Month 12, Day 13: Not Bad News

The Cancun climate conference ended on a friendly note, with mild intimations of progress all around. Lots of handshakes and polite applause, with only a few dissenting notes.

Yvo de Boer, who stepped down this year after four years as executive secretary of the United Nations climate office, said that the success of this year’s conference was in large measure attributable to the modesty of its goals.

“This process has never been characterized by leaps and bounds,” he said in an interview. “It has been characterized by small steps. And I’d rather see this small step here in Cancún than the international community tripping over itself in an effort to make a large leap.”

In all, the success of the Cancún talks was a shot in the arm for a process that some had likened to a zombie, stumbling aimlessly but refusing to die.

Is it just me, or is that last paragraph a desperate journalistic attempt to reconfigure the “climate zombie” meme?

It’s vaguely reassuring that the Cancun conference did not end with walkouts and public squabbles on the issues surrounding climate change. When representatives of the world’s countries gather to discuss the gravest existential threat our species has ever faced, and conclude with a modest agreement that further progress needs to be made, that’s good news. That is to say, it’s good news if you think about the alternative: contentious squabbling over trivialities as a means of ignoring the looming, slow-motion disaster that imperils us all. As Michael Levi notes, the most significant work will likely take place in areas that are not addressed by the U.N.’s decisions, which means individuals and communities at the smallest levels of scale, and multinational corporations at the largest. The question emerges: can transnational corporate entities acquire enlightened self-interest quickly enough to make a difference to the planetary systems upon which their customers’ survival depends?

Warren Senders