Why COP 25?

…Why COP 25?…

This Month, December, the UNFCCC will be holding COP 25 at Madrid, Spain, and the United States will send a delegation to the meeting headed by Ambassador Marcia Bernicat.

There will also be some others, such as Speaker Pelosi, who will be attending the meeting.

But why COP25?

In 1992, the United Nations held a conference in Rio de Janeiro which is now referred to as the Earth Summit. The conference was attended by 174 nations, while 15,000 activists attended a parallel meeting in Rio. NGOs were also allowed to participate in the UN conference.

The Rio conference drafted and approved a treaty known as the United Nations Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which the participating nations were expected to ratify.

The United States Senate ratified the treaty in 1992, and the United States is now subject to the provisions of that treaty and will remain subject to it unless the President withdraws from the UNFCCC treaty. The book CLEXIT contains a complete copy of the treaty with notes on how the treaty affects the United States.

(President Trump is exiting the Paris Accord, an agreement reached at COP 21 with respect to eliminating green house gasses, but the United States remains in the UNFCCC until the United States withdraws from the UNFCCC treaty.)

The treaty established the Conference of the Parties (COP) where all members of the UNFCCC were to meet periodically, which has been annually since COP 1.

The objective of the treaty, and of the Parties, is to cut emissions until “greenhouse gas concentrations are stabilized to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”.

In addition, a Secretariat was established under the treaty which is the body that works on a day-to-day basis to implement decisions of the COP and to otherwise further the objectives of the UNFCCC treaty.

The UNFCCC also established two subsidiary bodies to support the Secretariat and the COP meetings. These were:

• The Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice
• The Subsidiary Body for Implementation

The Secretariat is a bureaucracy which, like any other bureaucracy, is devoted to perpetuating itself. While the UNFCCC only employs 500 full-time staff in Bonn, Germany, plus an unknown number of consultants, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) routinely supply services to the UNFCCC.

Each annual COP meeting has around 25,000 attendees so this is no small, incidental conference.

Thousands are working tirelessly behind the scenes to prepare for each COP meeting, and for each of the two annual subsidiary meetings, and then to implement any decisions made at the COP meetings.

So why COP25?

The COP 25 agenda includes, quoting its website:

“Crucial climate action work will be taken forward in areas including finance, the transparency of climate action, forests and agriculture, technology, capacity building, loss and damage, indigenous peoples, cities, oceans and gender.”

Gender is an interesting political topic since presumably any climate problems would affect everyone.

Also from the COP25 website:

“The conference will include the twenty-fifth session of the Conference of the Parties (COP 25), the fifteenth session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Kyoto Protocol (CMP 15), and the second session of the Conference of the Parties serving as the meeting of the Parties to the Paris Agreement (CMA 2). The fifty-first sessions of the Subsidiary Body for Scientific and Technological Advice (SBSTA 51) and the Subsidiary Body for Implementation (SBI 51) will take place 2 – 9 December 2019.”

This highlights the bureaucratic nature of the organization of the UNFCCC.

The United States, as a signatory to the UNFCCC treaty, is required to attend the COP meetings. The United States has been routinely voted down, and booed at some meetings, as the United States has one vote, the same as every other country in the world no matter how small the country. There are 197 countries that are members of the UNFCCC.

The objective of all COP meetings is to cut GHG emissions, which means eliminating the use of fossil fuels.

Eliminating fossil fuels, if it were possible to do so, would destroy modern society. 

Over 80% of all energy comes from fossil fuels. Less than 2% comes from wind and solar. The remainder comes from nuclear, hydro, and biofuels such as wood.

Two things are clear:

• The real purpose of the COP meetings and the UNFCCC is to change the economic system away from capitalism. (The former head of the UNFCCC said so.)
• It’s time, actually past time, to establish the real forces causing climate change and demonstrate that CO2 is not the threat being promulgated by the UNFCCC.

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