
Third, we must transform the profligate endless-growth high consumption and waste economy that produces most of the carbon emissions currently destroying climate stability. Otherwise, emissions cannot be curtailed enough to avert disaster. That involves things we already know how to do, such as insulation, various other energy saving actions, and reductions in the explosive international trade that consumes so much fossil-fuel generated energy.
Neither the Gates Group of Billionaires nor the faux negotiators of COP21 seem willing to face the hard problem of immediate massive reductions in carbon emissions. What humanity and the planet need is a complete transformation of the global growth-at-any-cost economy into an ecological economy grounded in the earth systems that have sustained us all — so far.
What we need most is “Local Community Resilience to Avoid Climate Catastrophe,” which is the title of my article just published in the Green Fire Times, the largest distribution newspaper in Northern New Mexico. GFT focuses on all things related to sustainable life in the Southwest. In that article, I discuss resistance, replacement, and resilience, as the “three R’s” of survival under the conditions we face. These ideas are also discussed in some previous posts on this site. Civil society movements demonstrating outside the Paris conference — and around the world — are growing, as they did in response to previous establishment climate conferences that accomplished next to nothing. But they must grow much faster. The building of a global movement to achieve the Next Great Transformation offers the best hope, if it can happen fast enough.
