I am sitting in a small vegetarian restaurant near Gare du Nord Saturday evening with an old friend from Senegal (a social worker now living in Paris) and James Greyson (Blindspot ThinkTank) , who has just returned from the eleventh Conference of Youth (COY11) where he spoke with youth about systems change and climate change.
It is two days before the beginning of COP21 and behind the scenes official Paris is bracing for the upcoming onslaught of some 50,000 visitors to participate in and witness the historic UN Climate Talks. In a city already under a state of emergency following the November 13 attacks, the military and the police are omnipresent, many yielding huge machine guns and you can’t go anywhere without being thoroughly searched by security teams.
We are talking climate change and international development and our friend from Senegal is discussing why the efforts of huge NGOs and international interventions in developing nations have little chance of working. The issues he discusses are not new to us; we’ve been aware of the severe pitfalls of the highly funded models long before Jeffrey Sachs began work under UN sanction on Millennium Development Villages.
Our meeting this evening is in part to prepare for a Friday meeting with the executive director of a local NGO in Senegal to look into the possibility of a small project working alongside local community members with an experimental idea involving the in locally designing a produce which could address the major health and environmental issues they are dealing with while reducing GHG emissions and actually contributing to reversing climate change.
It is then that Bill Gates comes up. Since leaving Microsoft, Gates, as the world is well aware, has poured billions into international aide problems addressing global health, gender equity and, most recently it appears, geoengineering to tackle climate change.
Bill has emerged as the current ‘media darling’ of the UN talks.
Our dinner partner tells us about one of The Gates Foundation’s projects in his country where Gates invested a fortune building a huge water purifying plant. Like most development models, the plan was conceived as an ideal way to help boost the local economy by providing jobs for residents while addressing one of the key problems identified by the UN as most relevant to meeting one of the Millennium Development Goals while fostering gender equity.
“The problem is you have to go to Senegal before you even conceive of how you might be able to help,” he says. “You have to spend some time there, live like the people live. Understand their culture. Gender equity is such a huge issue but no one really talks to the women in Senegal. Sure, access to clean and adequate water IS a huge problem but building a factory is not the way to solve
it.”
What is left out of the equation, he explains, is that women in Senegal, and probably in many areas of the developing world, don’t really mind walking for water. In fact, the time they spend together each day is one of the most important times of their day. It’s important because it is the only time they have to talk intimately with each other. To forge friendships, to discuss personal issues, to joke and share secrets. Take that away and where does that leave them?
And so here Sunday night gracing the airways of CNN International, is Bill Gates, being interviewed as one of the leading experts” in the climate change arena. Gates is here to share his expertise. Is there anything Bill isn’t an expert on?
“Will Bill Gates and His Billionaire Buddies Save the Planet?
Even before the COP even begins, the Guardian tells us “not to worry” because the international philanthropist has come up with “a bold promise to usher in a clean-tech future.”
Concerned that governments just aren’t acting fast enough — or aggressively enough — (No kidding. Like this is news?) , Gates has surged to the forefront of the climate heroes with Mission Innovation, a coalition he’s formed with his buds (Richard Branson and Mark Zuckerberg, to name just two). Gates claims to have at long last solved the climate problem with the promise of “huge technological solutions.”
While raking in huge profits on the side.
Gates is now positioning himself as a key player among the other philanthropists and huge international corporations and aide agencies who have been — until now — invisibly pulling the strings behind the UN ‘charades’ , stalling progress for some twenty years now until figuring out how technology could catch up to the problem and rake in billions developing Clean Energy Mechanisms.
The Paris talks remind me of the opening ceremonies of the Olympics or the red carpet at the Academy Awards only on a much, much grander scale. I mean is there anyone who isn’t chiming in with opinions and forecasts and news about what county is doing what to tackle global warming?
At long last, a COP is trending on twitter, with messages filtering in at such a pace its impossible to follow unless you’ve been following the conversation for years and are proficient at developing expertly curated lists of who actually knows what they are talking about.
Meanwhile, as you travel around Paris, walk the streets, navigate through the Metro system. you are keenly aware that the everyday folks who live and work here, are shopping for groceries and Christmas presents, are picking up their children from schools (all under tight security conditions after last month’s attacks) are living in a parallel universe. A universe, like most places in the real world, where communities are exhausted just getting by, feeding their families, and paying their ever mounting bills they don’t have time to follow or even understand what is playing out at the Bourget and other non official venues around the City of Lights.
COP21: A Potluck Dinner in Paris
In a New Yorker article yesterday, John Cassidy suggests COP21 is guaranteed to succeed. And this is not only because all the COPS since the disastrous COP15 in Copenhagen, have claimed success while kicking the proverbial can down the road but also because of the low threshold which will be equated with success.
While some parts of the deal, such as the arrangements for monitoring the targeted emission levels, may well be codified, participation in the process will be voluntary, and enforcement will rely largely on peer pressure. The hundred and ninety-three participants in the talks have given up on seeking to forge a direct successor to the 1997 Kyoto treaty, which saw most advanced nations (but not the United States) agree to limit emissions. Instead, they have agreed to hold a huge potluck dinner, in which each country brings what it can.
(snip)
The decision to forgo a formal treaty was made partly to assuage the concerns of the world’s two biggest polluters, the United States and China. With the Republicans controlling the Senate, there was virtually no chance of a treaty being ratified in this country. Not much has changed in this regard. In 1997, when many advanced countries signed the Kyoto treaty, the first concerted global effort to limit carbon emissions, a frustrated Clinton Administration didn’t even bother sending it to Capitol Hill.
And citing the Atlantic again, The Ideas That World Leaders Won't Be Discussing in Paris, talks about potential solutions which are entirely too ‘aggressive’ to bring to the table here, ideas such as setting a world-wide gap on carbon emissions, cap-and-trade, a carbon tax proposal forwarded in a communique to Paris from Nobel economists Kenneth Arrow, Thomas Schelling, and Joseph Stiglitz, and a “carbon tax revenue-neutral by lowering sales tax.
While Paris will hopefully be a step in the right direction, the agreement that could come out of it—which would be implemented on the scale of individual nations, rather than the entire globe—will be incomplete. A much stronger plan would hold countries accountable to other countries, not just themselves.
Which brings us full circle, back to those woman and their walks to fetch clean water, to the women who contribute significantly to pollution and environmental degradation by using energy inefficient cookstoves, to the people the world over who live closest to the earth and have little or no awareness whatsoever of climate change.
Isn’t this really about them?
Make no doubt about it. Our golden opportunity lies in the time between the end of this COP and 2020, when the voluntary commitments of the 190-odd countries participating here go into effect. That is time to develop a new paradigm to solve the problem of global warming. That is the time for a roundtable and perhaps even developing a virtual space for scientists and economists, innovative thinkers and everyday folks to join together and take on this enormous task.
“Why don’t you have your own COP,” suggests Greyson as we leave the restaurant.
Greyson, who has written on why, by the very nature of their structure, COPs are designed to fail, also talks about how the energy and time put into mobilizing climate actions would be better spent focusing on forging collaborations to solve the problem.
I’m starting to think he may have something there.