Sorry to give the bad news evidence, but just think:
for several decades, we have had tons of international summits
almost all of them have failed to produce anything of value
Why do we keep setting our expectations so high?
Maybe we should try some other path of change besides the Big International Summit?
The Aid Watch blog is a project of New York University's Development Research Institute (DRI). This blog is principally written by William Easterly, author of "The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics" and "The White Man's Burden: Why the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good," and Professor of Economics at NYU. It is co-written by Laura Freschi and by occasional guest bloggers. Our work is based on the idea that more aid will reach the poor the more people are watching aid.
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http://belfercenter.ksg.harvard.edu/publication/17513/africa_losing_faith_in_conference_diplomacy.html
What do you suggest for this issue in particular?
Since you recently acclaimed James Ferguson’s Lesotho study as the best evaluation you had ever read, I would expect you to agree that while programmes may not be likely to have the intended effects, that certainly does not equate that they are without effects.
First, great expectations are part of political pressure.
Secondly, I don’t expect that the world will walk away now as if global warming stopped to exist.
So, while the meeting didn’t produce much if anything in terms of an agreement, it did show the hypocrisy of the West, in the light of per capita emissions even with most production removed to the developing world. As did it, in the light of that, show many developing nation’s willingness to be used in an arbitrary agenda of a small and deviant group of countries within the G77.
It’s my hope that that could very well spur change in a wealth of ways from within around the world … and it wouldn’t have happened without the exposure provided through the CoP.
Just seconding Secondo’s comment, both as regards these summits and general and the political dynamics of Copenhagen in particular.
The UNFCCC meetings have given us the IPCC – one of the largest programs of scientific research and synthesis in history. They’ve raised public awareness and concern about climate change. And, while they have as yet not done enough to reduce emissions, they have certainly created the conditions and established agreements in which many actions to reduce emissions are already being taken and many more are understood as necessary next steps.
I was watching the speech by Obama and thinking along similar lines. Although many were very disappointed by what he said, I couldn’t help thinking that an emphasis on an ongoing process, including transparency and accountability, is important, and perhaps worth more focus, instead of international summits trying to get this many different countries to agree on difficult things right there and then. Next question then is: how do we steer and monitor such a process?
Fragmentary point. ‘Copenhagen tanked’ or ‘international summits/conferences are bullsh-t’.
Whether you’re right or wrong no-one is going to be persuaded by this varient of reasoning!
What slays me about Copenhagen is how the onus is all on so-called developed economies to provide ‘more finance’ to countries experiencing (read: victimized) by climate change.
The subtext here is that being poor and under-developed gives some nations complaining rights when it comes to the human race’s collective responsibility to conserve resources and maintain the planet.
Do we commend the fact that these countries propensity for conflict and corruption equates to their relatively smaller carbon footprint?! Does anyone really think that these countries, if given the opportunity, would be more responsible in their use and misuse of resources?
I have lived in many of the places bemoaning their relative climate deprivation; these are places where if more ‘finances’ get into their hands, whether it is for conservation, health sector reform, jobs creation, etc., the government officials are woefully unqualified or have no discernible moral compunction to use these ‘finances’ the way they are intended.
If what some of these developing countries are asking for is reparations, then that’s a specific issue to consider. How developed nations directly caused their relative climate deprivation.
I like the precedent set in Aceh, Indonesia in 2007. Paying certain governments to do nothing is much more realistic. In this case all the Indonesian government has to do is not cut down or denude the Ulu Masen jungle ecosystem. The message is ‘leave it alone and we’ll pay you’. It’s the most that can be hoped for in some circumstances, esp. when the political elites in places like Sudan are so compromised by corruption, collusion, and nepotism.
The summit should have shifted gears and just focused on paying incompetent states to conserve their remaining forest, wetland, jungle, taiga, and rainforest ecosystems. Then let developed countries cap and trade. Of course, the rich get richer, but then climate change was not supposed to be about poverty allieviation, good governance, etc.
Or was it?
Roger Simon blog:
Copenhagen Wrap-up: “I have seen the future and it stinks!”
I am only just back last night from the Copenhagen UN climate change conference, yet am convinced of the accuracy of my headline – an obvious parody of Lincoln Steffens’ famous 1921 declaration about the Soviet Union, “I have seen the future and it works. ” In this case, however, the future concerns (supposedly democratic) “global governance” and not the workers’ state. For make no mistake about it, Kenneth Andersen is correct. COP15 was only peripherally about “climate change” and almost entirely about UN hegemony.
I know. I saw it with my own eyes. And it wasn’t for the first time. This was my second international UN conference in less than one year – the first being the so-called Durban Review Conference in Geneva that purported to review the “World Conference against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance in Durban, South Africa” of 2001. The latter was as much about real racism as the former was about real climate change. It was also – as will be recalled – something of a farce, with the appearance Mahmoud Ahmadinejad dominating the event as he spewed vitriolic anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial. Nevertheless, the UN declared the conference a success.
It will say the same of Copenhagen, no doubt. At least the presence of the various despots (Chavez, Mugabe, the re-upped A-jad, etc.) was not as damaging this time. It was more of sideshow, compared to the true objective of COP15 – the cementing of UN bureaucratic power under the guise of CO2 regulation. That was why the Climategate revelations were particularly poorly timed for the United Nations. Yes, they were largely ignored or dismissed at press conferences, but they were an overwhelming presence about which many were aware. ( Flemming Rose – the illustrious cultural editor of Denmark’s Jyllands Posten – told me in an interview that these revelations were covered much more extensively in the European press than in the US.) Furthermore, rejecting Climategate as an assault on “settled science” is, of course, risible because the concept of settled science itself is tenuous at best, verging on an oxymoron. As a commenter noted on this site, Einstein upended the settled science of Newton and now Einstein is in question. Yet we are supposed to believe without question some unknown mediocrity at the IPCC because of “majority rule” [sic].
Yes, it’s comical, but it’s quite worrisome, if you examine the true game afoot. Copenhagen was intended as an important advance toward world governance. On the face of it, it’s a beautiful idea. When I was younger, I was highly attracted to it. But my up-close-and-personal encounters with the UN have turned that attraction to near revulsion. It’s very clear that under global government – because of its size and natural inefficiencies – accountability is nigh on to impossible, transparency nothing but a distant dream, very often not even desired. In short, it’s 1984. And COP15 was just that – legions staring at world leaders on Jumbotrons as they blathered platitudes, while negotiations were conducted behind closed doors. (That’s bad enough in our Congress, but on a global scale…?)
Well, now jet lag is setting in, so I’m going to shut down for the moment. But I will add that, perhaps fortuitously, my long voyage home (9 1/2 hours from Copenhagen to Atlanta, another 4 from Atlanta to LA) finally gave me ample undisturbed time to finish a book I had wanted to read for a long time – F. A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. How apropos it turned out to be. Hayek had a lot of this figured out in 1944. I recommend to all who haven’t taken the time. It’s just a sign of my own indoctrination that I had read Marx, Marcuse, Gramsci, etc., etc. first.
http://pajamasmedia.com/rogerlsimon/2009/12/20/copenhagen-wrap-up-i-have-seen-the-future-and-it-stinks/
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