Meant To Do That

Speaking from Sweden, [Greta Thunberg] said some "small steps forward" may have been made but the Glasgow Climate Pact was very vague and open to differing interpretations.
Greta Thunberg: ‘COP26 even watered down the blah, blah, blah’

Young Ms. Thunberg is 18 now, and that means that she likely has a few more years in her before she's going to to be expected to understand how the world really works. I don't really remember the death of my own childhood idealism. I've been a practicing cynic for a very long time now (long enough to have become quite good at it), and it's enough to cloud my memory of what I may have been like prior to that.

But I'm pretty sure I was young once, and so there would have been a time when it wouldn't have occurred to me that international agreements for things that no-one actually wants to do were quite intentionally vague and open to differing interpretations.

There was a radio story, noting the fact that activists had complained about nations and businesses with interests in the fossil fuel economy being at the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. In the story, an executive of Russia's Gazprom noted that meeting climate goals was not going to be painless, with all of the costs borne by big businesses. It would mean less comfortable indoor temperatures, fewer vacations and alterations to people's diets. Of course, everyone knows this. It's just that the Gazprom executive was willing to say it out load. Everyone else simply signed on to a vague document, secure in the understanding that when they inevitably blew off their supposed commitments in the face of a recalcitrant public, they could fall back on an interpretation that would let them off the hook.

Because at the bottom of it all, Bill Maher is likely right.

I wish your generation was better than mine. I really do. The sad truth is, we’re completely the same. Lots of talk, and at the end of the day, hopelessly seduced and addicted to pigging out on convenience, luxury and consumption.

And I'll own some of this. I remember when my generation was freaking out about the National Debt and convinced that if the adults didn't start doing things differently, it was curtains for all of us. Then us Generation Xers became adults, and, on the whole, we didn't do anything differently. There was no push to either scale back government expenditures or set taxes at a rate that would pay for them. And when the tech bubble fell into our collective laps and showed us a path to actually having the economy generate enough revenue for the government to retire its debts, no-one acted to preserve that. Rather, the big companies that grew out of the internet revolution are now making sure that some upstarts don't do to them what they did to IBM, Sears and Eastman Kodak. And in the process, they're stifling the engine of innovation that brought about the late 1990s boom. And now, the Gen Xers in politics, on both sides of the aisle, have pretty much given up on the idea that borrowing can't last forever. They'll just force the other party's voters to bear the brunt of paying it back. Someday.

So the watering down isn't anything new. Because for all that people say that human beings are ruining the planet, human beings haven't managed to extract enough from it to feel comfortable with what they have. And so the convenience, luxury and consumption train rolls on. Not because "leaders" want it that way. But because "leaders" are beholden to their constituencies, and those constituencies don't want decarbonization enough to proactively take steps to bring it about. And I'll be honest, it's not a big deal to me, either. After all, I'm unlikely to see 2050 for myself. So I'm not out there, making sure that I vote for the greenest candidate, and pushing my friends to do so.

One day, today's young climate activists will have to make the choice; to become adult climate activists or decide that they would rather do other things. When I became an adult, I decided that I had more pressing concerns than the national debt, the greenhouse effect or the rights of humankind. And to be honest, I still do. The problem is that I'm not alone in that.