After COP28 climate change summit, politicians who offer hope in place of despair will reap huge electoral reward – Joyce McMillan

Given COP28’s refusal to countenance ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels, it seems clear the world is heading for global warming of 2C or more

The mills of God grind slowly, so we’re told; but perhaps not quite as slowly as the UN Conference of Parties on climate change, known to the world as COP. Following the end of this year’s meeting – COP28, held in the debatable setting of oil-rich Dubai – we are invited to celebrate the fact that it has taken only 28 years, since the first COP in Berlin in 1995, for the parties finally to concede in writing the truth that brought them together in the first place; that if we want to preserve anything of the natural world as we have known it – and that has enabled the development of human civilisation on Earth – then we must move away from the burning of fossil fuels, and switch to more sustainable energy sources.

This long delay in stating the obvious is ridiculous, of course; and some of those involved in the COP process – including young campaigners’ groups, and the representatives of small island nations – find it almost unbearable, given the urgency of the climate deadlines the world now faces. Speaking as COP28 came to an end, the former Irish President Mary Robinson – now, at 79, a leading member of the independent international group of Elders – said that fossil fuel consumption would have to stop rising by 2025, and then fall by more than 40 per cent before 2030, to have any hope of keeping the target of 1.5 degrees Celsius of warming alive.

It could hardly be clearer, though – given the dilatory tone of COP28’s final document, the lack of proposals for serious regulation, and the refusal to even talk about “phasing out” fossil fuels, rather than making voluntary efforts to move away from them – that that goal will not be achieved, and that the world is heading for warming of 2C or more by around 2050. As one social media observer pointed out on Wednesday, the sums so far pledged to the entire global Loss and Damage fund, designed to help poorer countries cope with a climate crisis they did not cause, amount to little more than the total annual salaries of the world’s three top footballers; and of course, they are dwarfed by the hundreds of billions that governments still spend on subsidising fossil fuels.

Glimpse of humanity at its best

These are failures for which history will damn us, of course, if anyone lives to tell the tale; it condemns our children and grandchildren to a grim future, of uncertainty, conflict, destabilisation and loss. Yet counselling despair and heading for the pub is not a decent option; nor is the increasingly frantic distraction politics practised by the climate-denying far-right.

Every tenth of a degree of warming that can be prevented, after all, may still save millions of lives, and preserve some vital part of the magnificent natural world we inherited; and to read the detail of the COP28 outcomes, on topics ranging from deforestation to food systems, is to catch the occasional glimpse of humankind at its absolute best, working together across every kind of cultural and political barrier to agree on positive steps that can be taken, to inform and encourage one another, and to do what can be done, on the ground.

And it’s for that reason – and despite all the obvious corruption and slowing of the process, over the last 40 years, by profit-hungry oil and gas producers – that it is, I think, an error of judgment to write off the COP process as useless, and worse than nothing. The truth is that if the gods had been trying to devise a lethal problem to which humankind would struggle to respond, both psychologically and politically, they could have hardly have done better than to invent global warming caused by human activity; and in that sense, the COP process was always bound to involve some spectacular contradictions. In psychological terms, the long-term consequences of climate change are vast, beyond what most of us can comprehend; yet at the stage when it can be halted, most of its impacts, particularly on wealthier countries, are easy to dismiss as mere “weather”.

Extreme weather, like this wildfire in Greece, is one of the consequences of global warming (Picture: Angelos Tzortzinis/AFP via Getty Images)

Engineering a just transition

And politically, it leaves even well-intentioned politicians trapped between the instinctive conservatism of comfortable Western voters – many of whom will clutch at any argument, however irrational or flimsy, which suggests that green measures are needless and silly – and the relentless pro-fossil-fuel lobbying of some of the most powerful and wealthy people on Earth, who appear to live in a well-cushioned bubble of denial about the consequences of their actions.

Our principal job as citizens, if we care about the climate crisis, is therefore to vote and campaign for political leaders who are brave and clear-sighted enough to understand the role that history now demands of them. When it comes to national policy, as with COP agreements, the necessary shift to a global low-carbon economy is a profoundly political matter; and in the end, it will only be driven by governments, at every level, which step up to their vital role in engineering a just transition, through strong legislation to ban or “phase out” those things which are destroying our world, and to promote those things which will give us a sustainable future.

Winning consent for that kind of change involves articulating a clear vision of what a more sustainable world would look like, and then marking out the steps we should take to reach it. And in a developed world increasingly plagued by the despair, denial and collapsing mental health that comes with the fear that there may be no future at all, it seems difficult to overstate the support that a new generation of politicians with that kind of vision might gather; or the huge, energising sigh of relief with which their coming would be welcomed, by a generation tired of helplessness, and ready to work, even against the odds, for better times.