It’s to hard to see all these people optimistically traveling to COP18 in Doha. It’s a nice fantasy but it doesn’t work. I myself was at the COP15 in Copenhagen, which was horribly organized and a punishment as government representatives from as far as the Phillipines stood freezing in the -9 Centigrade cold. Now it’s a huge arena of voices, people enjoying the perk of a visit to a desert city, people believing in global empathy and justice.
Doha model? Fantasy!
Doubt is killing humanity. Doubt was introduced in the climate debate by Frederick Seitz, a retired nuclear expert that advised to undermine the emerging attribution of climate change effects to human behaviour by publishing the studies casting doubt on the findings.
Humanity may go extrinct just because of this man and his desciples
Doha is doubt. Division of opinion and arguing is doubt in action. All the while under the solution to the problem, the sun (it’s 24 degrees there today), having the successes and failures of the negotiations about promises to do this or that. Its virtual reality, fantasy.
One can hold a storytelling gathering, an action coordination gathering or a victory celebration. What is Doha?
The picture is clear, we are facing 3-4 degrees at least on our present course. Action is stifled by banks living off the cashflow of carbon trade and carbon traders that don’t give a damn. How many people don’t give a damn is hard to guess, but even if people do, the most motivated end up in Doha getting nowhere. This is clearly not the right approach. One reason is that there’s no entity to enforce law on a global scale except the ones based on fossil fuel ownership.
What works
If there’s nothing you can promise, and there’s no way to enforce there’s no reason to hold a meeting setting law, promising money, fixing a system, unless you simply want to profit within the existing context (like with the CDM system). What you have is a narrative, about how we tried to negotiate a global treaty but how it was undermined. It is a tale of a loss, another carbon sympathetic aspect of the COP meetings. Let’s turn that around.
Ten people can push a car so it starts, with or without coordination
The alternative narrative is that we discovered the COP meetings where no way to achieve our goal of global coordination, but that we discovered that coordination is secondary to what we wanted to achieve, namely action. Ok, we can’t set global rules, but that does not have to mean there won’t be global action. It is just going to be less easy to control and exploit by the intermediaries that are now killing us. Thats a good thing!
The PostCOP global challenge
The PostCOP Global Challenge will not be who gets help from who, who pays for what, how much trees need to grow where. It will simply be to do the most CO2 emission reduction in your area, by any means, grow the most renewables, or helping others do so, and then holding an annual or even three monthly meeting on progress. All participants pledge to allocate resources (not money) for the three month winner. Everybody learns and enjoys the race.The PostCOP organisation just checks claims of positive action, which include:
- Reducing carbon use
- Increasing renewable power production
- Removing bank, industrial and carbon influence from politics and media
- Increasing biomass with positive carbon balance
- Sharing patents in helpfull areas like renewable energy technology
- Helping others do the same
- Actually capturing and sequestering carbon
- Reforestation, Dedesertification and Ocean Revitalization
The PostCOP Global Challenge can be participated in by the smallest of organizations. The comparison has to be based on the number of people in the area for which the change of improvement is made and the number of people involved in the action (or some system). Money is not considered, but emissions of the effort will be.
It requires no coordination only the assesment wich is done by one group that can’t disagree. In short, we have a global metric of demise, CO2, but we need a metric of competition for recovery, and maybe the PostCOP Global Challenge is a good start.
How to participate?
Just publish your effort with mention of the Post COP Global Challenge, mentioning the category and the date of achievement. No announcement before hand, only when it’s done. Send to info@greencheck.nl
Today Peter Altmaier (German politician and Federal Minister for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety) suggested creating a Club der Energiewendestaaten or a Club of Energy Transition States (not to gas that is). That the head group. Believe us, there will be a race, let it begin as soon as possible.