COP 26 is a waste of time, environmentalist says

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - Greenpeace co-founder Rex Weyler advises environmentalists to stay home, international conferences like COP 26 are a waste of time.

“These climate conferences are not addressing the real root problem, which is overshoot of the human species on earth, and they are not doing anything about the one symptom they are addressing, which is climate change,” he said.

There have been 34 climate meetings since 1979, when the first global conference was held in Geneva.

“What I expect from COP 26 is what we’ve seen from the last 25 COP meetings and the dozen climate meetings before that,” said Weyler. “Everything they agree on is full of loopholes for the governments and corporations to get out of their commitments.”

Fifty years ago, when he entered the environmental movement, Weyler believed that people would respond when they heard “the facts of what was going on with species collapse, climate change, toxins in our environment.”

Some have, but the level of response “feels almost insignificant” and society as a whole largely remains oblivious.

Weyler was shocked by the world’s failure to react in 2008, when it was first revealed that the Arctic permafrost is melting. The methane being released is a far deadlier greenhouse gas than CO2 and could trigger runaway global warming.

“It didn’t get a mention anywhere in the popular public media and was successfully ignored by all the governments in the world.”

He doesn’t know what scale of crisis it will take to inspire significant change.

Meanwhile, every year, close to 90 million new humans are brought into a world that doesn’t have the resources to support them.

“We’re not even addressing the problem of human population. We are ignoring that, pretending that is not an issue. We’re not really addressing our consumption habit. We are trying to come up with technological fixes that will allow us to continue with business as usual,” said Weyler.

He cited three examples of population overshoot in nature: among wolves, locusts and algae. While there were massive die offs in each case, a remnant of the species survived.

This is most likely what will happen to humanity, but “people are not going to necessarily remember how to achieve all the technological systems that we have in place now.”

“We’d be a lot better off if we could organize a soft landing at a lower population with a much lower consumption,” said Weyler. “Right now our population is growing at about 1.2% a year … If we could institutionalize women’s rights, so that women had the right to control how many children they had, and if we made contraception available worldwide, that alone would probably reduce our growth rate from 1.2% to maybe minus 1% or 2%.”

If humanity’s population was contracting at the same rate it is now expanding, in 70 years there would be 4 billion people.

Eventually there would be 1 billion, a number that Weyler believes our planet could sustain forever.

Photo credit: Crowd by Michael Kleban via Flickr (CC BY SA, 2.0 License)