The Ministry for the Future

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COP meetings of the Paris Climate Agreement kept happening every year, despite the increasing sense of irrelevance everyone in attendance felt in the face of the world’s ever-widening disasters. It was clear that the worsening situation vis-à-vis carbon in the atmosphere meant that many of the developing countries, those which could least afford to cope with climate catastrophes, were now being struck by weather disasters on a regular basis, and these were perhaps the prime drivers in the human conflicts now breaking out everywhere. For those who held to that perception of ultimate causes, the Paris Agreement remained something to hold on to, however weak it was beginning to look relative to the crisis.

The UN’s climate negotiations had always made a strong distinction between developed and developing nations, with lists of each specified, and repeated injunctions made that developed nations were to do more to mitigate climate problems than developing nations could. Much of this call for “climate equity” was spelled out in Article 2 of the Paris Agreement. Clause 2 of Article 2 states, “This Agreement will be implemented to reflect equity and the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities and respective capabilities, in light of different national circumstances.” Article 9’s clause 1 repeats this principle: developed nations are to assist developing nations, they can and should do more than developing nations.

These were crucial clauses in the Agreement. The text of these articles and their clauses had been fought over sentence by sentence, phrase by phrase, word by word. The delegates who had pushed hardest for the inclusion of these articles had given their all, they had spent years of their lives working for them. On the subway rides during summit meetings they compared notes on divorces, bankruptcies, broken career paths, stress-related illnesses, and all the other personal costs accrued by throwing themselves so hard into this cause.

Were they fools to have tried so hard for words, in a world careening toward catastrophe? Were they fools to keep on trying? Words are gossamer in a world of granite. There weren’t even any mechanisms for enforcement of these so carefully worded injunctions; they were notional only, the international order of governance being a matter of nations volunteering to do things. And then when they didn’t do them, ignoring the existence of their own promises. There was no judge, no sheriff, no jail. No sanctions at all.

But what else did they have? The world runs by laws and treaties, or so it sometimes seems; so one can hope; the granite of the careening world, held in gossamer nets. And if one were to argue that the world actually runs by way of guns in your face, as Mao so trenchantly pointed out, still, the guns often get aimed by way of laws and treaties. If you give up on sentences you end up in a world of gangsters and thieves and naked force, hauled into the street at night to be clubbed or shot or jailed.

So the people who fought for sentences, for the precise wording to be included in treaties, were doing the best they could think of to avoid that world of bare force and murder in the night. They were doing the best they could with what they had.

Now, as the situation continued to deteriorate, there were delegates at every annual Conference of the Parties who kept on focusing on words and phrases. Many of them were now arguing that all the young people on Earth, and all the generations of humans in the centuries to come, and all their cousin creatures on the planet who could never speak for themselves, especially in court—all these living beings added up to something like a poor and vulnerable developing nation, a huge one, appearing inexorably over the horizon of time. These new citizens were young and weak, in many cases utterly helpless. And yet they had rights too, or should have rights; and under the Paris Agreement’s equity clauses, which every nation had signed, one could argue that they had rights equivalent to those of a developing nation. And without quick and massive efforts from the Annex One nations, meaning the developed world, the “old rich” countries, that giant new developing nation’s development, even its very existence, looked less and less likely. So the COP meetings had to keep insisting on equity as a fundamental value and policy. Which meant that support for the Subsidiary Body popularly known as the Ministry for the Future should continue to be supported in full.