Paris agreement negotiator Todd Stern attacks premiers who say that decarbonisation programmes are unrealistic and should be slowed down
Political leaders who present themselves as “grownups” while slowing the pace of climate action are pushing the world towards deeper catastrophe, a former US environment chief has warned.
“We are slowed down by those who think of themselves as grownups and believe decarbonisation at the speed the climate community calls for is unrealistic,” said Todd Stern, who served as a special envoy for climate change under Barack Obama, and helped negotiate the 2015 Paris agreement.
“They say that we need to slow down, that what is being proposed [in cuts to greenhouse gas emissions] is unrealistic,” he told the Observer. “You see it a lot in the business world too. It’s really hard [to push for more urgency] because those ‘grownups’ have a lot of influence.”
But Stern said the speed of take-up of renewable energy, its falling cost, and the wealth of low-carbon technology now available were evidence that the world could cut emissions to net zero by 2050. “Obviously it’s difficult – we’re talking about enormous change to the world economy – but we can do it,” he said.
the real downside of our governing structure is that long-term projects are unfeasible. when a king/emperor or even a strongman/benevolent despot is in power and they actively set and enforce policy their entire reign, crazy shit can get done - looks towards the Egyptian pyramids or some gothic cathedrals as examples.
Most gothic cathedrals were the result of a very deeply engrained social construct called religion. The cathedral project was in many places not magically run by one despotic figure, instead, it took multiple generations of god-fearing, co-operating people within the strict framework of the religion. They were both built in very strict societies and in societies with something that resembled a precursor of democracy (albeit, only wealthy white men participated of course). They were often financed in a what would today be called a “public private structure” where the cathedral would also serve as the city’s lookout tower to see enemies coming from afar and spot fires before they would become wildspreading troughout the entire city, resulting in both financing by cities and goverments and by traders and by the church itself. If anything, your comment suggests we need an even stronger collective consciousness about climate change, more than anything else.