[HD-5] Booooooored
The head of the New Zealand delegation is checking her phone. The guy beside me is talking to his wife on iMessage about the colours they want to paint their new baby’s nursery. I am having to resist the impulse that tells me come on, man, just check how much it would be to order a phone mount for your bike before you get back to Canada. I know you’re not sure if you want it, but just check, will you—oh, god. Everyone here is bored.
Hofgarten Days, friends, and the living is somewhat tepid. Join me, Bernard Soubry, as I simmer in the broth of not negotiating a huge climate agreement any more. This is your fifth email.
This is an awkward moment for everyone. The COP in Glasgow was kind of the last big whoop for the Paris Agreement; now, not so much.
I mean, you used to get yelling in these rooms. At the last SB meetings I was in, I saw somebody in the Periodic Review room—which was literally a negotiation to figure out whether the review of country goals was going to be too much like the global stocktake of country goals—genuinely flip their shit at the moderator because they didn’t like how many meetings there were. And then one of our rival publications publicly accused that negotiator of harassment, and the negotiator accused them of libel, and the publication had to apologize for fear of permanently getting banned at the UNFCCC. I mean, Christ, but things got intense.
Yesterday there were like three actual negotiations and six hours of talking about countries’ different experiences. People are reading prepared statements. The back-and-forth is nonexistent. We are, in fact, not negotiating any more; we’re implementing the Paris Agreement.
This is a problem if you’re a negotiations team that has spent the past ten years trying to fight tooth and nail for your country’s views to get in there. People have been amped up this whole time, and now they have to… cooperate? Actually pony up the money? Weird. Confusing. Kinda boring.
It’s not just negotiators: the entire process is feeling it. You can’t run two weeks of three-hour workshops; people’s brains will break. But that’s what the UNFCCC is reduced to in the lull between knowing how to do an all-out agenda brawl and sitting down to coax promises into, like, real money.
I worry. We’ve built a system that rests in part on the need for adrenaline, on big media wins, on things that national politicians can build future campaigns on; but that’s not the stuff of climate action. Real climate action is boring, too. It’s headlines like “COUNTRY DOES EXACTLY WHAT IT SAID IT WOULD DO,” and “SCIENTISTS STOP GETTING INTERVIEWED LONG ENOUGH TO PROPERLY ADVISE HEADS OF STATE.” It’s not that many open negotiations and a lot more secret bilateral meetings to give and take and promise without saying anything out loud. No one is used to this. Everyone is bored.
I’m not used to it, either; sitting in technical dialogues, I start to chomp at the bit. Give me stories! Give me gossip! I prod my sources. I go looking for fights. I hate how hard it is to write about the slow, democratic pace of explaining how processes must unfold now that they’ve been decided on.
But misinformation and poor work feed on boredom, and the expectation that no one is watching. As it is now, so it was with all the yelling in the last SBs: everyone paid attention to potential libel, but no one cared about rooms where some Excel spreadsheets decided whether methan and carbon dioxide would be counted in the same way, or whether anyone needed to fill out their emissions reports.
What happens if we don’t get the hang of it—if the UNFCCC becomes a place hopelessly mired in long talks that don’t go anywhere, that lose any kind of zing, that make people think that climate governance doesn’t happen at a big scale any more? How do I write about processes that might actually go best if you don’t write about them at all?
I don’t know how to hope for patience and long-termism among all of us who have grown so used to the next fight, and the next fight, and the next. I worry about what happens when we get bored, and when we get tired of it.
Concentrate, concentrate -
B