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In just over five weeks’ time, this year’s annual UN climate conference, or COP, will get under way in Azerbaijan’s coastal capital Baku. It will be the 29th gathering of its kind and if you have ever wanted to understand how international climate diplomacy works, why it is still struggling to contain global warming and what that means on the ground, a new batch of books offer answers.
Todd Stern gives an admirably readable insight into the byzantine world of climate negotiations in Landing the Paris Climate Agreement: How it Happened, Why it Matters and What Comes Next (MIT Press $32.95). As Barack Obama’s chief climate negotiator, Stern spent years at the centre of the wrangling that eventually produced one of the biggest achievements of the UN climate process so far, the 2015 Paris Agreement.
His insider’s account lays bare the fraught nature of talks between nearly 200 countries where exhausted delegates spend sleepless nights battling to adopt decisions by consensus. As talks teetered on the brink of failure at the 2009 Copenhagen COP, the generally reserved Stern recalls that, having had “two 30-minute naps on a hard floor in the previous 48 hours”, he exploded and yelled “shame on you!” at bewildered UN officials.
More fireworks followed in the years it took to put the negotiations back on track after Copenhagen, not least when it came to the pivotal relationship between the US and China. An agreement was finally forged in Paris, but not before a heart-stopping moment when Stern realised the draft text of the deal had been changed to say developed countries “shall” take the lead on cutting emissions instead of “should”. “I couldn’t believe that this whole, world-changing accord would unravel over something so witless,” he writes.
In the end, governments signed up to an accord that is supposed to limit global warming to well below 2C compared to pre-industrial levels, and ideally 1.5C. But nine years later, these goals are in jeopardy as the fossil fuel use that is by far the biggest driver of warming continues to soar.
Why? One reason may be the delusional nature of the idea of energy transitions, argues Jean-Baptiste Fressoz in More and More and More: An All-consuming History of Energy (Allen Lane £25). This sprightly demolition job attacks the widely held idea of a world where wood was steadily replaced by coal, then coal by oil and gas, all of which will eventually be overtaken by wind, solar and other renewables.
Fressoz, a historian of science and technology, says the fact is that, after two centuries of so-called energy transitions, humanity has never burnt so much wood, coal, oil and gas. The roughly 2bn cubic metres of wood felled each year for burning is three times that of a century ago, and not just in developing nations. The US burns twice as much wood as it did in the 1960s.
Likewise, coal had the strongest growth in its history between 1980 and 2010, long after the industrial revolution. And while European countries have pushed coal out of their own energy systems, the coal used to make their imports means they still indirectly drive its growth.
Fressoz does not want to suggest green energy can never dominate. But he fears incumbent fossil fuel companies promote the idea of transition to delay changes that must be far more radical than “techno-solutionists” assume.
Outside academia and diplomacy, climate change is having worrying impacts on the ground, writes environmental journalist Peter Schwartzstein in The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence (Footnote Press £22). Drawing from a decade of reporting from more than 30 countries, Schwartzstein offers a series of dismal examples of how drought, heat and other extremes are exacerbating conflict. In Iraq he finds that farmers whose crops had failed amid shrinking rains, and who had lost communal land to Baghdad businessmen, were more likely to support Isis than those near rivers who could maintain good harvests. In some regions, they seemed to join the jihadis at roughly three times the rate of counterparts living near rivers. In Jordan, where scorching heat and water scarcity threaten rural livelihoods, Schwartzstein witnesses protesting villagers burning portraits of the king.
His travels in Bangladesh, Africa and other climate-battered regions reveal further pressures but also offer hope in the form of environmental peace-building aimed at calming climate-fuelled hostilities. Schwartzstein sees evidence of success in the northern Sahel, where erratic rains and declining pastures had spurred murder and tit-for-tat animal killings. But tensions eased after an agricultural NGO stepped in to help manage appropriate herd numbers and compensation.
Finally, far from the tense world of climatry, wildlife biologist Diane K Boyd has written the uplifting memoir, A Woman Among Wolves: My Journey Through Forty Years of Wolf Recovery (Greystone Books £18.99)
In 1979, when Boyd went to work for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in northern Minnesota, she was to her knowledge the only woman in North America trapping wolves for research and to help protect livestock. Local papers wrote about “the attractive blond lady wolf trapper” and sceptical male colleagues bet she would never catch an actual wolf.
Boyd proved them wrong and spent decades at the heart of the protracted tussle pitting farmers and hunters against conservationists trying to protect a once-prevalent predator hunted to the brink of extinction. She survived the stench of livestock carcasses, icy wild river crossings and the occasional hostile logger to witness the recovery of an animal that would eventually spread throughout the Midwest.
More recently, in some US states and parts of Europe the ancient war against wolves has resumed. But Boyd has faith in the creatures’ resilience — and value. “We can live without wolves,” she writes, “but the world is a much richer place with wolves in it.”
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