The following is a tidied up transcript of an interview conducted last week.
Question – Was there a time when this was worthwhile and it seemed like it could be working and we were going to actually get somewhere and do something, or was it doomed from before it even started?
My reply -So scientists have known about carbon dioxide buildup in the atmosphere as a problem since the early 1950s. This was not a state secret. It was not hidden away from anyone. It was in American newspapers, Australian newspapers. It was on the radio. It was on the television. But it wasn’t until the late 1970s that scientists were sure that it was going to be a problem…
So the first thing to understand is that it’s a global problem in every sense. In that, emissions that come out of one country don’t stay there; they very quickly mix into the atmosphere.
So it was very quickly understood, once they realised that it was going to be a problem, that it was a global problem, and it was going to need coordination and cooperation from nations, big and small. And in the end, what happened was that in 1988, for various reasons, climate change burst onto the scene. It was a minor issue in the 1988 election between Bush – George Herbert Walker Bush – and Michael Dukakis.
And Bush won that election, and Bush was an oil man and was sympathetic – even more than the Democrats – to big auto, big oil, and they could see a problem for themselves. Their fear was that the world would take action on carbon dioxide in the same way the world had taken action on ozone, which had been an issue a couple of years before.
So it was very very important for the Americans and the Saudis and the Gulf oil and gas exporters, that whatever deal emerged from an international negotiating process was as weak as possible, and Bush did everything he could to slow down even the beginning of the negotiations, including censoring James Hansen, the climate scientist, in 1989, back when Hanson was still employed by NASA. Bush got caught doing that, and it blew up in his face. And so eventually, the United States was forced to concede that there should, in fact, be an international treaty to tackle climate change.
The United States has always been extremely reluctant around international treaties, and especially about environmental ones. And the ozone thing wasn’t a really; it was an international treaty, but there were very very small numbers of active participants because only a few countries had significant CFC production, whereas climate, everyone realised, was going to be a much more difficult problem to solve.
So what happened was that some countries, and France was in the lead, said “if we’re going to have an international treaty about carbon dioxide and climate change, the treaty has to include targets and timetables for steep emissions reductions by rich countries.” Everyone agreed that the rich countries which had caused the problem would have to go first. So the French said, “Let’s have a treaty, and it will include targets and timetables for emissions reductions.” And the response of the U.S. administration was, “If you present a treaty text that has targets and timetables for emissions reductions by rich countries. We will not come to the big summit in Rio. We will not sign it. We will not ratify it. And basically, it will be dead in the water.”
And so, the French and the other advocates of targets and timetables for emissions reductions had to make a decision. They either had to proceed with a treaty that was strong but did not include the United States and therefore would be weak or worthless, or they would back down, take out the targets and timetables, get the Americans in the room, get the Americans to sign it, and then later get targets and timetables in.
Now this is absolutely crucial history, which you never see talked about, and it enrages me because everyone assumes that “oh, 1992 United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Yes, that was a long time ago, we don’t really know what happened. We don’t really need to look into how it was made.” Yes, we do.
There were these things called “newspapers” at the time, and and people would talk to the newspaper reporters, and it’s all absolutely clear. And then you get people saying, “Oh well, you know, it was different times, and they didn’t really know what was going on.” They absolutely knew; they had the first IPCC report in 1990 in front of them. This was straightforward naked power politics. The Americans and the Saudis, etc., wanted to make sure that they could keep on selling and using fossil fuels for as long as they wanted, and they didn’t want to have to negotiate on actual emissions reductions.
So here we are in early 1992, and the British minister responsible was a guy called Michael Howard, and he flies to New York, and he negotiates the removal of targets and timetables from the text of the draft text of the treaty. At which point the Americans say, “Fine, we will come to Rio. We will sign it. We’ll ratify it because it is toothless” – they didn’t say this out loud, but essentially they were no longer worried that their hands might be tied because the treaty was now toothless.
So some people, and I think I am among them, would say that’s the crucial moment, and everything that follows from that is what we call kayfabe, is “make believe.”
Other people would say, “no, no, no, you’re being too doctrinaire. You don’t understand that these things do take time. That you have to use soft power and cajoling to get the big boys to do the right thing.” And so this comes back – I don’t know how much international relations theory you know – but there’s the realism school, and then there’s the liberal institutionalism, and those guys would bat this back and forth.
And at the time, there were diplomats writing on both perspectives. So if you want to be charitable, you can say that it all was not lost.
So then, what happened is that the treaty was opened for signatures at Rio, June of 1992, and the whole thing got signed and ratified by enough nations to become international law a fair bit quicker than anyone had anticipated. I think, I mean, I wasn’t paying close attention at the time, but there was a kind of assumption. “Well, this is going to take, you know, three or four or five years until we start having meetings about the treaty.” But that was not what happened. What happened was that by late 1994, enough nations had signed, and therefore the very first COP, which stands for Conference of the Parties, was held in Berlin in March April 1995 And one of the key movers, German politicians involved in that was Angela Merkel.
And the thing that came out of Berlin was this thing called the Berlin Mandate, and the Berlin Mandate was an effort to put back into the treaty the idea that rich countries would have to commit to targets and timetables for emissions reductions of their own. And for reasons I don’t fully understand, they were able to get that through, and it was agreed that at the third COP, in and we should remember that it wasn’t certain that the COPs would be an annual thing. Nowhere is it written that the COP has to be annual. I mean, it has been annual every year except the pandemic.
So there was then another negotiating process, and there is a rich documentary record here, and this was under Clinton and Gore. And Clinton Gore had already tried to introduce a domestic tax. I don’t know if you remember the BTU tax, and they’d had their asses handed to them by the fossil fuel lobby. So the second COP after Berlin was held in Geneva, Switzerland, and everyone was haggling and arguing with each other.
And the third COP was scheduled for Kyoto in December of 1997, and this is the point where the rich nations were supposed to turn up with their plans for “we’ll cut by X percent by such and such a date, etc.” And everyone turned up, and the Australians played hardball. The Americans, very very complicated. I’m telling a vastly simplified story. But the Americans turned up saying yes, they would do some cuts. The European Union continued to be sort of the leader on this, and they said, “Well, we as the EU as a whole will reduce our emissions by, I think it was they promised 12% by 2008.” And the poor nations were there, but the poor nations were not having to take on any emissions cuts of their own because the argument was they hadn’t caused the problem. They needed to grow their economies to lift people out of poverty.
And in the run-up to the Kyoto conference, you had this huge front group called the Global Climate Coalition, which was, you know, Exxon, Mobil before they combined, GM, Ford, all the usual suspects, and they were determined that the U.S. not sign a treaty or a protocol to the treaty that committed the U.S. to emissions reductions. And so they were able to rally the tame senators. And there was this thing called the Byrd-Hagel resolution in the U.S. Senate that said the U.S. will not sign any carbon emissions reductions treaty that does not impose similar constraints on poor countries because they could see China coming. China was industrialising quickly. I mean, it didn’t really take off until into the 2000s, but you could see it coming.
So if you wanted to believe the Liberal Institutionalist theory that “get a treaty, get everyone’s signature on it, exert soft power, cajoling carrots and sticks, and etc.” you could still argue that the UNFCCC process was kinda-sorta heading in the right direction, albeit slower than it should have, and that the COPs were a worthwhile thing.
I think that the COP process becomes really a dead letter, except for all of the absolutely most Pollyanna-ish paid to believe it can still work people, when Dubya Bush pulled out of Kyoto negotiations in March of 2001. If you wanted me to pick “the day the UNFCCC died,” I think that would be my day.
Now, very quickly, what happened is, and then the Australians pulled out the following year. But the Russians wanted to be part of the World Trade Organisation. The EU said “we’ll support that as long as you sign Kyoto.” The Russians said, “Yeah, but our economy collapsed after 1990, so we have lots of freedom to pollute and still meet our Kyoto obligations because of all those factories that shut down. So yeah, fine, we’ll sign Kyoto. It means nothing, but we’ll sign it.” And the Europeans were very happy with themselves. So then, in 2005, the Kyoto Protocol finally became international law. That’s both L A W and L O R E, and as in fairy tale. And then it becomes a question of well, the Kyoto Protocol was going to be for the years 2008 to 2012, and something’s going to have to replace that.
So then you have all of the shit, sorry, the summit around Copenhagen. And then it turns out, and you can quote me on this: the Danes are not nearly as clever and diplomatic as they think they are, and the whole thing falls apart, and everyone blames everyone else, and there are some lovely sound bites, and then it’s just in the toilet
And then the French decide, “well, we’re gonna pick up the vase and glue all the bits of the vase back together, so it looks like a vase still, and we’ll host the COP in Paris in 2015.”
And then in 2015 you get the Paris Agreement, which famously, as Naomi Klein pointed out, does not include the word fossil fuels. So we’ve had decades of conversation about how to cope with climate change, and they’ve never put the word fossil fuels in the treaties and in the text until you know years later.
In 1991, the negotiations were hopelessly bogged down, and they had a hard deadline because they’d already agreed to hold what was called the Earth Summit in June of 1992 in Rio, and that was a fixed point. And so different people were coming up with different ways to try and break the logjam and to create something that was, frankly, that Bush would sign, that still meant there could be progress
And the Japanese proposed this thing called “Pledge and Review.” The idea was that rather than have targets and timetables and strict agreements, you all turn up in Rio and every nation would have brought its own pledge about what it would do, and then a few years later there would be a review to see whether the nations had done those pledges and whether it was enough. Because alongside the UNFCCC process, you also had the IPCC, the scientific process, and the scientists were saying, “Look, look, you’ve got to cut deep quickly, and if you cut deep quickly, you’ve got a chance. But the more, the longer you leave it, the harder it is.” I always make the analogy of you know you’re trying to lose weight for your to fit into a wedding dress, and if you lose a pound a week, it’s easy. But if you leave it till the end, you’re going to have to do liposuction or get a bigger dress, and you can’t get a bigger dress.
So the Japanese proposed pledge and review, and they were laughed out of the room. People thought, “look, that is a recipe for complete capitulation and failure.”
And guess what? Pledge and review was dusted off, given a new name, and called the Intended nationally determined contributions. It is the Paris Agreement was signed and agreed on the basis of pledge and review, where nobody has to commit to anything serious, and nobody can be held to account if they don’t even meet those inadequate pledges, because there is no big boss. This is what the Realists would say versus the Liberal Institutionalists. There is no one who’s going to knock heads together. There’s never going to be any tariffs or sanctions on a nation that is free riding.
So, we got Paris, and I said at the time with Paris that I strongly expect it will run into the sand within three or four years.
Why does the COP caravan keeps going?
Well, for the longest time it’s been the only show in town. And the poor nations have no choice but to turn up because they’re disappearing under the waves. There have, of course, been repeated proposals for how you would reform or change the UNFCCC. There’s an academic called David Victor who’s written a lot about this, and there’s this idea of carbon clubs, but nobody trusts anyone, and the the two Trump administrations have been more open about their contempt than say Bush was or Biden was. Obama’s a little bit interesting. Obama just wasn’t willing to spend any political capital on it – he was saving all his political capital to get Obamacare through, and he felt that he could only do one thing at a time. Which, given the politics of the day and the numbers in the House and the Senate and so forth, that that’s where we’re at.
I think also you have to understand that COP has morphed into a clean tech – “clean” in inverted commas, trade show and expo. And there was a COP three or four years ago in Azerbaijan. So there’d been cops held in fossil fuel intensive places before. There was the one in Poznan, Poland in 2008, and then the Poles also held again in 2017. I want to say I could be hazy
But the increase not just in lobbyists but in all of the salesmen for the various you know carbon capture and storage, direct air capture, and all of the other stuff. And that I think is one of the reasons why COP continues is it’s just become a predictable, Useful, familiar place on the calendar where you can go and not sign deals, but do the negotiations for deals and to maintain relationships and to extend relationships.
But it has, I mean, virtually nothing to do with addressing climate change because what needed to happen for addressing climate change was to reduce emissions sharply against a 1988 baseline. But as you said earlier, you know we’ve emitted so much additional CO2, but you know things persist long after they have ceased to have the function that they initially had. Just inertia, and it becomes useful for other reasons.
… I mean the renewables people will want to be there, and there are still, you know, if you’re 40 years old and you still truly believe that solar is going to save the world by replacing fossil fuels, and you know you can point to just how much solar is entering the energy grids of China and Pakistan and so forth then you can make an argument to yourself that you’re doing your bit by turning up at COP and schmoozing energy and environment ministers from countries that are looking to move away from fossil fuels.
You can tell yourself that story, and it’s a good career move as well, and then the activists, where possible, want to be there because again, what else are you going to do? Well, I think there are lots of things you could do, but it’s too much like hard work.
For politicians, attending COP will be enough to make people who are low information on climate, which most sensible people are – because why would you spend your days thinking about the end of everything? Because that’s what climate is. It is the end of everything. So a rational person looks away, and only looks up if one of their politicians, who they feel generally warm and fuzzy, whether it’s El Sayed or or Ocasio Cortez or whatever, is standing in front of a picture of a wind turbine going “green industrial revolution”, and they think to themselves, “Oh, that’s nice. Things will be okay.” Of course, they do.
It’s a networking opportunity for everyone. Everyone has their little tribe, and the tribe agrees to meet at such and such a place, and they exchange gossip and business cards and tips, and some people get laid, and the sex workers do very nicely out of the COPs, of course. People away from home, opportunity to you know “sample the local cultures” as the euphemism goes. So I’m not surprised that it continues without it meaning anything because it’s like the stamps in the envelope in the Graham Greene novel – it serves a different function.
I mean, is there any value to keep having the COPs? I’ve become quite nihilistic. I used to be a physiotherapist, and we used to have patients come who’d had their legs amputated because they had smoked and smoked and smoked and continued to smoke after the doctor told them what the consequences would be. What I’m trying to say is, there is such a thing as a window of opportunity that closes. There is such a thing as physics, and if you go back and look at those warnings that the scientists were making in the 1980s, and the urgency with which they were saying “we must radically reduce emissions NOW”, and we’ve turned around and for the past almost 40 years done the exact opposite. There comes a point where the consequences are just gonna be there. It’s my concept of the Fafocene.
You know, and we can continue to have these meetings and make these pledges about the future, but that’s not going to change the fact that there are consequences literally baked in, literally baked in. So, if I were space aliens offering our species advice. It wouldn’t include have an annual meeting where 50, 60, 70,000 people turn up where some of those people genuinely want the world to be a better place, but the rest of them are trying to flog a technology, whether it’s nuclear, whether it’s carbon capture, whatever.
In defence of the COPs, people will say, “No, no, no. We’re going to have a Democrat in the White House by 2029, and they’re going to care about climate change, and therefore the U.S. will be back.”
I think there are things that we need to do about climate change, and those things are not going to happen at the COPs, and they’re not going to be discussed at the COPs or decided at the COPs. And even if they were decided at the COPs, it wouldn’t filter down. What is still. needed around climate action is for especially middle class people in countries where political action is possible because there’s freedom of speech, freedom of information, freedom of assembly, to be heavily involved in pushing for or doing and pushing for radical action and degrowth, and a massive reduction in the sort of the casual consumption that happens in the West around meat eating, around driving tanks, around unnecessary flying. None of that will happen because people’s identities are so closely tied up with how much they consume. The more that you consume, the more successful a person you are, the happier a person you are, the more you have proof that God loves you. And if you start reducing your consumption, you are a luddite and a communist, and you will lose all your friends. You will lose career opportunities. If there’s two of you going for a promotion and you say, “I’d rather not fly to that conference to give that presentation,” the competitor is going to say, “I’ll fly,” and they’ll get the job, and the carbon will have still gone into the air, and you’ll be washed up.
So the incentive structures are there for us to keep going.
[Digression about Erisychthon]
Yeah, yeah. So you know, for 1000s of years, I mean, Ovid was writing at the time of Christ, you know, A.D. 08, and he was probably drawing on a myth from 1000 years before. Look at the famous Mesopotamian one, Epic of Gilgamesh. Our myths across the world are full of warnings about the consequences of appetites that are not constrained or controlled. Even in Europe after the Industrial Revolution, there were warnings about this. You know the religious stuff about Mammon. You can worship God or Mammon, and on and on and on. To come back to the 1950s. Since the 1950s we have been telling ourselves a story that our technology has solved the problems of scarcity.
There’s two kinds of science. There’s production science, nuclear, genetic modification, radar, sonar, so you could hunt down fish more effectively, etc., etc., etc. And there’s impact science, where we could start to measure the consequences of deploying up production science.
So possibly the earliest examples of this are with radioactive fallout, and you can detect strontium 90 in the teeth of children. And then you get Rachel Carson talking about DDT, and production science and impact science have been in competition, and we’ve chosen to think that whatever we do to ourselves, there’s always a technological fix, and there doesn’t need to be any constraint on our appetites.
And the COP is this weird holdover. I mean, COP – what’s it going to be? Number 31. Okay, so the clue is in the name. 31 times we’ve done this.
So, for your putative reader in, I forget whether you said Alabama or Mississippi, they could think of COP as the alcoholic promising that they’ll change. “That’s the last time I get drunk. That’s the last time I drive home over the limit. That’s the last time I hit or threaten to hit my wife or my husband.” And if they’ve done that 30 times, are you going to believe are you going to believe in the 31st, or are you going to say “no, we need to do something different. You need to get your ass into recovery. You need to go to a 12-step programme.”
Now, the ‘whole humans are addicted to fossil fuels’ thing is is quite tricky because it’s a subset of humans that have forced the rest of us to be addicted. “He gives the kids free samples because he knows full well that today’s young innocent faces will be tomorrow’s clientele.”
But if you’re bringing it down to a personal level, if there have been 30 meetings and emissions are twice as high as they were when the meetings began, and the consequences are piling up all around us, that’s got to say something.
And yet, the meetings are still useful for the renewables crew, or for whatever, and the academics can get some publications out of it and feel like they’re contributing
But really, to use another metaphor, it’s the emperor’s new clothes. Nobody wants to be the seven-year-old kid who says “the emperor is naked,” because in the real world that seven-year-old kid is not applauded and thanked. That seven-year-old kid is sectioned, or given some antidepressants and put in a “special school.”
Look, even when the cop was held in the UK, the UK the UK Environmental campaigning groups like Friends of the Earth and Greenpeace and so forth were not really able to make much of it to turn it into a sort of a recruitment tool or a you know mobilising tool because again once your numbers start getting into double figures, people have to ask themselves, “Well, this is this is just another. It’s like an FA Cup final. There’ll be another one along, you know. It doesn’t mean anything.”
And so I think the last time people really got excited about a COP was Paris in 2015, and that’s because of the particular sequence of events. Copenhagen had been such a failure, and here come the French to salvage it all. And you could still, if you were a bit scientifically illiterate, and you needed to hope,l believe that 2015, if we took quick decisive action and we were very very lucky, luckier than we deserved at a species level, that the situation was salvageable.
But I think you’d struggle to find anyone who has more than a rudimentary understanding of the science to say that the situation was salvageable, if you had them on their own, anonymous. Once people are in groups, they know that they’ve got a reputation to defend, they’ve got to be part of the tribe.
There are exceptions. There are people like Ed Miliband, who’s now foreign secretary. He is just always insanely optimistic. There’s a couple of other people, but if you scratch the surface, they are assuming that there will be rollouts of their favoured technology at incredible speed. So Bill McKibben is all in on solar, and you know solar is spreading so quickly that maybe he’s right, but even then, you’re still only going to reduce by a bit.
Say solar exceeds everyone’s expectations, and they even have them now, and say that I’m just making up numbers. Say it knocks 10 billion tonnes off the annual release of CO2, so we’re down to 30 billion tonnes being released every year. That’s still 10 billion more tonnes that was too much in 1990, and it’s the accumulation of it.
So if we get all that solar and we get down to you know bullshit about net zero. You’re still left with the consequences of what you’ve done before.
So another story from when I was a physio. I remembered this really clearly because I just started as a physio and I was on the cardiothoracic rotation, and I had a patient, and I can remember his name. I won’t say it; it doesn’t matter. But anyway, he’d had a lung removed, and I went to him and said, “You know, check your name, date of birth, blah blah blah.” Pass. Do you smoke? And he said, “No,” really emphatically. And I was very young as a physio, I’d been on the job like a week, but I said, “Okay, did you smoke?” And he said, “Yes, until last week.” And the point is, we feel that if we take action now, that negates the build-up in the past, but it doesn’t. The damage, you know, there is such a thing as the damage is done. So you can have all the solar that you want. The Arctic and the Antarctic are still melting. Nepal, the Third Pole, Tibet. That’s going to continue. The ocean acidification is going to continue. The desert, you know. The damage is done, but we cling to these stories of salvation at the last minute.
You know, the film Armageddon, the Bruce Willis one, where they blow up the asteroid. We cling to these stories that with you know one weird trick, we can save ourselves because that’s yeah. Well, they have to be because the alternative is massive demand reduction in the rich countries, and massive demand reduction in the rich countries means smaller houses, smaller cars, less flying, less meat. Well, try selling that to a Western popular electorate. It’s a suicide note as a manifesto, isn’t it?
So look, the COPs continue because they meet many many social needs, whether it’s for journalists or trade lobbyists or politicians wanting a photo op. The fact that it’s been going on for so long tells you that it is continuing to meet needs. Those needs are shifting. It will possibly continue, though it’s getting a little bit harder to find someone who wants to host it because it’s very expensive. There’s a certain amount of reputational risk. It comes with a certain amount of attention to your own country’s performance on climate. But I, it wouldn’t surprise me if COP didn’t keep going for another, you know, five or 10.
What would surprise me, and now I am going to sound like a complete fucking lunatic. I would be very surprised we are in 2026. I would be very surprised if by 2036, the world economy and the world travel networks are such that people are willing and able to travel for an event of that size in the numbers that they’re travelling. I think we’re. I think El Nino is going to force a lot of people, at least briefly, to wake up and see the depth of the crisis that we’re in. So maybe that will give added impetus to next year’s COP, which is, I think, in Ethiopia. Maybe the El Nino will scare the shit out of everyone, but then memories fade. But I, but I wouldn’t bet against us hitting two degrees by 2036. We’ve had a couple of days now, consecutive days over two degrees, and I could easily see just shit falling apart. I don’t know exactly what that looks like, but I could see international travel becoming really dangerous and difficult, and governments just not being interested in participating, and sort of the acknowledged collapse of the COP process.
Look at the IPCC, the opponents of action have managed to kick it into the long grass beyond the next stock take, the IPCC.
It’s a relatively similar story to the UNFCCC around the interference by the usual suspects: the Americans, the Saudis, and the attacks on the science were kind of more vicious and explicit, especially in the 1990s. I’m amazed that they’re still bothering to do these reports. There will be the seventh assessment report, or will it be the eighth? I think it’ll be the seventh. I mean, I’ve kind of lost count. Um, how many times can you say the same thing? And you know, this time, oh, they’re going to include the humanities and the social sciences. Yeah, but most of that is neoliberal positivistic wank anyway. So it’s garbage in, garbage out…. it’s angels on the head of a pin. This is what academics do because they need to believe that they are somehow influencing policymakers. I’m not sure future generations will see it that way. When we say to them, “You’re you’re absolutely fucked,” and here’s the documentations from like 1990, 95, 2001, 2007, 2013. You know, so we documented it for you guys. No, I think they’re going to get a little miffed at that.
As for all these reports, what they’re having to say is, what UNEP emissions gap one was like. “You know, we need a 16% reduction in the next three years”, and it’s like, well, even in the depths of COVID, they managed 6% for one year. So it’s kind of the song by Leonard Cohen. “Everybody knows.” – everybody knows the war is over. Everybody knows a good guy’s lost.
It went from oh, “we’ll use technology”. Oh, “we’ll do carbon trading.” Oh, “we’ll do CCS.” “Oh, we’ll do direct air capture.” “Oh, we’ll do geoengineering.” There’s always a new trend. There’s always a new technology or policy that everyone can get excited about, and they get glossy reports. Politicians get to give speeches and send out mailers to low information voters. Kayfabe, you know, from wrestling – everybody knows that it’s make believe, but everybody knows that they have to continue to be part of the make believe, and nobody expects anyone else to believe it. That’s kayfabe.