This post is part of a series on the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP21) held in Paris, France, from 30 November to 12 December 2015.
How should we interpret the outcome of COP21 from Paris? Antonio Gramsci was fond of advising that one maintain “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” This seems to be the right mindset with which to receive the COP21 agreement. Much of the mainstream media reporting about the agreement betrays an astounding level of ignorance, laziness, and/or apathy regarding the subject. The easy storylines of a “breakthrough,” “game-changing,” or “landmark” agreement ignore the existing context in which the agreement took place. For decades, nation-states have placed cynical geopolitical strategy over the need to address an imminent unprecedented global environmental crisis resulting in maintenance of the status quo and the protection of entrenched economic interests regardless of the cost to the environment and humanity.
Already, climatic change in the form of extreme weather events, drought, flooding, and sea level rise have had devastating impacts on populations around the world. At this point, these effects are complexly intertwined with vulnerabilities stemming from historic and existing socioeconomic inequalities and political marginalization. Generally speaking, those most directly affected are the least able to adapt to these changes. John Rawls’s concept of a “veil of ignorance” posits that when we try to decide a rule that will govern a heterogeneous population, where socioeconomic power is unevenly distributed, we should ask ourselves what rule would we advocate if we did not know ahead of time which socioeconomic strata we would occupy. In terms of climate negotiations, it is obvious that interest and responsibilities diverge widely, ranging from the postindustrial economies of the global north to industrializing nations such as China and India to the most vulnerable nations already facing climate change disruptions, such as Kiribati, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu. This means we should ask ourselves what climate change agreement we would like if we were equally likely to live in any nation on Earth. While conceptualizing such an optimal agreement is quite complex, its basic character has one indispensable element: first and foremost, human activity must not exceed the finite biophysical boundaries of the earth’s environment. We have yet to devise such an agreement.
The Paris agreement is important for acknowledging the need to aggressively address climate change, but it fails to detail how that will be done. The aggregate pledges to reduce greenhouse gas emissions made by the nation-states of the world fail far short of what is needed to begin to address looming catastrophic climate change and the agreement fails to acknowledge the need to decarbonize the world economy. The Paris deal may be the best deal that could have been struck given the limits of the political economic environment, but that does not mean that it does what is necessary to protect the life support systems of the actual environment. Where the political economic environment and the actual environment are at irreconcilably at odds, there is no option other than to change the political economic environment.
How then should we think of the outcome of COP21 in Paris? If intellectually we must understand that it is, at best, an incomplete response to the problem at hand, we can also acknowledge that it holds within it a basis for an optimism of the will to continue to push for change. In the movie Bull Durham, there is a point where one of the players says to Kevin Costner’s character, Crash Davis, “We need a night off just to stop our losing streak. We need a rainout.” They have no illusions that they could win their next game; all they dare hope for is a momentary pause in the losing streak. While drunk, they break into the ballpark they are supposed to play at the next day and Davis turns on all the sprinklers, flooding the field, and shouts, “Oh my goodness, we got ourselves a natural disaster!” COP21 is not a landmark victory in battle to address climate change, nor is it a loss in that battle; it is a rainout. It alone did not change anything and it alone will not assure a victory in the future. That said, it is a pause in a decades-long losing streak on the issue of addressing climate change. After that pause, it is no more likely that we will win or lose the battle to meaningfully address climate change, but at least it feels, at long last, the either may be possible.
We should critique the weaknesses of the COP21 agreement but claim the optimism that stems from its very existence and insist that it sets a floor on conduct but not the ceiling on what we have a right to demand from the governments of the world. We should claim the agreement as a down payment on the right of people, particularly young people, to reject the status quo and to demand that human productivity conform to the bounds of the natural world. We should work to make manifest this glimpse at the possibility of ending the suicide pact of between carbon-based industrial capitalism and political power. We should accept COP21 with pessimistic optimism, not because a great victory has been won but because we have gotten a chance to stop our losing streak. COP21 is not a victory but an opportunity, and an obligation, to redouble pressure to make real substantive transformations. It is an opportunity that should be seized because we can all agree that in the future we would rather be watching Bull Durham than Waterworld.
J.C. Salyer is an anthropologist whose work focuses on immigration law, social justice, and how climate change will effect migration, particularly in the Pacific. He is a term assistant professor of practice in the sociology department at Barnard College, Columbia University. He is also the staff attorney for the Arab-American Family Support Center, a community-based organization in Brooklyn, New York.
Cite as: Salyer, J.C. 2015. “Understanding the ‘Success’ and ‘Failure’ of COP21.” EnviroSociety. 17 December. www.envirosociety.org/2015/12/understanding-the-success-and-failure-of-cop21.