Think of a high-fever patient in a hospital bed. Doctors are quietly conferencing over ways to cure her, when her insurers come in hordes, and haggle over who will pay the bill. That’s what has happened to climate talks. They are now held, or directed, by business interests—not scientific, people’s or even political.
First, let’s see how Mother Earth got high fever. Ever since James Watt invented the steam engine, humans have been making more things with machines. These machines foul up the air with bad gases, the waters with poison, and the soil with non-rotting waste. The gases trap heat in the air, giving a fever to earth. The fever causes polar snows to melt, and seas to rise. Soon isles and coasts will sink, farms will parch, plants will wilt, men and beasts will die, and the world will end.
How to cool the earth? Scientists say, emit less carbon; switch to cleaner fuels; grow trees to absorb excess carbon; do such other penitent deeds. These will cost a packet. Who will pay?
Illustration: Deni Lal
The rich and industrialised northern countries argued that we are all in the same ark, the ark is sinking into the rising seas, and we ought to save it together. The poorer developing southern countries said that the rich had been polluting since three centuries, and are still polluting more than they are. So the north should pay more.
These talks have been going on with targets fixed, met, unmet, money paid, unpaid, deferred and so on for three decades. Baku was another such round. Delegates from the south arrived there with a broad idea that they would seek $3 trillion to do some of the good deeds—lift up low-lying beaches, shift people, wet parched lands, switch to cleaner fuels, grow more trees, and so on—so that the earth’s fever doesn’t rise more than 1.5 degrees from what it was before Watt.
But businesses who control the north, keener on trading in carbon than in emitting less carbon, got the deal force-closed at $300 billion. The proof of even those paltry pennies will be in the counting. They had taken 10 years to give even the $100 billion they had promised in 2009, most of it as loans that sent some poor states into debt traps. How long will this $300 billion take? By then, how much more feverish would earth be?
All these sound like the doctors standing around Mother Earth’s bed discussing not whether she needs a paracetamol pill or a saline injection, but ‘shall we give her a 5-rupee pill or a 50-rupee injection?’
Scientists are fogged. The diagnosis and prognosis are no longer held in their language, but in the language of the boardroom, alien to most earthlings. Climate talks are called conference of parties (parties to what?); fund target is called NCQG or new collective quantified goal on climate finance (close your eyes and say that again); trade is now in carbon credits (oxygen debits next?).
Even men who we were making bombs to end the world were more transparent. When the USSR and the US thought in the 1970s that they were building too many bombs, they held strategic arms ‘limitation’ talks. When they found it was not enough to limit, but they should reduce the bombs, they called it strategic arms ‘reduction’ talks. Four simple words each that said everything, and acronymed SALT and START.
Compare those with COP, NCQG, NDC (nationally determined contributions), IHLEG (independent high-level expert group on climate finance), EMDC (emerging markets and developing countries), LMDC (like-minded developing countries)….
God save Mother Earth!
prasannan@theweek.in