this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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It is not like it is a binding document. No law will be derived from it. Nobody will be held accountable in 10 or 20 years. Nobody will go prison if not. Nobody will remember their names. Is there even a fine or something?
It is a total feel good self therapy charade.
No, but it is saying that every other country will transition away from fossil fuels and they all signed it. So if somebody says"But X country is not doing their part, so why would we" the answer to this is that we all promised to do it and that country X is an asshole for not transitiong away from fossil fuels. However do you want to live in another asshole country.
At the same time you have a place where some of the most powerfull people in the world talk climate. That means a lot of small iniatives are started on COPs. However small on a global stage still mean billions of dollars and touching millions of lifes.
I‘ve read every summary to every COP since they began in the 90s. I can not share your enthusiasm. It is a talk festival without visible actions. They talk since 30 years and you try to tell me with a straight face that anything significant happened already touching million of people? How? Where? In 2001 at COP6 they agreed on carbon sinks. Where the fuck are they? Twenty-fucking-years and nothing happened. A lot of money is thrown around and a lot of people line their pockets with cash from these funds while every year we have new oil production and CO2 emission records. Please give me your top 3 points of things that actually happened in the last 30 years of talks at COP that I can get your optimism.
For this one there is the very obvious loss and damages fund, which has been brought throu. Then you have the nuclear alliance with a good number of countries planning to tripple nuclear production.
As for COP6 they did not agree on carbon sinks. That was the US trying to basicly say that they have a lot of carbon sinks, so them emitting a lot was totally fine.
As for me being "optimistic" I am not. I am just realistic enough to understand that the COPs are a forum to talk about the issue and some solution will be shown. That is about all that it is. The UN is not a world government and same story for COPs. In the end of the day the key are things like the Past Coal Alliance and similar projects of a smaller number of countries. The loss and damages fund being set up is good news and I bet you we will see more stuff like carbon tariffs in the future.
The loss and damage fund came through with almost no money. It's a symbolic payment, not one that's anywhere near compensating those harmed for actual damages.
The promise to triple nuclear capacity is to do so by 2050. This means nuclear grows far more slowly than wind and solar will.
Take one example, my home country of Canada. Our government has signed on to every climate accord and "commited" to the targets. Have we actually met any of those targets? No. Have there been any new laws or regulations that can have the necessary outcomes, even in principle? No. The "commitments" are not worth the paper they're written on, let alone the cost of the meeting itself.
Oh sure, there is a bit of picking at nits around the edges, but nothing at a scale that matters. By now, we should already have adapted to the outlawing of new fossil fuel projects of any kind, not still wondering why our "green" government bought a new pipeline project that a private company gave up on.
I just looked up whats going on in Canada. Phase out of combustion engine cars starting with a ban 2035 sounds good, free heat pumps for poor households also sounds like a good plan, having a minimum carbon price is also at least a decent idea.
From what I see the problems are extremly high emissions from trucking, which should be solveable by electrifying the rail network. The other huge problem seems to be massive mining everywhere, which includes a lot of fossil fuels. That should be the easiest one to solve as most Canadians do not work in the mining sector right?
The ban on combustion vehicles is a ban only on sales of new combustion vehicles. It's a start, but a step that should have been taken 30 years ago so that we'd already be 10 years into the ban. That 30 year gap is exactly what I meant when I said that there has been no real action associated with any "commitment" to date.
Free heat pumps for the poor is inaccurate. Maximum $5000 dollars, including electrical upgrades and professional installation by certified professionals. That means a maximum of about 20,000 BTU, probably less. My cost would be somewhere in the $6-8k range, partly because of our requirements, partly because of the substantial electrical upgrades, partly because of how far we are from certified installers. Oh, and we don't qualify anyway, because the only housing we could afford is a mobile home built in 1968 and nobody thought to remove the axles and hitch. So another couple of grand for something that has no relevance beyond getting past a filter. (To qualify, a mobile home must be on a foundation, where foundation is defined as tied down, no axles, no hitch.)
It's true that only a minority of our population works in mining, but it's still an important sector. Saying we can shut down mines because they don't employ many people is like saying we can shut down agriculture because it doesn't employ that many people. The transition away from fossil fuels doesn't eliminate the need for raw materials.
Electrifying the rail network is a good idea, but Canada has spent the last 50 years moving away from rail and really accelerated that project about the time we should have been stabilizing and adding to it.
Building codes are also at least 30 years behind the times. Here in Saskatchewan, there was a 1980s project to figure out how to build a truly low-energy house. With the right construction techniques, plenty of insulation, and passive heating and cooling, they cut energy requirements so far that it wasn't even worth hooking up to natural gas. And there is still nobody building like that.