The United Nations Climate Change Conference, or COP, can be described, with each edition, as both a failure and a success. Each year brings small advances and minor victories against the resistance of CO2-emitting countries.2...or oil producers, or—as in our case—dependent on tourism, which is one of the most polluting economic activities due to its high consumption of fossil fuels. Some victories are also usually achieved against the denialist rhetoric emerging worldwide, fully aligned with the populism of the far right, which extracts natural resources and public funds. However, these victories, conquests, and advances are timid, sometimes Pyrrhic, compared to the major points of the Paris Agreement on climate change and the 2030 Agenda that remain pending, postponed, or excluded from a consensus declaration, year after year.
The COPs are meaningful because they keep alive the most pressing and cross-cutting debate facing the world today: the adaptation of our civilizations to a new climate reality that should shape every decision made by global governments. But at the same time, they lose their meaning because they consistently fall significantly short of the expectations they generate. Should we lower expectations, then, which means lowering the demands of the climate emergency? No: we should redirect the instruments of wealth creation toward environmental protection, which is also the protection of human life. Even if it's just market logic: a climate-unsustainable world leads to a world impoverished at all levels, in which capitalism faces greater obstacles to its successful development.
Seen in this light, the COPs serve as a reminder of the gap between what we do and what we should be doing, of the enormous global procrastination that involves postponing the most important decisions until next year, year after year: decisions about reducing and eliminating emissions, about alternative energies, about the 1.5-degree threshold for poor countries (this measure, for example, extends the implementation timeline to 2035). They also speak to the lack of commitment of today's leaders to the future of the countries they govern and the people who live in them, an abandonment or neglect that will be written about in the future, because there will be a future, however bleak. From this year's COP (because it was held in the Amazon, because it was the 30th, because it marked ten years of the Paris Agreement and the 2030 Agenda), great results were expected, but they didn't materialize. Just like every year. Nothing is more empty than opinion-makers with delusions of being futurists, but there is one prediction that seems certain: there will be a rush to do "something" about climate change when a major catastrophe occurs, and that doesn't mean a very large loss of human lives, but of money.
