6 Climate Treaties
Monbiot
Inaction and self-interest are built into climate summits. Instead, we need a voting system that can’t be subverted by fossil fuel producers
Throughout these Conference of the Parties (Cop) summits, fossil fuel lobbyists have swarmed the corridors and meeting rooms. It’s like allowing weapons manufacturers to dominate a peace conference.
It’s not surprising that the two decisive measures these negotiations should have delivered at the outset – agreements to leave fossil fuels in the ground and to end most livestock farming – have never featured in the final outcome of any Cop summit. Nor should we be astonished that these agreements favour non-solutions such as carbon capture and storage, whose sole purpose is to provide an excuse for inaction.
Perhaps it’s unsurprising that, of 27 summits completed so far, 25 have been abject failures, while two (1997’s Kyoto protocol and the Paris agreement, in 2015) have been half-successes. If any other process had a 3.7% success rate, it would be abandoned in favour of something better.
The first and most obvious reform is to shut out the lobbyists.
The only global negotiations that are organised like the climate summits are other environmental summits, such as the UN biodiversity conferences. When states want something to happen – trade agreements, for example – they use different methods.
Since this horrible farce began 31 years ago, plenty of people have proposed reforms. The proposals fall into three categories. One is to improve the way consensus decisions are made. Well-meaning as these are, they’re futile: you can tweak the process, but it will remain dysfunctional.
Another approach is to replace consensus decision-making with voting, an option that remains, in draft form, in the UN rules. The obvious objection is that a majority would impose decisions on other nations. But this reflects a narrow conception of what voting could do. There are plenty of ways of ensuring everyone can be heard, without relying on crude binary choices. One of the most promising is the Borda count, a decision-making method first proposed in 1435.
The modified Borda count developed by the de Borda Institute looks especially useful. First, the delegates agree on what the principal issues are. These are then turned into a list of options, on which everyone is asked to agree (the options could range from the immediate phase-out of fossil fuels to planetary Armageddon). The options are listed on a ballot paper, and each delegate is asked to rank them in order of preference. A scoring system awards points for every ranking. The more options a delegate ranks, the more points each one is worth to them. This enables complex decisions to be made without excluding anyone.
The third approach, which could run alongside the second, is to bypass the Cop process by developing new binding treaties. The professor of environmental politics Anthony Burke suggests an approach modelled on the 2017 treaty on the prohibition of nuclear weapons, the 1997 anti-personnel mine ban convention and the 2008 convention on cluster munitions. In these cases, states and citizens’ groups frustrated with a lack of progress began building treaties without the participation of the powerful nations – the US in particular – that sought to resist them. They developed enough momentum not only to push the treaties through the UN general assembly, but also to establish new diplomatic norms that made defiance of the treaties much harder to justify, even for nations that refuse to ratify them.
Burke proposes treaties on deforestation and the elimination of coal, and a stronger version of the fossil fuel non-proliferation treaty that others have developed. He suggests that if they don’t immediately gain the support of the general assembly, they can begin as regional treaties, establishing, for example, deforestation-free zones. He argues that these treaties should be folded into an overarching greenhouse convention, supported by an International Climate Agency, modelled on the International Atomic Energy Agency.