Yves here. COP29 was such a disappointment that climate activists seem at a loss as to what to do next. Paul Rogers’ forecasts that it will likely take another decade of worsening weather and the fires and floods they generate to hit the Global North hard before advanced economies get religion about climate change. While the time frame sounds reasonable, there’s another factor that is likely to come to bite even sooner, and that’s diminished food production and rising costs.
In France, food prices had been increasing into the 1780s due to population increases outpacing food supply growth. A harsh winter in 1788 produced famines and food riots. During the 1997 Asian economic crisis, both Thailand and Indonesia had food riots.
If we have that sort of rupture, it’s not conducive to reaching a consensus on climate action, even if climate is the driver.
By Paul Rogers, Emeritus Professor of Peace Studies in the Department of Peace Studies and International Relations at Bradford University, and an Honorary Fellow at the Joint Service Command and Staff College. He is openDemocracy’s international security correspondent. He is on Twitter at: @ProfPRogers. Originally published at openDemocracy
While COP29 in Baku narrowly avoided collapsing, its results were bitterly disappointing for delegations from across the Global South, who ended up with barely a quarter of the annual $1.3trn of support they were seeking by 2035 to respond to climate breakdown.
Quite apart from other factors, more than 1,500 pro-carbon lobbyists worked hard to limit progress and ensure that burning oil, gas and coal at profit continues for as long as possible whatever the global consequences. After all, the world’s fossil fuel industries rake in around a trillion dollars in profits a year.
Meanwhile, more and more examples are emerging of accelerating climate breakdown. The flooding in Valencia is just one, but scarcely noticed in Europe is the thoroughly weird weather being experienced in the eastern United States.
This autumn there have been over five hundred wildfires in New Jersey alone, a 5,000-acre fire has been burning for a week on the New York-New Jersey border prompting a voluntary evacuation, and New York City’s Fire Department was called out to deal with 271 brush fires in the first two weeks of November alone.
As if timed for that and certainly released with COP29 in mind, Carbon Brief, a website covering the latest developments in climate science, climate policy and energy policy, has mapped every published study on ‘impossible’ weather events – record heatwaves or storms that would not have happened without the overall global climate changes.
The first such study came in 2004, the year after weeks of extreme heat hit Europe and killed 70,000 people across the continent over several months. That early example of an ‘impossible’ weather event kick-started a new field of research known as ‘extreme event attribution’, which looks at how climate change has influenced extreme weather.
There are now 600 studies of 750 such extreme events spanning the past 20 years – a tiny fraction of the total number of these kinds of events. Of these 750, Carbon Brief found that scientists and researchers had concluded that 74% were made more likely or more severe because of climate change.
This has added to the growing sense of urgency right across the climate science community coupled with a highly critical view of the whole COP process. Even before the dismaying summit in the Azerbaijani capital, both last year’s COP in Abu Dhabi and the year before in Egypt were notable for their lack of progress even as the urgency of preventing climate breakdown was becoming more and more obvious.
There are other risks to global security including nuclear weapons, pandemics, cyber warfare, AI misuse and the progressive destruction of biodiversity, but climate breakdown is different from all of these. It is not a future risk, it is a current happening, it is accelerating, and we now have very few years left to get on top of it. If we don’t then a worldwide catastrophe with many hundreds of millions dying and societal collapse will become increasingly likely.
Does it have to be like that?
As things stand, in terms of changing attitudes, developments in renewables, resistance of the fossil carbon industries and, of course, Donald Trump’s looming presidency in the US, a reasonable prognosis for the next decade has three elements.
First, the use of renewable energy resources does continue to increase but not at anything like the rate required, so net carbon emissions will continue to rise, not fall, for most of the next ten years. Second, resistance to decarbonisation will continue from many quarters, no doubt now including the White House. Finally, severe weather events will become both more common and more destructive.
Eventually, and it might take more than a decade, the disasters will be so great, including sudden weather events in rich cities in the Global North killing many tens of thousands of people, that public pressure across the world will force governments to respond. There will be no alternative to engage in truly transformative change.
But what that means is that the task ahead by then will be hugely greater than if the transformation starts much sooner, so timescales become crucial, especially what can speed up the process.
There is, though, one thing to remember at a time of widespread pessimism. If nations had got their act together 25 years ago after the Kyoto Protocols, were signed we would be in a far more favourable position worldwide than we are now. We are acting more than two decades late.
But climate breakdown is not happening as a slow, steady process of change, creeping up almost unawares. If that had been the case then with all the reasons not to act, especially the global fossil carbon lobby, we would have been in an even worse position now. Instead, it is happening at variable rates in two respects, some parts of the world – such as the polar regions – are warming up much faster than others and extreme weather events are happening much more often.
We are therefore getting a foretaste of what will affect everyone a few years before it does, and this gives us just a little more time to act. It means that the next ten years, and perhaps even the five years to 2030, will be the key time for us to come to terms with the transformation in society that is essential for global well-being. That is possible, just.
US food prices have increased 67.3% since 2007, 34.0% since 2017 and 27.4% since 2020:
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=10MV4
January 15, 2020
Consumer Price Index for Food and Energy, 2020-2024
(Indexed to 2020)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=MN3g
January 15, 2018
Consumer Price Index for Food and Energy, 2017-2024
(Indexed to 2017)
https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=10NhZ
January 15, 2018
Consumer Price Index for Food and Energy, 2007-2024
(Indexed to 2007)
“rich cities in the Global North killing many tens of thousands of people, that public pressure across the world will force governments to respond”
Isn’t this what the plutocrats and WEF-crowd actually are looking for? Get rid of the WEFs and plutocrats and then climate change problems can be dealt with.
Peter Carter at COP25:
It’s set up to fail because
In the Convention it said that major decisions will be made by consensus.
We still don’t have a definition of consensus under the Convention.
Climate change imposes costs on society (on the poor), mostly in the future
The Poor see that fighting climate change imposes costs on society (on the poor) mostly now.
Its unclear how the lumpen proletariat will aim their pitchforks. Logically, sure, but there is little evidence of logic in the news these days… Consider COP29 held in Azerbaijian
Well, to tie this back to the election, the price of eggs in America is up just over 30% in October compared to last year. Blame avian flu. Whatever. Jem Bendell, in his 2023 book “Breaking Together” expects societal collapse, which he dates to starting approximately in 2015 based on stats such as life expectancy. A food crisis is one of the triggers he fears. He also fears our ruling elites. Wether they think they can win Jackpot, or are just stupid (looking at prior societal collapses he favors the second), these elites are a serious threat to everyone, including themselves. He is waiting for the collapse working on a farming commune he helped start in Indonesia.
We are all old people now, working on our bucket lists. Perhaps we will be pleasantly surprised, but do not count on it. Be your best self with whatever time you have left. Is it better to live in a Florida beach house, defiantly riding out hurricanes until onetime we don’t, or to pick a less exposed place and see if we just might ride it all out? Then again, many people in Asheville, North Carolina thought they had picked a safe mountain hideaway from the hurricanes, only to meet Helene. I live in Portland, Oregon, so my options are interesting. Will it be societal collapse from global warming, the “big one” Cascadia subduction zone earthquake, a bomb cyclone like just hit Seattle, or just boring ordinary old age?
Bendell:
>> Another way of saying that is we are enslaved by debt and rent. In my own case I had to move to a country to where land and labour are far cheaper. That has meant I could develop a collapse-ready organic permaculture farm school – something that would require millions in finance to do in the West.
Similar strategy as Daniel Brooks works on in Costa Rica.
> We are all old people now
I have took this to mean even young of age are old of experience and grief. This poem goes there, but still from age’s vantage. I was speaking with a friend this morning about deaths from despair. He’s trying to run his own handyman/renovation business, but his fourth helper in the last year left last week. Consistently, they work to get enough money to do a drug blowout. Not weed, ‘the funny stuff.’
And I can’t deny nihilism for wage slaves who will never make enough to even think about their own place for a family. Both my friend and myself can consider this while having (had) parents with something of an estate, land beyond their own home. Like nobility inventing the Enlightenment, can we really cross the divide to bring along people without such concrete material? The suicides of late in my life were triggered by a really good day, won’t get better than that. Would there have been a French Revolution if they’d had fentanyl and meth?
This is the 29th such Conference. Every one in the past has been a failure by any rational standard, the ones which were defined as “successes” succeeded in generating fake spin about how something would be done when in fact nothing was done.
Why should anyone expect anything different from COP29? Nobody should. We should ask very serious questions about the agenda of anyone who claims to be disappointed. I suspect that these people are realising that Charlie Brown is wising up to Lucy’s football, and are therefore proposing that Lucy should next time set up a different brand of football. (Perhaps call it COPO, or “Criminal Organisation of Petrochemical Oligarchs”.)
One point made at the beginning is, I am told, actually false. That is, the poorest countries in the world were asking for a bailout of over a trillion dollars, but as I understand it they were not given a bailout of 300 billion. As I heard it, the rich countries have offered them loans of 300 billion, which of course plunges highly-endebted countries deeper into debt. Which suggests where the real agenda of the oligarchs running COP29 is.
“Climate Change,” as a concern of voters in the past presidential election, scarcely moved the needle. Until the message gets through, our efforts will be too little, too late. And while the primary concern of voters is the economy, addressing climate change in a serious manner would be a huge economic boost. Imagine, e.g., the effect of putting solar panels on every rooftop in the country? This could be done efficiently with low-interest government loans, of say 20-25 years, about the lifetime of many solar systems. The biggest problem might be a lack of enough qualified workers. But where’s the money for this? Well, where’s the money for another $60 billion or so for Ukraine? Or another $20 billion for Israel?