Bernd Carpenter

Fiji warriors have opened the 23rd International Climate Conference in Germany.
25,000 participants from 193 countries will discuss the practice after the Paris climate agreement. Only Syria and the United States do not support this agreement. But are we talking about the real problems and are the expectations simply too high?

Talks will take place in the World Conference Center and in a large tent village where representatives of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) will be held. Ultimately, there must be rules of the game for the principles of the Paris climate agreement.

Because the 193 countries minus 2 have agreed that the temperature should not rise more than 2 degrees Celsius this century and should preferably be close to 1.5. Each country will come up with its own climate plan and will report on it once every 5 years.

Bonn is therefore not concerned with new substantive agreements, but with the rules on how a Member State will implement its own plan and how it is obliged to inform others about it.

It’s in bad shape and it’s not getting much better. The 161 plans that are on the table are below par and only come close to the agreements made for a third. In addition, the US under President Trump is going to call it a day.

In 2018, the big roadmap for Paris should be ready on the shelves and the 24th conference in Katowice, Poland, is just around the corner.

To spoil the festivities even more, the agreements in the Kyoto Protocol, which came into force in 2005, have not been met. In 1997, in Japan, the world may have woken up to fall asleep again. Greenhouse gases had to be reduced by 5% compared to 1990. The deadline was 2012, but was extended to 2020. In Paris in 2015, there was some hope again. Now 25,000 people are speaking in Germany again.

Will there be rules of the game, yes probably. Are the goals achievable, no, forget it.
The dates make us dizzy, the numbers of participants too, and it is abundantly clear that both Kyoto and Paris were and are doomed to failure.

It’s too non-committal. Countries determine their own plans and often prioritise other problems or opt for expedient political behaviour. The climate conference is not going to save the climate and us (and the animals). That’s a shame for future generations. Global warming is not fiction.

The obsession with endless economic growth is the real second problem. After the first one that follows. It is a continuous exploitation of planet earth causing climatic disruptions.

You can put your head in the ground as a climate denier, but then your head will also be warmed up. Man has gone off the rails, detached from nature. The chance of intervening by means of almost 200 plans of action is a hopeless mission, comparable to getting VMBO schools to subscribe to opera and ballet. It’s not going to happen.

The environmental scientist Jared Diamond has pointed out why swords, horses, and germs set peoples on the road to greater prosperity. Because they had better weapons, because they had fast means of transport and brought diseases with them to which they themselves were resistant, but the natives were not.

The West has unleashed prosperity as a forerunner and other countries, all over the world, now want to repeat the mistakes. This is how man lives in illusions. We live in an imaginary reality of unprecedented prosperity with capitalism, liberalism, and economic growth with free trade.

This system knows no boundaries, nor ethics. Man has become too powerful because technology and technologies have unscrupulously overtaken him and her. Man is in an amoral age.

The biggest problem is the number. Not just economic growth. There are too many countries talking, there are too many people who want to participate (25,000), the tents are full of all kinds of good people from even better organizations. There are also far fewer people who demonstrate but do not know by God what is possible and feasible. It is too much, and where there is too much talking, a meaningless compromise comes out of the hat.

However, the problem of numbers has nothing to do with the number of talkers. There are simply too many people on this earth. That is the first problem and it is exacerbated by the third problem. We are getting older, with more diseases but even better medicines and treatments that make us even older than is good for people and the planet.

In 1987, there were 5 billion people on earth. In 1999, there were 6 billion conspecifics. In 2011, the number of 7 billion came on the ticker and by 2025 there will be 8 billion unique consumers. By the end of this century, there will be joy or sorrow over 11 billion human-mammals on the planet dancing on the volcano.

There are too many of us. The major epidemics of the past don’t help either. Wars hardly decimate and once again the brilliant progress makes us older.

There are no more first, second and third worlds. There are, however, first, second and third major international problems that will not be discussed in Bonn, nor will the UN be discussed elsewhere.

There are too many people (who are reaching too old an age), that is too expensive to pay for later and there is a firm belief in unbridled economic growth (within free trade), for which the environment and animals are sacrificed.

Prosperity is the cause of the happiness and exhaustion that awaits. Climate, water and food are under pressure from the mass of people who want to enjoy what is possible and at the same time impossible.

The only possible advantage is that due to the major crises that are to come (global warming, hunger and water shortages) there will be such population movements with serious conflicts that will drastically reduce the number of people on earth. Only then it will be too late.

The great brains are best at coming up with plans. Now not who has the A-bomb before, the good guys or the bad guys, but to look for solutions (including moral ones) to the trilogy of causal problems: too many people, too long living in too much consumer prosperity.

How much humanity can the earth, the environment, nature and animals handle?

That is the central question that needs answers to survive in the centuries to come. In Alaska, the Environment Switzerland of the world.

If man wants to save the earth, it is not about 193 plans that are not carried out. Fewer children are needed, natural disasters may not be so bad after all, can we all celebrate 100 years, mandatory completed life at the age of 85 and are epidemics sometimes not the friend of the balance on earth?

Only a CO2 reduction, which has no chance because of the ego of man, will not provide solutions for the major problems that will soon affect everyone.

The population bomb is more disastrous than the atomic bomb or the CO2 bomb.
There is no mention of this in Bonn.

Overconsumption and overpopulation: can these two be on the agenda for a future?

Bernd Timmerman
, historian and sociologist