Over the past two weeks, I've probably watched around four hours of interviews, news bits, forum chats, and expert analysis from this climate conference in Madrid, Spain. I watched it via the BBC, France 24, N-TV (German commercial TV news), ARD and ZDF (the two German public TV networks), and occasionally CNN.
Yesterday, the news folks kinda wrapped up the whole 'drama'. It's best to describe the two week episode as a total failure (nothing was signed or agreed upon). Some might say that various points were gotten across, but beyond that....it was simply a wasted trip for most of the individuals there.
Why? I would offer five observations:
1. I think roughly half the attendees (nations) arrived with some minor notions of the requirement, and suddenly came to realize that there was going to be intense pain, suffering, and taxation involved, and the political parties of those nations weren't going to sign up for nothing that dramatic.
2. The problem of the youth-agenda folks versus the political establishment? This was played out over and over for the two-week period. Trying to introduce Greta into this, and expect easy acceptance of her agenda? It simply didn't work.
3. A normal day for the attendees? At one point in the first week....some attendee talked about the schedule....getting up at 6 AM, attending the all-day conference, eating out at 8 PM, having an after 10 PM cocktail or wine meeting with foundation people, and not getting to bed until midnight.
You could forecast ahead of time that by the 7th day of this type of week.....you would have been completely out of enthusiasm. Toward the end of the 2nd week, folks were laying around on couches or sleeping at tables. For some of them, I doubt if they had more than 50 hours of sleep over a 10-day period.
4. Madrid, for some, is more of a party-town, than a place where you'd conduct serious chatter like this. I'm not condemning the selection of Madrid for the COP25 meeting but it'd be awful easy to arrive and skip 3 hours here and 4 hours there....to chill out and make this more of a tourist adventure, than a conference trip.
5. Was there ever one single solution that would fit into the agendas of 100-plus countries? You could ask this over and over, and get a dozen different answers. I think that problem stood out by the end of the two weeks.
The next climate conference? 9 November 2020, in Glasgow, Scotland. Oddly, it occurs a week after the US election, and probably will be affected in some way by that vote/result. Odds of agreement in the 2020 meeting? I would go and forecast it already.....near zero.
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