The Definition of Insanity
As I walked to my class to teach on Monday, I listened to a podcast on the outcomes of COP28 that one of the colleagues I’m co-teaching with had assigned to the students. In it, the commentator, Alden Meyer, a senior climate science advisor, comments on the fact that a number of countries pulled together a little over $700 million in pledges for loss and damages: “Just to put that in perspective,” he says:
We spend about three and half billion dollars a day subsidizing people to produce and consume fossil fuels Almost a trillion and a half dollars a year. . . . And when you think about it, it’s insanity. We’re actually paying people to produce and burn something that we say is an existential threat to humanity, and is going to make the need for loss and damage funding much, much greater. . . . Matter of fact, the International Monetary Fund says that fossil fuel subsidies have been increasing in recent years, not cut back. So that’s literally the definition of insanity: digging the hole deeper and paying people to do something that you say you don’t want.
It’s the definition of insanity. It made me think of Daniel Sherrell’s book Warmth in which he refers to the death by suicide of the civil rights lawyer, David Buckel, in Prospect Park, Brooklyn in 2018. Buckel doused himself in fossil fuels and lit a match to protest climate inaction. When Sherrell’s mother calls the action “crazy,” Sherrell responds, “I didn’t think he was crazy” (8). And it made me think of how Elizabeth Spiers, at “The End of Snow,” tells her readers that she’s not worried that her grandchildren won’t grow up with snow, as if to reassure us that she’s not crazy, that she’s keeping things in proportion. So often, in commentaries on climate change, there’s a desire to scale back so that one does not seem to be “overreacting.” What strikes me as crazy is that we don’t talk about—and, importantly, address—the subsidy system Meyer describes.
When I got to class I was talking to another colleague about how the COP Reports get written. It was a fascinating example of co-writing. She explained how material that the writers are thinking about adding are embedded in square brackets in the text. Here’s an example:
(d) Organize an in-session workshop [referred to in decision 8/ CMA.4, paragraph 10(a)], including round-table discussions,23 to be held in conjunction with the [5th] [6th] meeting of the GCNMA, inviting [representatives of the [Facilitative Working Group of the] Local Communities and Indigenous Peoples Platform and other relevant bodies, institutional arrangements and processes [, as referred to in paragraph 12 above,]] [relevant stakeholders] that focuses on, inter alia: (DRAFT TEXT on SBSTA 59 agenda sub-item 13(c) Matters relating to Article 6 of the Paris Agreement: Work programme under the framework for non-market approaches referred to in Article 6, paragraph 8, of the Paris Agreement and in decision 4/CMA.3 Version 6/12/2023 9:00)
It will be familiar to anyone in climate policy but to me, as a literary scholar, it gives a nice trackable example of how this writing happens.
The second point, that another colleague discussed in our class, is the generation of many “options” for the policy phrasing. Here’s an example:
7. Option 1: Recognizes that the consideration of equity can enable greater ambition in climate action and support and increase the likelihood of meeting the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement, including just transitions, strengthening resilience, sustainable development, environmental protection, poverty eradication and human rights, and that historical, current and changing contexts within and across nations remain potent factors in the ability to make progress towards climate goals;
Option 2: Notes that equity is complex and multidimensional as Parties have different national circumstances and capabilities to contribute and that their contributions toward achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement are nationally determined and also notes that inclusive approaches respecting human rights can lead to better climate outcomes and enable more ambitious climate action and policies;
Option 3: Recognizes that the consideration of equity can enable greater ambition in climate action and support and increase the likelihood of meeting the long-term goals of the Paris Agreement, that equity is complex and multidimensional as Parties have different national circumstances and therefore differentiated pathways, that these dimensions include just transitions, strengthening resilience, sustainable development, poverty eradication, that procedural equity requires social inclusion of women, youth, Indigenous Peoples and those in vulnerable situations, and that historical, current and changing contexts within and across nations remain potent factors in the ability to make progress towards climate goals;
Option 4: Reiterates and respects the principles of equity and CBDR-RC under the Convention and its Paris Agreement, recognizing that they are at the very core of the global response to climate change and reiterates their continued importance in guiding global efforts to address climate change in the long-term to ensure fairness and leaving no one behind;
Option 5: no text (DRAFT TEXT on CMA agenda item 4 First global stocktake under the Paris Agreement Version 8/12/2023 15:30)
Both of these examples are nice examples of co-writing that I want to develop for my larger project. The massive subsidies in my first example illustrate a very different form of co-writing: the way that so many in the Global North describe the climate crisis without referring to the systemic inequalities that reinforce it. It’s often not even a “bracket” or an “option” in everyday conversation.