With the U.S. fed up and only
100 governments left willing to attend COP30 in Brazil on combatting carbon-emissions
and the related global warming, the question of whether the basis of the annual
conference, voluntary compliance, is sufficient and thus should be enabled by
the staged meetings. Even to continue to have the conferences annually can be
viewed as part of a broader state of denial, given that the 1.5C degree maximum
for the planet’s warming set at the Paris conference a decade earlier was
by 2025 universally acknowledged by scientists to no longer be realistic; the
target would almost certainly be surpassed. It is in this context that any progress
from COP30 should be placed.
At the end of the pre-COP30
meetings, the “European Union and Brazil launched an appeal calling on other
nations to recognize carbon pricing as a pragmatic way to cut emissions and fun
the green transition.”[1]
Crucially, the “declaration . . . is a symbolic way to encourage world
nations to develop strategies and establish markets akin to the EU’s emissions
trading scheme, ETS, in place since 2005. Under the ETS, the EU makes companies
pay for the emissions they produce.”[2]
Below the nice headline of the declaration and assurances of “partnerships”
lies the key word, symbolic. To characterize countries as partners is
already a red flag, for that is weaker than even alliances, which can be broken
at a moment’s notice with impunity.
Immediately after the “declaration”
was made public, critics were saying “that putting the spotlight on carbon
pricing could divert attention from real emissions-cutting, like investing in
restoring natural carbon sinks, like forests and oceans.”[3]
Even in putting “real emissions-cutting” in terms of restoring forests and
oceans—COP30 ironically being held near the increasingly deforested Amazon
rain-forest—minimizes the urgency in staving off warming from greatly exceeding
1.5C degrees. Real decreases in carbon-emissions were needed, and yet only 100
national governments were meeting in Brazil to consider voluntary action
at the country-level.
The elephant in the living
room, invisible to almost everyone, is the assumption that voluntary decisions
by national governments in the face of economic and political immediate costs
can be relied upon to solve the problem, even when it was clear in 2025 that
the 1.5C degree maximum “decided” at the COP15 in Paris would be surpassed. Like
the tremendous risk of destruction to the species from nuclear war, which the belligerence
of the Russian and Israeli governments for two years as of 2025 means that the irrational
decision to unleash nuclear weapons is not at all unrealistic, the risk to the
species’ very survival from climate change justifies the establishment of a
world federation with just enough governmental sovereignty, backed up
militarily, to push back against wayward national governments in order to keep
the worst of human nature from being unleashed with hitherto unimaginable ferocity
and mass destructiveness. Anyone with the irrational fear that such a world
federation, which Kant recommends in his writings, would produce the
Anti-Christ might want to look at the Russians in Ukraine and the Israelis in
Gaza as of 2025 for a clue as to where in the tiered system evil has already
been manifest. Stalin and Hitler provide easy examples from the twentieth
century.
In short, symbolic international
conferences and absolute national-sovereignty should no longer be relied on so
much by our species if it hopes not to go extinct. If that does happen, the wound
would almost certainly be self-inflicted. Yet even then, with blood dripping
from the knife being held by our species, still word of the deed will not have
reached us. As Nietzsche writes of the unconscious discrediting of God (which
Nietzsche opposed, for he was not an atheist), word of the deed did not reach
the culprits, as in light from a far star not having reached Earth yet and yet
the explosion has already happened. So too, our species has been oblivious
concerning what is sufficient to stave off the destruction even of the species
itself. The human mind discounts even mass-destructive possibilities that are thought
to be low-probability and far off in the future, and thus flinches from
agreeing to set up adequate safeguards.
In issuing the warning here with
an acknowledgement of utter futility, I may be writing only to future descendants
who are already dead. I am time, the destroyer of worlds, Lord Krishna tells
Arjuna in the Hinduism’s Bhagavad-Gita. Left to its own devices by a
feckless, stubborn, and greedy species, time may indeed see the extinction of homo
sapiens, the “wise” species of Man, while the gods laugh at our primped-up
seriousness as if we had been children pretending to be adults. Pathetically,
we even take ourselves to be adults as we marvel at our own symbolic feats.
2. Ibid., italics added for emphasis.
3. Ibid.
