It’s over a week now since the parties to the Conference that was COP26 jetted or slogged back to their many points of origin.
In the interval, I’ve been processing the constructive disillusionment of the event, the necessary street theatre of protest, the sickening deafness of politicians and lobbyists, the vile taste of greenwash.
If there is reason to hope, it might lie in the fact that, at least this time, ‘they’ didn’t even promise to ‘save the world’ by keeping average temperatures below 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels in 2100.
Projections, based on the agreements, suggest 2.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels is the best-case scenario. As usual, those projections ignore many tipping points we might barge through in the meantime. Assume that is an optimistic estimate.
So, they are content we are 1.2 degrees less safe than they promised in Paris in 2015. As they left, they promised they might promise next year…next time…maybe.
Which is not, believe me, cause for despair. Many, many earnest folk committed to a better future prepared for COP26, showed up at COP26, tried to make their voices heard.
I was in Glasgow for the last day. An AcousticCommons radio initiative – As if Radio – had kindly invited me into the Civic House studio for a chat about ‘Poetry as Activism’, Pibroch and my views as a former ‘fossil-fuel industry insider’. Too weary to ‘slog’ home to Aberdeenshire (on the bus) that night, I stayed over at an excellent ‘affordable’ hotel in the Finnieston. On the Saturday morning we discovered that the bureaucrats were still fudging and evading whilst suggesting that pulling an all-nighter was somehow ‘above and beyond’ their job-descriptions. “It’s only a mass extinction event, after all!”
In the breakfast room, my fellow low-budget ‘parties’ discussed and debated in Spanish, Danish, Quechua, Japanese, Xhosa and, of course, the cargo language… English, whilst two awesome women negotiated and renegotiated, in Scots, the niceties of a full Scottish breakfast – ‘haggis, black pudding AND a tattie scone?’ – with the intrigued, the principled and the down-right hungry.
“Worst fortnight o ma life, so it wiz!” she said to me. “Still, whit can ye dae?”
To avoid climate catastrophe? Negotiate, renegotiate, compromise…don’t compromise. Listen.
“Jist the eggs an the tattie scone then? Whit aboot beans?”
Maybe it was the worst fortnight of many of our lives…so far. Yet a few miles from the conference centre at Finnieston, the world seemed ‘normal’. A bit quieter than usual, they said. Like Glasgow was holding its breath…or under martial law…high viz policing in twos and threes on all the major thoroughfares.
Between the radio interview and the hotel, I stepped in for a dram and a scribble at the Pot Still. Afterwards, at the Number 3 bus-stop on Hope Street, I bumped (in a socially distanced way) into a young Canadian woman and her mother. The younger woman was incensed that the previous Number 3 had driven past her.
“He saw me. He shook his head and just kept driving.”
I shrugged it off with native indulgence : “Glasgow. What can you say?”
They weren’t in Glasgow for the COP. The younger woman was studying in Glasgow and her mother had come over to visit. They had been to Edinburgh that day. We had the standard exchange about the pronunciation of ‘burgh’ in Scots.
Four minutes before the next Number 3 was due, they lost patience and called an Uber.
“Places to be and things to do,” she said as the Uber pulled into the bus-stop and blocked the way for the Number 3 which pulled up simultaneously.
Over the previous week I had been reading David Graeber and David Wengrow’s book, The Dawn of Everything. In it the authors propose three fundamental freedoms:
The freedom to move
The freedom to disobey
The freedom to redefine social relations
Fundamental freedoms that few in the modern world possess. As I sat on the number 3 to Drumchapel, the brilliance of the moment exploded in my imagination. The young Canadian’s body language, the way she hailed the bus, the way the driver of the previous Number 3 exercised, in that moment, his freedom to move, to disobey and to redefine social relations by driving straight past her.
Ay, gaun yersel, Glesga!
At 2.7 degrees above pre-industrial levels, billions of creatures, human and otherwise, will find themselves in conditions of untholeable heat or rising water-levels, starvation or violent conflict. And, of course, for many it will not be either-or.
The freedoms to move, to disobey, to redefine social relations have never been so vital. The survivors on Piper Alpha on the night of 6th July, 1988 exercised exactly those freedoms. They left the ‘temporary refuge’ in which they had been urged to remain. They broke with procedure and the chain of command. They re-asserted their humanity – their fundamental freedoms – and jumped. And on the sea-below, others – bosuns, ordinary seamen – waited, heroically, to rescue them, drag them to safety, give them aid and comfort.
In that sense, there is hope in the dismal fudge of COP26. Might it be the tipping point in which we realise we need to be free to live?
