CounterPunch Exclusives

CounterPunch Exclusives

The Minilateralist Incentive: A Climate Change Conference in Colombia

Logo for the First International Conference on the Just Transition Away from Fossil Fuels – Fair Use

Not much good comes from war.  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.

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 final COP 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........

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