I'm offering here a concluding Part 3 of what is now apparently a series inspired by (or rather sparked by my frustrations from) COP26—after Part 1, Smokes and Mirrors, and Part 2, A Crisis in Form.
Like my previous pieces, this isn't entirely about COP26. It touches on it while speaking to larger and tangential points. I saved the juiciest parts, in my opinion, for the end.
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Question reports of COP26 as successful.
Successful — by what measure?
Grist headlined in an article by reporter Shannon Osaka that for all of the Paris Agreement's faults (i.e., of not being legally binding nor enforceable), it is “kinda, sorta working”:
“‘We came to Glasgow on a path to disaster (2.7°C),’ Johan Rockström, an environmental scientist… wrote on Twitter. ‘We leave Glasgow on a path to danger (just below 2°C).’”
Great. There is, of course, a caveat.
What this article reported as “working” referred only to the pledges becoming more “ambitious”. It acknowledges, deeper into the text, “To meet the goal of keeping warming well below 2 degrees Celsius, countries actually have to follow through on those promises — something most have not been known to do.”
Layers of misalignment: from targets, pledges, inaccurate reporting, to reality
Let me walk you through this in a straightforward manner, as I am trying to articulate this thought process succinctly.
There’s the scientifically agreed-upon target of a need to keep average warming below 1.5°C.
The climate pledges thus far have not added up to being enough to meet the target.
The submitted data on emissions have shown that most countries are not meeting their subpar pledges.
Investigations reveal that there are wild inaccuracies in the submitted data tracking carbon emissions.
Various greenhouse gases beyond carbon dioxide that contribute to the climate crisis go unaccounted for in the reporting.
The water cycle, which regulates temperature and heat as part of Earth, is not at all addressed within major climate conferences’ discussions.
Biocultural diversity, too complex for reductive mathematical equations yet necessary for actually rebuilding Earth's resilience, balance, and therefore climate stability, is not at all acknowledged.
In essence, there are discrepancies after discrepancies. The pledges are off from the targets, the reported data shows countries failing to meet their pledges, then investigations show that the reported data is often off base. And, more critically, the factors being measured, used to guide every decision, are extremely reductive and incapable of framing the complexity of Earth's diverse, living, and breathing bioregional systems.
What use are the supposed “climate solutions”, and the conferences set up to decide on them, if they are based entirely on limiting (and even inaccurate) measurements of what has been driving Earth's breakdown?
Climate change is a symptom of Earth in ailment.
It was interesting for me to read the IPCC Working Group II's tagline saying that they focus on assessing “the vulnerability of socio-economic and natural systems to climate change.”
This may sound perfectly normal to most. And this isn't unique to the IPCC—this sort of interpretation is rampant across climate discussions.
But notably, it frames climate change as something that is separate from us, separate from these socio-economic and ecological systems—something that is happening to them, something these systems must be protected from.
Climate change is Earth’s fever, chills, aches.
Climate change is not something that is happening to Earth — to fend off.
Climate change is Earth (of which we and all of our “systems” are parts) in an expression of their imbalances, traumas, and injuries.
Climate change does not need to be fought against.
Climate change is a cry for us to listen more deeply.
I say this not to be insensitive to peoples living in places where the effects of climate change are the most palpable. Under this light, the most affected communities are not most “vulnerable to climate change”. Rather, they—the majority of their lifeways being land-based and/or directly dependent on the health of their ecosystems—are most in tune with Earth's symptoms.
Their struggles and inflammation from their stresses also are Earth's struggles and inflammation in another form.
As such, I would even reframe the increasingly used acronym of MAPA (Most Affected Peoples and Areas) to something like MITPA (Most In Tune Peoples and Areas).
This reorientation emphasizes that the most disassociated peoples (usually noted as “privileged”) need to listen to and take after the leadership of MITPA—rather than victimizing them as those just needing to be saved from catastrophes.
It also illuminates why technofixes, including the focus on “transitioning” to (really expanding extraction through) “clean” energy, are just pain killers masking our deepening wounds. The longer we numb ourselves without understanding the source of the ruptures, with both emissions and climate change really being symptoms rather than the causes of our felt crises, the more serious the injuries of our greater bodies will become.
Water, water, everywhere—yet nowhere to be found…
in the climate mitigation discussions, that is, beyond talks of water “insecurity” or rising sea levels.
“If we step back and ask ourselves the question, ‘How does the planet manage heat?’ Then we're looking at the water cycle.
The way we've talked about climate, as a society, is we've tended to look only at the carbon cycle.
But once we look at the water cycle and understand how that works, not only do we understand, a lot more deeply, where many of our climate problems come from, but also where the solutions are." –Judith D. Schwartz via Green Dreamer.
The water cycle is what regulates temperature and manages heat. And healthy, biodiverse ecosystems with extensive root networks, resulting in the land being relaxed, porous like a sponge, rich in flora and fauna, are what create the conditions for healthy water cycles.
The climate crisis isn't just making droughts more severe in certain areas. Clear-cut deforestation, land conversion, industrial agriculture, and the colonial water architecture of dams and pipes are all disrupting and compromising the water cycles of various landscapes—aggravating the crisis itself.
To illustrate the importance of having a more holistic view, here's a part of my conversation with Adam Sacks of Biodiversity for a Livable Climate:
Adam Sacks: “I have a picture that I took of my front yard. I measured the temperature from under the bushes out to the asphalt.
It was 90 degrees out. What do you think was the difference in degrees Fahrenheit between the coolest and the warmest spot in the picture—the warmest spot being the asphalt, the coolest spot being under the bushes?
Kamea: I'm really bad at conceptualizing temperature changes. Twenty?
Adam Sacks: That is what people often guess, but the difference in temperature between underneath the bushes and over the hot asphalt was 60 degrees Fahrenheit. That all has to do with shade and water.
We can bring those temperature differences under control even with elevated greenhouse gases—depending upon how we manage the land.
Kamea: So even if we were to go back to pre-industrial levels of carbon in the atmosphere, if the entire Earth were, for example, just asphalt, that would heat up really quickly because we wouldn't have the healthy ecosystems in place to stabilize and regulate that temperature.
COP26 isn't even about healing Earth.
Not only are climate conferences set up to fail when they base every decision on reductive measures like carbon emissions, the U.N. Conferences of the Parties actually have been allowing more insidious agendas to take hold.
“COP26 has given some of the biggest plutocrats in the world the opportunity to greenwash their plans for complete economic domination—which includes the financialization of the entire natural world under the guise of protecting it.
Though COP stands for ‘Conference of the Parties’, what it should stand for is Conference of Propaganda…”
–Whitney Webb via Unlimited Hangout.
Many activists have been passionately condemning the fossil fuel representatives present at the conference as the reason that its efforts will be futile.
But the reality is that even if there were no one from Big Oil present, it would not have stopped the major political and corporate powers from using the climate crisis to justify their further centralization of power by way of “green” finance.
“The most powerful private financial interests in the world, under the cover of COP26, have developed a plan to transform the global financial system by fusing with institutions like the World Bank and using them to further erode national sovereignty in the developing world.” –Whitney Webb.
It's interesting whenever we can find elements of truth in what some climate deniers say. Specifically, they are not wrong when they worry that special interests are taking advantage of the crisis (or for them, a manufactured crisis) in order to amass wealth, power, and control. Perhaps this shared, legitimate concern could be an effective common ground to open dialogues with.
Earlier this year, the “industry-led and UN-convened” Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) was created by John Kerry, US Special Presidential Envoy for Climate Change, Janet Yellen, US Secretary of the Treasury and former chair of the Federal Reserve (who took $7.2 million from Wall Street and Big Banks, including $810k in ‘speaking fees’ from Citadel), and Mark Carney, UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance and former chair of the Bank of England and Bank of Canada.
The alliance is also co-chaired by billionaire Mike Bloomberg, and includes “the CEOs of BlackRock, Citi, Bank of America, Banco Santander, and HSBC, as well as David Schwimmer, CEO of the London Stock Exchange Group and Nili Gilbert, chair of the Investment Committee of the David Rockefeller Fund.”
As Webb notes:
“At the time of the alliance’s launch, UK prime minister Boris Johnson described GFANZ as ‘uniting the world’s banks and financial institutions behind the global transition to net zero,’ while John Kerry noted that ‘the largest financial players in the world recognize energy transition represents a vast commercial opportunity.’”
That the climate lead of the United States and the world’s global powers view this crisis of overextraction as a “vast commercial opportunity” to profit off of should show that the climate agendas they “negotiate” and lead will only result in greater ecological devastation and economic disparity.
The difficult reality is that there is no heartfelt speech any activist can formally give “at the table” to change these plans already being carried out.
They are not up for debate for the masses. They are decided on behind closed doors—well before the “negotiations” started. Then they are just announced.
When I said on Instagram that I refuse to legitimize the United Nations as a leader for global agendas, including climate agendas, I received a little pushback. But I re-affirm my sentiment.
“In light of GFANZ’s membership and members’ ambitions, some may wonder why the United Nations would back such a predatory initiative. Doesn’t the United Nations, after all, chiefly work with national governments as opposed to private-sector interests?
Though that is certainly the prevailing public perception of the UN, the organization has for decades been following a ‘stakeholder capitalist’ model that privileges the private sector and billionaire ‘philanthropists’ over national governments, with the latter merely being tasked with creating ‘enabling environments’ for the policies created by and for the benefit of the former…
With the UN now essentially a vehicle for the promotion of stakeholder capitalism, it is only fitting that it would ‘convene’ and support the efforts of a group like GFANZ to extend that stakeholder capitalist model to other institutions involved in global governance, specifically global financial governance.” –Whitney Webb.
While strategic “inside-strategy” may be helpful in getting more inclusive language in the agenda, and that work is important for those with access and strategic calls-to-action for others, the actual needles being moved here—happening much deeper “inside”—are going under the radar for most.
Unfortunately, the mainstream environmental movement's heartfelt cries for governments to invest more and faster in “decarbonization”, “renewable” energy, and “green” finance as “the just transition” are being co-opted to fuel this agenda.
As Webb concludes:
“To get this far, all they have needed to do was to convince enough of the world’s population that such shifts are necessary due to the perceived urgency of climate change and the need to rapidly decarbonize the economy.
Yet, if put into practice, what will result is hardly a ‘greener’ world but a world dominated by a small financial and technocratic elite who are free to profit and pillage from both ‘natural capital’ and ‘human capital’…
Though GFANZ has cloaked itself in lofty rhetoric of ‘saving the planet,’ its plans ultimately amount to a corporate-led coup that will make the global financial system even more corrupt and predatory and further reduce the sovereignty of national governments in the developing world.”
As I first quoted in Smokes and Mirrors before COP26 even started, Dr. Camila Morena, who has attended nearly all the major climate negotiations in the past decade, was truly speaking from insider knowledge when she shared this:
“What we're doing with decarbonization pathways is planning and aligning all the economies. This is not for the sake of people or environment. It’s for the sake of having predictable environments and forecasted scenarios for profit and for corporations. You're taking the power of nation-states, as complicated and diverse as they are, to create a platform for corporations to rule.
This is the structural process. We need to really see the climate negotiations, as naked as they are, for putting forward this agenda.”
This leads me to believe that we need a shift in what we dedicate our sweat and tears to. The time feels ripe to move away from what's starting to feel like spectacles for ourselves, and towards becoming more strategic—creating cracks from within for those with the access, or otherwise working in ways that actually disrupt business as usual and help build community, resilience, leverage, and power.
Earth needs therapy, not “green” tech nor “green” finance.
(*Note: I put “green” in quotes to refer to tech and finance touted as eco-friendly but whose actual impacts and intentions are worth questioning.)
What if instead of fixating on carbon emissions, we took a pulse on the intimacy and state of our relationships with community and with place—and tracked that as a gauge of healing ourselves and Earth?
When our cortisol levels are elevated, that's a sign that our bodies are experiencing stress. The cortisol levels being high is not the cause of stress. It's a sign. And there are many ways to reduce those stress hormones while not at all addressing nor alleviating the bodies from the strain.
What if the imbalance of greenhouse gas levels were to be understood as symptoms in a similar way? Many consider excess levels of carbon in the atmosphere as the cause of climate change. But there's a deeper story here.
It's actually the rupture of place-based relationships—taken over by colonizing cultures and centralized systems completely disassociated from the lands’ unique traits, cycles, and biocultural diversity—that led to the essentialness of the energy-intensive, water-abusive systems many are reliant on today.
Megacities built in deserts are kept functioning through draining rivers piped in from elsewhere. In California, massive almond farms, meant to grow in regions that rain a decent amount, are sucking dry water sources from other landscapes. Rainforests in the Amazon, rich in native trees and plants with deep root systems, are being converted into monocultural farms with shallow roots, compromising the regional rain patterns. Meanwhile, wildfires, an integral part of various terrains, are suppressed by those who do not know their roles, laying the grounds for the more eruptive fires that end up as destructive rather than restorative.
With our homogenized food, water, and greater economic systems misaligned with those of our varied bioregions, they become incredibly resource-intensive just to sustain.
Then, there are the nonsensical, predatory trade deals incentivizing countries to export the exact same foods and products they then import from far away. This has been an insidious process of exploiting labor, degrading lands, and disrupting community-based systems—while empowering the few multinational corporations that control most of the global supply chain.
With these broader contexts, it becomes clear that the elevated levels of emissions are merely signs of Earth in distress—with a breakdown of community and a loss of place-based relationships, knowledges, and lifeways.
“The green transition”, as it stands right now, seeks to power the same resource-intensive, exploitative global economy disassociated from ecology—using just another source of energy. But the problem is not an addiction to fossil fuels. The problem is an addiction, period.
Focusing on emissions allows for the actual crises to be side-stepped. It becomes a justification for other forms of extraction and pillaging. It gets used as a reason to further centralize control and to financialize everything for “management” purposes.
On the contrary, when we shift towards holding a relational lens, it leaves no room for these sorts of manipulative games circumventing what is at the heart of our socio-ecological breakdown. And when we focus on healing our relationships with each other, with community, and with place, “decarbonization”, climate stabilization, diversification, and collective resilience become the byproducts.
This leads me to wonder: What if relationship therapists were tasked with guiding us towards collective healing?
What historical traumas would we be called to confront, together? How might the perpetrators of harm and abuse learn to view accountability in a new light—as necessary for their own healing? How would we mend our relationships with our unique landscapes and realign our lifeways, cultures, and dreams with their desires and needs? And how might we be directed towards rebuilding regionalized systems rooted in care, interdependence, and reciprocity?
What if, indeed, instead of fixating on emissions, we gauged the intimacy and state of our relationships with each other, with community, and with place?
In deep gratitude: I just want to share a special thanks to all paying Substack subscribers (and Green Dreamer patrons) for reciprocating support and for making my unbranded, unleashed critiques, dreaming, and writing here possible!
Essential reads and resources:
From this series: Smokes and Mirrors; A Crisis in Form
More on “the green transition” from my past article: “The conflicting questions that #ProtectThackerPass sparks for environmentalists”
UN-Backed Banker Alliance Announces “Green” Plan to Transform the Global Financial System
Wall Street’s Takeover of Nature Advances with Launch of New Asset Class
COP, carbon and high-tech: who is setting the agenda? Ft. Dr. Camila Moreno
I really love this series. I have been reading and studying about climate and food systems and just really appreciate how you cover quite a bit but in a fairly succinct and accessible way - this is no small feat, so thank you. I agree wholeheartedly with your conclusions and am considering the question about place and just wonder how our increasingly online world fits in. I think a lot about community, which ideally is in person, and especially when it comes to food and its production, consumption, waste - should be more geographically local, centered on what is indigenous and less extractive, etc. And I guess I am still working out how to think about online activism and I suppose communities collect and collaborate in online 'places' as well and be 'place-based' and grassroots in a sort of metaphorical way....?
Thank you for mentioning the way we speak about people who are, as you say, most in tune with the earth. This is another manifestation of white saviorism, to think of these people as victims that need to be saved rather than as teachers. So insightful