Article

Comment

Sustainability

28 November 2024

6 min read

Does COP make any difference?

When climate deal makers and justice seekers meet.

Julia Kendal

Juila is a writer and social justice advocate.

A speaker holds two fingers up while sitting in front of a backdrop reading 'United Nations Climate Change.

Brazilian politician Geraldo Alckmin addresses COP29.

Vice-Presidência da República, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.

This year’s UN climate talks have come to an end with a headline-grabbing figure, reports of deep divisions and cries of failure. How do we understand the legacy of these negotiations for us now and for the generations to come?

COPs bring together negotiators from almost 200 nations, along with tens of thousands of people from across business, civil society and local communities. They gather to make decisions about this crisis that touches every community and part of our lives and our world, though not equally (which is part of the issue). The annual negotiations are the culmination of months of action and diplomacy. The negotiators pore over draft texts to understand the implications of a new set of brackets, they search for sources of free coffee to power them through the increasingly sleepless fortnight, and scrabble at the end to land on a consensus.

At COP29 this year, the key things at stake were a new finance deal that was three years in the making and a wave of 2035 national climate targets. Lurking amongst discussions were the implications of the US election results. The pressure was on to land strong decisions before Donald Trump – who withdrew the USA from the landmark Paris Agreement on climate last time he was in office and has stated his intention to do so again – returns to the White House.

What did we get at the end of all of this?

Finance in the spotlight

The new finance goal of at least $300 billion per year by 2035 for lower-income countries seems like a big number, but is around a quarter of what is needed, $1.3 trillion. For what was dubbed 'the finance COP', wealthier nations came with a distinct lack of actual money, despite their obligations towards those countries least responsible and hardest hit by climate change. The $300 billion could be spun as a tripling of the previous commitment of $100 billion a year – but taking into account inflation, it’s nowhere near that in real terms. And it’s not just about the quantity; much of that money is likely to be loans, driving already strapped countries even further into debt.

When lower-income countries argued for that $1.3 trillion, this wasn’t them trading Pokemon cards in the playground. It was about the very existence of people and whole communities. Climate Action Network, a global network of over 1,900 civil society organisations, labelled the outcome a betrayal, while India's delegate Chandni Raina called the final text “little more than an optical illusion”.

To build meaningfully from this, the last-minute addition about using the next 12 months to develop a roadmap towards that $1.3 trillion needs to be a priority. This finance could come from sources such as taxes on shipping, aviation and the wealthiest in society. This money would be an investment in the world we need – more secure and stable in the face of growing climate chaos and more frequent flooding and storms.

Emissions reductions left in the dark

The other key test of this COP was meant to be the countries’ national climate commitments which are due to be updated and strengthened by February next year at the latest. Despite this, the UK was one of just a few countries to come with a new target. In Baku, nations had the opportunity to collectively agree how they will implement the commitments from last year to transition away from fossil fuels – but kicked those decisions to next year. This is in the context of plateauing action to curb warming; since 2021 we have been on a path toward 2.7°C by the end of this century. (This analysis suggests the recent election of Donald Trump could add 0.04 °C of warming due to rolling back US climate policies; not good, but not the derailing some feared. The potential impact on collective action is as yet unquantified.)

A mirror to the world

Questions are inevitably being asked about these COP events: are they “no longer fit for purpose”? Is it time for something else to deliver the scale and urgency of action required?

I was struck by the words of Alden Meyer, with his 40 plus years of experience in climate policy:

“COPs are where the world holds a mirror up to itself to see how well it is doing in the fight against climate change; when the image in the mirror is ugly, it does little good to blame the mirror.”

We do not like what we are seeing. Two weeks of tough negotiations culminating in imperfect outcomes expose our frustration with the rate of our change. They magnify our longing for COP to solve this crisis that frightens and overwhelms us.

But COPs are only as good as the governments, businesses and people that will turn the agreements into lived reality. That’s why those national climate plans due next year matter so much. This mirror indicates that climate seems to have slipped a little down the priority list, despite the growing urgency.

The mirror analogy is a good one – but we also need to recognise where there are vested interests who would obfuscate what we see and what is decided. Among the thousands who descended on Baku were 1,773 fossil fuel lobbyists — more than all delegates from the ten most climate-vulnerable countries. This is part of a recent trend of outsized influence by those who would invest against our collective future for the profit of burning more fossil fuels.

Weeks like last one remind us of the flaws in the COP process – but the answer is not to ditch the whole thing. COPs are the only forum where every country is heard on this global issue. Existing power imbalances are reflected and needed to be addressed; a concrete finance figure only appeared on the last scheduled day of negotiations, putting lower-income nations were under pressure to accept it as clock ran down. In the final hours, several delegations walked out of a meeting to express their frustration with what was on offer.

COPs provide a space for civil society, youth activists, faith and community leaders to speak into global decisions and shape the world and our future. Getting the agreement we got is in part testament to the advocates who kept finance solutions on the agenda.

The COP processes need to be made fairer and more accountable, to steer a clearer way forward for climate action of the scale and speed we need. But if we scrapped them, we’d only need to create a different space for international diplomacy in their place – and we certainly don’t have time for that.

We see only in part

Ultimately, our disappointment with COP shines a light on our longing for a more hopeful future. It would be easy to let weeks like the last one harden or discourage us. But legacies are hard to see in the moment. Prior to the 2015 Paris Agreement, we were headed for at least 3.5℃ of warming by the end of this century; a catastrophic change to our world and inheritance for future generations. COPs have played a key role in shaving almost a degree from that trajectory. It still isn’t enough, but it isn’t nothing.

COPs show us something of the world as it is – messy, broken and yet suffused with people devoting themselves to justice again and again. For many, there’ll be some much needed rest to catch up on, because this is a race for the long haul. We live and act and speak for justice knowing that legacies don't fit nearly into a headline or media quote. They are slower to be realised and understood. The challenge to us all is to keep sowing faithfully, knowing we may not be the ones to reap in our lifetime. To keep acting in love and hope – even when the end is not in sight.

One of the early church leaders, Paul, wrote in a reflection on love: “For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.”

Essay

America

Comment

Leading

Politics

31 October 2024

6 min read

Democracy, hypocrisy and us

A deep dive into the pitfalls of political vision and our response to them.

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

Donald Trump holds his arms out to his side while speaking.

Trump addresses a faith leader event.

x/realdonaldtrump.

Coverage of the Republican candidate for Vice-President, J.D. Vance can't help but return again and again to his Christian intellectual influences. Whether it's an interview with Rod Dreher or an analysis of Patrick Deneen and other 'New Right' thinkers, many US political journalists are having to give their readers a crash course in some of the most controversial ideas in contemporary theology. One recent Politico article stands out because it didn't just introduce an unsuspecting audience of political obsessives to an obscure theologian, it also told them (us) about contradictory ways one might read said obscure theologian. And yet these contradictions force us to confront a difficulty facing anyone engaged in democratic debate.

In the article , Ian Ward sought to explore the impact of Rene Girard's scapegoat mechanism on Vance. In doing so, Ward underlines the importance of Girard's ideas in the intellectual circles around J.D. Vance and his mentor, Peter Thiel.

Girard, a French academic who died in 2015, is remembered foremost for his analysis of the relation between desire and conflict. Girard proposes that desire is ‘memetic, that is to say, it mimics; I want what I see that others want. This naturally leads to conflict, a conflict that can only be resolved by a scapegoat. Identifying a scapegoat, an out-group, is a force powerful enough to create a sense of solidarity between those would otherwise be in conflict over shared desires.

The Politico take considered how Vance's reading of Girard might relate to Vance's defence of his running mate's false suggestion that Haitian immigrants are eating their neighbour's pets in Springfield, Ohio. It went as far to suggest that—rather than a rejection of Girard's analysis— Vance could be understood to be applying a pragmatic reading of Girard. Ward writes:

Though Girard never said so outright, some of his interpreters have argued that Girard’s idea of the Christian ethic — which in theory offers an alternative to ritualistic violence as a basis for social cohesion — cannot in practice serve as the basis for a large, complex and modern society.

Scapegoating is inevitable, deploy it to your advantage. We cannot know how exactly this or any reading of Rene Girard factors into his political tactics. What we can know is that Vance's public fascination with big ideas opens him up to a charge upon which a healthy democracy depends: hypocrisy.

In contrast, there is often a surprising transparency to Trump's appeals to self-interest, Addressing a audience in July, Trump declared:

Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won't have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it will be fixed, it will be fine, you won't have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.

As much as Vance and others try to change this, there is little ideological content, no substance behind ‘Make America Great Again’ insofar as Trump tells it. It is politics at its most transactional and what Trump offer his supporters, beautiful or otherwise, is so often a scapegoat. Trump tends to be pretty open about this and, as ugly as this kind of politics is, there is a strange kind of honesty to it. But Vance is different. He has big ideas. And however weird you may think these ideas are, and however much tension there seems to be between his love of Rene Girard and his scapegoating of Haitian immigrants, democracy is better for that tension. Constructive democratic debate, in some sense, depends on hypocrisy. Without it, democracy would be nothing more than a negotiation around mere self-interest.

A politician with an ideological vision is one that can be held accountable. Keir Starmer's recent decision to pay back £6,000 worth of gifts is a case in point. Had he not sought to set himself as a contrast to the Boris Johnson of Partygate, the criticism of his accepting clothes and tickets would not have had the same bite.

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact.

The first generations of Christians encountered a similar problem. The law they believed that they had received from God showed them a vision for the good life just as it revealed all the ways they fell short. As the early church leader Paul wrote: “through the Law comes the knowledge of sin.” We might add that through political ideology or aspiration comes the knowledge of political hypocrisy.

Had Vance never publicly explored Girard's theory, if he were only an opportunist more like Trump, we would have one less means by which to hold him to account. Every politician will be found lacking when judged by their public ideological aspirations. And the more ideological aspirations, the greater the charge of hypocrisy. Hypocrisy will always be found wherever we find people debating and aspiring to ideas more perfect than they are. I'm not defending any individual hypocrisy; the residents of Springfield, Ohio and newcomers across the US deserve so much better. Hypocrisy is always disappointing, but it is less disappointing than the alternatives: either a naked pursuit of self-interest or a naïve expectation of ideological purity.

The question for each of us in a democracy is how we live with hypocrisy, expecting it while still expecting more from those who wish to serve us in public office. And a moment's introspection reveals that it is a charge that confronts each of us also: the shaming gap between my aspirations for my life and the reality. To ask how we live with these hypocritical politicians is really to ask how we live with ourselves?

With that we return to Girard. He claimed that Jesus Christ willingly became a transparently innocent scapegoat and in doing so undermined the mechanism. In the Politico article, Vance is quoted as follows:

In Christ, we see our efforts to shift blame and our own inadequacies onto a victim for what they are: a moral failing, projected violently upon someone else. Christ is the scapegoat who reveals our imperfections, and forces us to look at our own flaws rather than blame our society’s chosen victims.

The exacting logic of the crucifixion prevents us from scapegoating even the scapegoating politicians.

But Jesus’ death is more than an embodied social critique. In coming to us and dying in the person of Jesus, God showed his love for imperfect people struggling under the weight of perfect ideas. He came to give the home and safety we all desire, offered freely to hypocrites. The point of Christ's death is not, at least in the first instance, to inspire me to treat others better. It is God's unconditioned offer to the broken and hypocritical, as the broken and hypocritical, not as he'd rather we be.

Paul puts it like this: "God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Christ died for us." Yes, God's grace is too dramatic, too strong not to provoke us and empower us to change, but his love comes to us before any change. It comes to us as we are, nursing our pitchforks and that self-righteous sense that it's all really someone else's fault.

Stumbling into politics haunted by a sense that things could be better will make us hypocrites on impact. We must not excuse this hypocrisy; we should hold ourselves and our leaders to account. And yet we can do so gratefully haunted and gratefully held by a God who came for hypocrites.