Qualifying exceptions, however, can be found. The United Nations, tarnished, libelled and mocked for being simultaneously ineffectual and intrusive, was the mediating entity for international relations that grew from the calamities of the Second World War. Without that somewhat frail body, it is hard to imagine how the patchwork of human rights, however uneven, could have been stitched.
The Iran War, and the consequential choking of the Strait of Hormuz by Tehran and Washington respectively have also had an unintended, meliorating effect. If the pressing dangers of climate change cannot push fossil fuel exporters and consumers to wean themselves off their diet of extraction and carbon emission, the panic caused by economic shock may well do the trick.
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Despite the pageantry that circles around the now familiar Conferences of the Parties (COPs) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), progress on limiting the rise of global temperature remains tardy and constipated. The annual COP talks have become ceremonies of fatigue and inanition, often influenced by petrostates and avid fossil fuel lobbyists. The COP30 talks held in Brazil last November typified the mood. The finalCOP 30 agreement, entitled “Global Mutirão: Uniting humanity in a global mobilization against climate change”, failed to even mention the role of fossil fuels. (The same can be said of the2015 Paris Agreement.) Fossil fuels – that devil in the detail – only debuts in the 2023 COP28 conference, with thecallto transition “away from fossil fuels in energy systems, in a just, orderly and equitable manner, accelerating action in this critical decade, so as to achieve net zero by 2050 in keeping with the science”.
The insipid outcome of COP30 was enough to spur Colombia and the Netherlandsto announcetheir co-hosting of the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels, a step as part of theBelém Declaration on the Transition Away from Fossil Fuels.
“This will be,”explainedIrene Vélez Torres,Colombia’s Minister for Environment and Sustainable Development, “a broad intergovernmental, multisectoral platform complementary to the UNFCCC [United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change] designed to identify legal, economic, and social pathways that are necessary to make the phasing out of fossil fuels.”
Thetalks that beganon April 24 at the coastal town of Santa Marta, Colombia, are the genesis of that promise. While the list of attendees has conspicuous omissions – the United States, China and India are not among their number – a number of prominent fossil fuel states are. Such absentees as the USdid not troubleTorres.
“We knew they weren’t going to be here. We weren’t expecting them to be here because their energy policy and their economic policy is to ‘drill, baby, drill.’”
Not only would the conference not be for them, Torres could express her relief that no one would be “boycotting” the endeavour.
Source: Global Research
