- Paulo Hartmann
- Dec 7, 2020
- 0 min read
Updated: Aug 2, 2024
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- Sydney Charles
- Aug 16, 2020
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 2, 2024
What Everyone Should Know About NDCs
Sydney Charles has been active in climate campaigning for over ten years. She’s devastated that, whilst so much is known about solutions, so little is done by the powers-that-be. Indeed she is horrified. Even as the world needs to recover from the ongoing breakdown of the global system, many governments are awarding vast sums to polluting industries. Sydney is active in North London, arranging local events, working with community energy groups, and continually lobbying and protesting for carbon reductions at the national level. She also tracks the all important UN negotiations. Sydney tries to balance the continuous struggle between supporting positive actions and battling the malevolent forces of media and billionaires. Her passion for a Green New Deal has been overtaken by a passion for a green recovery from the pandemic – our only chance.
Her twitter handle is @sydcharles
Almost five years ago in Paris, in December 2015, 192 countries agreed to produce a Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) pledging to bring down their Greenhouse Gas emissions. These ‘Paris Pledges’ can be found here – in the little known archive on the little known UN web site.
The Paris Agreement makes clear that pledges might not be sufficient to limit global temperature increases to 1.5°C. (footnote 1)
Frequent heat waves, fires, hurricanes, flooding, glaciers melting and cold ‘in the wrong places’ are signs we ignore at our peril. Most alarmingly, they are happening right now as we approach just 1°C increase in carbon emissions. We can no longer expect to live in the ‘green and pleasant land’ of our youth. But the looming global catastrophe could be minimised and delayed if every government was pressured into pledging to do much more, much sooner.
Panic and fear would appropriately ensue among billions if global citizens took in the fact that the aggregate of all the pledged emission reductions ‘bakes in’ emission increases leading to global warming of around 4°C, rather than the aim of only 1.5 °C. This will make vast areas of Earth uninhabitable.
The Paris Agreement required every Government to submit a new pledge by 2020. That is NOW. They were to include greenhouse gas reduction strategies through 2050. But already that may be too late. Many governments clearly have no intention of making more ambitious pledges. Indeed, many are not attempting to honour the pledges they have already made. footnote 2
Activists in every country, and the diaspora of every country, need to know what their climate abatement pledge contains and to pressure their government into submitting an update pledging maximum action in minimum time.
Increasingly, the public is developing a sense of anxiety about Climate Breakdown and Ecological Damage. But most citizens have a ‘non-existing level of knowledge’ about what actions their government has pledged that might pull us back from the brink. Most don’t know their government is pledging the minimum, whilst continuing to add to greenhouse gases. This inexorably warms the world, which disrupts weather patterns, which causes death and destruction.
As Greta Thunberg stated, “Public opinion is what runs the free world, and the public opinion necessary is today non-existing, the level of knowledge is too low.” (Time.com July 2020)
How to ensure that your government pledge maximises emission reduction and maximises sequestration:
First find the pledge for your country here and get all your contacts to find theirs
Second analyse the pledges with people who understand the country and the causes of climate change
Third publicise how inadequate the pledges are and the inevitable dangers to the country and the world
Fourth lobby and protest – either from within or from outside the country
It is in the interest of fossil fuel companies to control the message which gets accepted in governments. They insist that controlling green gas emissions is ‘not urgent’ and ‘would cost too much’. The huge benefits of improved air quality, more comfortable homes, better access to power for the disadvantaged, less conflict over oil are messages that get lost, distorted, buried under corporate hype.
Until the message gets through to every global citizen and to every politician on the urgency for public, ambitious climate abatement pledges, we will continue on the inexorable path of increasing climate damage. Life on earth will be impossible in at least some regions, and the planet we rely on will no longer be hospitable to our continuing presence.
Check out your government’s commitment to reducing Greenhouse Gas Emissions!
John Kerry signed the Paris Agreement for the USA with his granddaughter in April 2016. The US is now on track to cancel that agreement.
(footnote 1)
Paris Agreement on aim and shortfall (p2)
Emphasizing with serious concern the urgent need to address the significant gap between the aggregate effect of Parties’ mitigation pledges in terms of global annual emissions of greenhouse gases by 2020 and aggregate emission pathways consistent with holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below 2 °C above preindustrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C above preindustrial levels.
(footnote 2)
Climate Action Tracker July 2020
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- Rose Levinson, Ph.D
- Dec 17, 2019
- 4 min read
Updated: Aug 2, 2024
It’s no longer a ‘crisis’. It’s reality. Remain is dead. Brexit is the world we live in, normalizing fear and destroying ties that bound this little English island to a larger community of nations. Being an American affords me a very slight measure of distance. But as a Londoner, I’m anguished by England’s shrinkage, its delusion that going it alone will restore some former glory. In fact, I’m probably going to witness the breakup of the ‘United’ Kingdom as Scotland will almost surely opt for independence after centuries of connection.
"One commentator, pondering Scottish independence notes “That result would take us back to the 17th century, before the 1707 union, and some would even say back to the 16th century, when only England and Wales were united under one sovereign... Brexit... fuelled at the top by English post-imperial delusions of grandeur, is the very thing that will probably end up demolishing even the original, smallest English empire... Brexit is at heart an English nationalist project."
It’s going to be a long journey to the next period of stability, and it’s impossible to imagine what the next epoch will resemble. One of the things I hate about being old is that I won’t be around to see how the world is re-configured in thirty years. All I can say with certainty is the world will be drastically different even ten years from now. In time, I believe there will be smaller and smaller entities clumped together in some kind of communal groupings,but nation-states as we know them now will be severely altered or eliminated. Climate catastrophe will dictate much of what transpires, as survivors of nature’s fury form new ways of living together and out of the rubble construct means to do so. Artificial Intelligence will play a greater and greater role in non-machine (that’s us) interactions. And we’ll succeed in installing enough people on nearby planets that humans and our AI buddies will get to mess up all over again on places like Mars.
What this has to do with the election is in demonstrating that ‘the times, they are a changin’ as Bob Dylan sang. In fact, things are not in the process of ‘a changin’--they are changed, irrevocably. When Dylan squawked these words in the sixties, it was a time of optimism, the world moving towards what felt like better conditions. These days, the shifts feel ominous. What we took to be stable--such things as relatively safe food supplies, statespersonlike discourse on major global concerns, general agreement on what constituted unacceptable assaults on humans both individually and collectively--are breaking apart. Everything I assumed to be relatively true is now in freefall. And Brexit madness is the latest in the collapse of former stabilities.
I’ve read thousands of words, desperately seeking solace in insights from those I trust. In fact, reading has helped begin putting the election in perspective. See links below for some of the commentators whose judgements I trust. Their language helps make order out of the election chaos. But ultimately, we’re in a seriously bad place and need to
figure out where we’re going from here. The ‘we’ is you and me and whoever we can rope in to address the mess we’re in out of the values we cherish of a just and equitable world.
Postscript:
I was in the West Midlands when the vote took place, away at a writing centre. This buffered me from the intensity of the election results. Back in London, four days on, the full weight of the vote has landed. I feel down and defeated. The effects of Brexit won’t show up immediately, but I dread their inexorable impact on life even in this huge, embracing city. Beyond Brexit, there’s the fact that the Johnsons and the Trumps and the Erdrogans and the Putins run the world, along with their corporate buddies. I feel oppressed at how the forces for whom capital trumps compassion, for whom climate catastrophe is just a myth, are in charge. It’s hard to see a way forward. Perhaps what I and others need is to let ourselves grieve for awhile, just be with the pain. Perhaps then we can begin to rally. But I’m not up to it just now.
Postscript number 2:
Five weeks since Johnson won his landslide election. Brexit is due to happen in about ten days.
London feels calm at the moment, emotional energy diverted to minor royalty leaving their imperial enclosure. The human capacity to distract itself is astonishing, Doubtless this quiet time will not last. The realities of life as a small island marooned in a sea dominated by larger, more powerful entities will sink in. We’re now all frogs in tepid water, awaiting our fate as the water begins to boil; the impact is slow but inevitable. We weary Remainers continue to contend with our ideas, not yet certain of what comes next.
Rose Levinson
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Share your thoughts on Brexit: editiors@emergingvoices.co.uk
The Guardian Articles:
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