The Future We Choose
The Future We Choose
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| Christiana Figueres |
This title
is taken from a new book written by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac.
Figueres is a luminary in the world of climate change having been the principal
leader of the United Nations Conference that has become known everywhere as
2015 Paris Accords. (Tom Rivett-Carnac assisted at Paris and collaborated in
writing their new book.) That the 2015 conference was even held is something of
a miracle since the previous United Nations effort in 2009 was a total wash-out
with the conferees unable to achieve any sort of consensus about remedies for climate
change.
Even Figueres herself was not
optimistic at the end of the 2009 effort. When reporters asked if she believed there
was a chance for a world-wide agreement she answered, “Not in my lifetime.”
Despite the 2009 failure, the United Nations leadership wouldn’t give up. In
desperation, they asked the Costa Rican activist Figueres to try again, giving
her carte blanche on planning and organizing another session for the heads of
state of all the world’s nations. She began working on a new conference
immediately. She said the first thing she had to do was instill confidence in
those leaders who would ultimately decide the future of the planet by their
decisions about climate change. “The future,” she said, “is in your hands.”
In the
run-up to the Paris conference was a 2014 preliminary meeting with many of the
nations who would be principal participants at the 2015 event. The sense was
that the Paris meeting would be scrubbed unless the 2014 event offered promise
for agreement among the world leaders. The key to the 2014 meeting was a
last-minute agreement between the two largest polluters and the two largest
economies; the United States and China who occupied the top spots in both these
categories. At a late night meeting the two sides finally agreed on a concept agreement
that would allow different pollution goals for advanced economies versus those
poorer nations identified as developing economies who could ill afford to limit
energy supplies for their developing nations.
The 2015
Conference was a big deal; 25,000 participants from 195 nations attended the
Paris event despite a French protest in early December that turned violent. In
spite of the demonstrations, Christiana persevered and scheduled the event
based on the success of the 2014 agreement. The conference was successful; on
the last day of the event on 12 December 2015, Christiana called for a vote on
the last proposal. When the votes were tallied and the proposal adopted, the
audience broke out in wild cheers and applause and Christiana banged the gavel
to signal the close of debate and the end of the conference. The first-ever
universal, legally binding global climate deal had been achieved. The agreement
had established a global action plan to put the world on track to avoid
dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C and
pursuing efforts to limit it to 1.5°C.
In the
agreement, each nation was charged to set its own goals with the overall aim of
nations working together to achieve reductions in emissions of greenhouse
gases. Nations agreed to aim for reductions of 50% by 2030 and becoming carbon
neutral by 2050 (emitting no more CO2 than that nation captures). Barack Obama
and former Secretary of State John Kerry, announced that the United States agreed to
reduce emissions by approximately 26 percent from its 2005 emissions by 2025. Of
course, the current US President ignores those agreements, but other nations
are making progress in meeting the goals they agreed upon.
And now here
we are in the middle of a pandemic, with our focus on staying alive and with
the concomitant risk of squandering progress on climate change. Christiana and
Tom recognize this risk and the pair penned their book and a brief piece in
Time Magazine to urge continued work on issues affecting climate. They offer
concise arguments in the magazine article noting that the pandemic and climate
change issues have common challenges and common solutions, to wit:
1.Global
challenges have no borders; walls will not help
2. We are only as
safe as our most vulnerable people
3. The challenges
must be solved by governments, businesses, and people
4. Prevention is
better than cure
5. Response
measures must be based on science and the best solutions will be those that
address both the corona virus pandemic and climate change
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