Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments | George Monbiot

Until governments undertake to keep fossil fuels in the ground, they will continue to undermine agreement they have just made

COP21 UN climate change conference in Paris. Whatever happens now, we will not be viewed kindly by succeeding generations. Photograph: Christophe Petit Tesson/EPA

George Monbiot
Saturday 12 December 2015 10.53 EST Last modified on Sunday 13 December 2015 06.17 EST

By comparison to what it could have been, it’s a miracle. By comparison to what it should have been, it’s a disaster.

Inside the narrow frame within which the talks have taken place, the draft agreement at the UN climate talks in Paris is a great success. The relief and self-congratulation with which the final text was greeted, acknowledges the failure at Copenhagen six years ago, where the negotiations ran wildly over time before collapsing. The Paris agreement is still awaiting formal adoption, but its aspirational limit of 1.5C of global warming, after the rejection of this demand for so many years, can be seen within this frame as a resounding victory. In this respect and others, the final text is stronger than most people anticipated.

…(read more).

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The Paris agreement marks an unprecedented political recognition of the risks of climate change | The Economist

The nations gathered made a historic step down a very long road

Dec 12th 2015 | Paris | International

“HISTORY is here,” declared François Hollande, France’s president, on Saturday morning. The UN climate conference in Paris had run over its original deadline, and the final text had yet to be seen, but the mood among the negotiators and ministers he was addressing was buoyant. And for the rest of a long day bonhomie kept on breaking out. China’s special representative for climate change, Xie Zhenhua, gave Nicholas Stern, a British economist, a jolly embrace. When Laurent Fabius, the French foreign minister, gaveled the agreement through in the evening there were cheers, tears and shouts of jubilation (pictured).

The “Paris agreement”, negotiated under the aegis of the UN, aims to hold the increase in the global average temperature to “well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels”—a more ambitious goal than had been expected. Similar ambition was apparent in the agreement’s explicit goal of having as much greenhouse gas coming out of the atmosphere as going into it in the second half of the century.

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The Climate Deal in Paris Is Nowhere Near Enough

The Nation

Published on Dec 12, 2015

The climate deal that has been negotiated at COP21 crossed multiple red lines: Scientific red lines, equity red lines, legal red lines, and more. The emissions targets outlined in the deal still amount to increases of 3 to 4 degrees Centigrade—an increase incompatible with organized civil society. So today, protesters came together in the center of Paris to say that the deal cannot be the end of our climate justice struggle. In this video dispatch, Naomi Klein outlines what has to come next.

Full sequence of Naomi Klein Reports from Paris:

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Naomi Klein: Making the Paris Climate Talks Count

Sequence of 6 Reports from Paris

The Nation

Published on Nov 29, 2015

It’s a classic case of the shock doctrine in action: In the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks on Paris earlier this month, the French government is using that crisis to try to silence the climate justice activists who have converged on the capital city for this week’s COP21 climate conference. But it’s not working.

In the first of Naomi Klein’s video dispatches from the frontlines of the Paris climate justice protests, produced by Mediapart and The Nation, Klein explains that at the bottom of all the jargon that will be thrown about this week are human lives—lives that are already being impacted by climate change. If these talks fail to produce substantive changes to our carbon-intensive economy, those lives will only be in greater danger.

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Naomi Klein on Paris Summit: Leaders’ Inaction on Climate Crisis is “Violence” Against the Planet

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Published on Nov 30, 2015

Ahead of the 21st UN climate change conference in Paris, more than 170 nations submitted plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions. But experts say the proposed targets end up falling far short of what is needed to mitigate against drastic heating of the planet, and that the agreements during the negotiations are not likely to be binding.

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Naomi Klein: Making the Paris Climate Talks Count

The Nation

Published on Nov 29, 2015

It’s a classic case of the shock doctrine in action: In the wake of the horrific terrorist attacks on Paris earlier this month, the French government is using that crisis to try to silence the climate justice activists who have converged on the capital city for this week’s COP21 climate conference. But it’s not working.

In the first of Naomi Klein’s video dispatches from the frontlines of the Paris climate justice protests, produced by Mediapart and The Nation, Klein explains that at the bottom of all the jargon that will be thrown about this week are human lives—lives that are already being impacted by climate change. If these talks fail to produce substantive changes to our carbon-intensive economy, those lives will only be in greater danger.

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Naomi Klein: Sane Climate Policies Are Being Undermined by Corporate-Friendly Trade Deals

The Nation

Published on Dec 9, 2015

The COP21 Paris Climate Summit has seen some very positive developments in the global effort to combat climate change. But a new wave of international trade deals—deals that are being pushed between the US and the EU, and between Canada and the EU—threaten to undermine the actual implementation of any smart and sane climate policies.

In this dispatch from Paris, Naomi Klein explains how companies like Exxon and Shell are pushing for these trade deals because they see them as ways to create new markets for fossil fuels—which is exactly what we cannot do if we are to save our planet.

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