November 2, 2021
Well the BIG United Nations Climate Change Summit COP26 is going off as planned. A lot of blustery speeches, some media darlings are getting the shine and the world leaders are getting a telling off from the civil society barons. But do you feel change coming out of this? I don’t get it. I don’t even see all of the speeches posted on the UN Climate Change YouTube page, just one from our region. This seems strange.
I call it strange because when you go to the COP26 website to find all of the speeches, hardly any of them- well, let’s say less than 25 percent of them- are posted. Even though the summit is in its third day and nearly everyone has had a chance to show us how well they can put down a good speech.
It seems like the summit is hiding the ignorance of the respective world leader’s on the issue of climate change, which is of no shock here because climate change is a very diverse and hard topic to make one sound knowledgeable of. That in itself is the telling part if the leader’s themselves don’t know how to even go about articulating climate change issues.
This leads to Ms Greta Thunberg the climate change warrior from Sweden who said about this year’s conference that world leaders only pretend to care about climate change and the environment. While she is on the extreme side of the climate change paradigm, being a tree-hugger extraordinaire, we should take note and put her bias to one side for second because she is in the midst of this much hyped parade and can see the leaders up close and personal. This is something most of us don’t have the luxury of doing.
We have said it before, unless world policing bodies are brought into the discussion like how they have done with tax avoidance and money laundering, we will get nowhere with climate change. The world leaders know that and they have to make up a formula to address that particular challenge, at least acknowledge that.
I just hope the buffet at this year’s COP26 is beyond superb because other than that there is nothing else to go there for.