Paris Climate Conference - intervention or toothless?

It was always going to be a near impossible task. So simple to summarise yet so difficult to accomplish. We need to burn less fossil fuels.

And at the 2015 Paris Climate Conference next week that is just what the UN will once again attempt to enforce. They want to arrive at a legally binding and universal agreement on climate, with the aim of keeping global warming below 2°C.

So will they be successful? Ban Ki Moon has suggested ‘reasonable optimism’ – a stance I wish I could mirror but the chances seem almost vanishingly small to me. Getting 190 countries to reach agreement on anything is hard enough; to do so for a legally binding document that could prove to be one of the most important in human history begins to sound like a hopeless task.

The UN have been quick to point out that if successful, it’ll be the first time in over 20 years of negotiations that such an aim has been achieved. But – are we as a world in a good place to reach this agreement?

Well, it can be no bad thing that just a few weeks ago the US government announced new curbs on oil and gas exploration in Arctic waters off Alaska’s northern coast. That, as they say, aint nothin’. And it comes after Royal Dutch Shell spent 10 years and billions of pounds trying to tap the Arctic’s oily underbelly, so it’s not for want of trying. But this isn’t the early sprouts of a greener environmental stance for the US, its simple pragmatism. The US Geological Survey estimates that the Arctic holds about 30% of the world’s undiscovered natural gas, as well as 13% of its oil. The rub being that it is particularly difficult to get at – and so the Alaskan oil is ‘safe’ simply by virtue of its difficulty to mine. Hardly time for environmentalists to get out the bunting. Especially since the demand for fossil fuels is expected to rise over the next decade as emerging markets grow thirsty for the black stuff. How long, we must ask, before the energy companies try again with renewed vim?

And what of us here in the UK? Once held as bastions of renewables, things have taken a decidedly nasty turn. The UN’s chief environment scientist said the Tory’s decision to remove subsidies for renewables companies was a ‘perverse’ shift away from clean energy.

And so our addiction to fossil fuels looks as strong as ever. With governments looking to industry, and industry looking to market forces, and populations looking to governments, there has always seemed to me to be a circle of indecision and inaction. Talks are held, hands are wrung, heads of state play fast and loose with the platitudes – but change, if any occurs at all, is millimetric at best.

And yes, I know this is how international agreements work – they are chipped away at, like a sculptor working a block of marble. The problem is, whilst this is happening, people – actual members of the global community these international agreements are supposed to be helping – suffer. And how. As we hear from Peter Byass of the Centre for Global Health Research on p24 we can’t pretend to know exactly how the changing climate will affect – indeed is affecting – human health, all we can say is that it will definitely do so.

It does seems as if giving up fossil fuel whilst there is still some left in the ground is rather like asking a heroin addict to simply leave the drugs in the cupboard. Is that likely to work? Perhaps intervention is required.

Let’s hope that’s what Paris can be, rather than yet another round of toothless talks.