In an opinion piece posted at Common Dreams, Tom Weis says, "To keep pretending, year after year, decade after decade, that the U.N. process is working when everyone can see that it is failing, is its own kind of denial."
Here's more...
Every year, the world’s governments gather at what the United Nations calls a Conference of the Parties, or COP, to talk about lowering carbon emissions while they just watch emissions continue to rise. It is time to start calling these annual gatherings what they are: COP-OUTs.
COP28 is already shaping up to be the biggest COP-OUT of them all. Taking the dressed-up climate pageant to a new level of absurdity, the COP28 conference being held in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, from November 30 to December 12 is being chaired by — get this — an oil baron. The president of COP28 is Sultan Al Jaber, CEO of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company.
Lest you think the Biden administration truly gets that we’re in a climate emergency, John Kerry, Biden’s Special Presidential Envoy for Climate, publicly praised Al Jaber’s appointment as “a terrific choice,” as if the idea of an oil baron presiding over international climate talks wasn’t preposterous on its face.
We need to stop thinking things will get better with the next COP-OUT, when things just keep getting worse. The hostile takeover of the international climate negotiations by fossil fuel industry arsonists is an unconscionable betrayal of our children’s trust and of all generations to come. Big Oil has not only been lying to the public for decades, it is knowingly perpetrating ecocide and crimes against humanity.
@breadandcircuses
To add to this, a cheeky quote from a 2015 article by Georrge Monbit on the same thing.
> If you visit the website of the UN body that oversees the world’s climate negotiations, you will find dozens of pictures, taken across 20 years, of people clapping. These photos should be of interest to anthropologists and psychologists. For they show hundreds of intelligent, educated, well-paid and elegantly-dressed people wasting their lives. - George Monbiot (2015)
@breadandcircuses It’s probably going to take some drastic action to make meaningful changes. Which means that we can’t depend on governments that are beholden to the corporate world to enact them.
Governments need to, ahem, unite, to fund mandatory alternatives to energy production that is climate-friendly, providing subsidies to implement in the general population. The for-profit oil world had their chance. It’s almost too late: we’re heading for a climate emergency.
It's true and it's wrong to assume that the people at the UN are so stupid they can't see it. But the trouble is, the Charter was written in such way that it's impossible to enact any kind of serious reform without the votes of every SC permanent member (which includes Russia and China).
Basically, the only way forward is to go the way of the League of Nations - to abolish the UN and build a new and better one on its ruins.
But then, that could be a long and winding road and in the meantime we need a place where the nations, though perhaps not entirely united, can actually get together and talk about things.
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