Pathfinders – Climate of crisis
You might think, given much of the news last month, that the howler monkeys had taken over the zoo. Some of Donald Trump’s executive appointments were widely viewed as stark raving bonkers. Matt Gaetz, ‘the most investigated man in the United States Congress’, suspected of underage sex and sex-trafficking, and friend of far-right conspiracy nuts and Holocaust deniers, was made attorney general. Tulsi Gabbard, avowedly anti-Nato and allegedly pro-Moscow, was made director of national intelligence, prompting critics to suggest that in future there won’t be any. The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who sacked the janitors at Twitter so workers had to bring their own toilet rolls, has been given a job to cut state spending. And the president-elect put Robert F Kennedy, the vaccine sceptic and 5G conspiracy nut, in charge of the Food and Drug Administration, Medicare, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ‘That sound that you just heard was my jaw dropping, hitting the floor and rolling out of the door,’ as one professor put it.
In the words of the Economist, Trump is an aroma many people don’t want to sniff. His attitude to the ‘climate hoax’ is also well known. He is fully expected to pull the country out of the Paris Agreement once again, just as the latest UN report announced that, far from restricting warming below 1.5 or even 2.0°, the world is on track to warm by 2.6 to 3.2°. The likelihood of the world’s biggest fossil-fuel producer bolting for the door and leaving everyone else holding the bag may well have overshadowed the two COP meetings that took place last month, as participating states must have calculated that if the USA bailed, then probably China would follow, leading a stampede of ‘every state for itself’. COP16 met in Cali, Colombia to discuss ways to preserve biodiversity in the face of what is being called the sixth mass extinction on Earth, but broke up in chaos. Then COP29 in Baku, Azerbaijan started badly with its own chief executive being caught on film making oil deals, the country’s president calling their gas resources ‘a gift from God’, and fossil-linked lobbyists outnumbering the delegates, making the event look like a mafia-led War on Drugs initiative. No wonder a former UN secretary general and a former UN climate chief have written to the UN saying that the COP climate talks are ‘no longer fit for purpose’. And all this just after the publication of the 2024 State of the Climate Report, which begins: ‘We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled’.
Something else Trump has no time for is the World Health Organization, which has since the last pandemic been attempting to negotiate a collective global accord in time for the next pandemic, but which last month also failed to reach agreement. The reason for the failure is the same reason the climate talks never get very far, and it’s not Trump, it’s the capitalist competitive market system. The 194 WHO member states certainly understand that the next pandemic is a matter of when, not if. They know perfectly well that they don’t want to be caught with their pants down and unable to react, like last time. So they have every reason on Earth to cooperate. But they just can’t. For one thing, poorer countries can’t afford to scale up their health facilities, meaning richer countries would have to foot the bill, a big ask given their many other financial commitments. An even more pressing issue is the transfer of technology for vaccine development and production, part of the Pathogen Access and Benefit-Sharing System (PABS). Poorer countries want PABS to be mandatory (of course), but the WHO is an entirely voluntary scheme, and big countries are reluctant to bear all the R&D costs only to give away their valuable intellectual property for nothing. They are insisting on merely giving away a certain percentage free, and a further percentage at cost price, a proposal that infuriates poor countries who are invariably on the sharp end of diseases like Ebola, bird flu and Mpox. Negotiations are further stalled on the establishment of the Global Supply Chain and Logistics Network, which is intended ‘to facilitate equitable, timely and affordable access to pandemic-related health products.’ All parties are agreed that this is highly desirable and in everyone’s collective interest, but squabbling continues over just one word, ‘unhindered’, to go in front of the word ‘access’. Once again, poorer countries obviously want this, while rich countries are afraid to cut their own pharma industries off at the knees.
When you consider the world’s urgent and existential need to mitigate climate change, halt a mass extinction, and prevent the next pandemic, and that instead of acting, countries always end up paralysed by the competing requirements of the market, you realise that capitalism as a planetary management system is about as helpful as Superman building his own kryptonite factory.
But since it would be unseasonal to end on a sour note, a recent study found that the news might not be entirely as bad as you think it is, and that there has been an ‘increase in media coverage of crises, but not in the number of crises’. Researchers looked at news articles from The Times, going back to 1785, along with parallel studies of the Guardian, Economist and others, and concluded that there has been a notable increase in ‘crisis rhetoric’ rather than in actual crises, and not for the usual reason that ‘if it bleeds, it leads’. They pin the blame on ‘intensified crisis PR’ from pressure groups, better public education creating a more acute perception of crises, and a proliferation of politicised media outlets. But crisis or not, we’re definitely going round in circles, even if not quite circling the drain.
PJS