I’m not sure why I keep getting emails from the World Economic Forum, telling me about this or that world economic problem.
I don’t remember giving them my email address, but maybe I did. Probably late at night, when I wasn’t paying attention.
The latest WEF email invited me to learn something about COP27, a big whoop-dee-doo in Egypt that was supposed to end on Friday, but went into ‘overtime’ and was still rocking and rolling on Saturday.
The event organizer is the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, but “COP27” stands for “Conference of the Parties 27”. So basically, it’s 35,000 scientists and government officials and financial advisors attending a bunch of parties, where they no doubt talk about climate change, but also try to hook up. (I mean, what’s really important here? Hot climate, or hot romance?)
They’ve been doing this every year for 27 years, and nothing has gotten better. But any excuse for a party, I guess.
The email had a link to a video, featuring a scientist named Johan Rockström who doesn’t seem to have much hope for the future of mankind. But at the end of the video, the WEF wanted to get me personally involved in the issue, so they asked me a question.
“What do you want COP27 to achieve?”
I didn’t take the question very seriously, at first. I mean, this was happening in Egypt — like, on the other side of the world — and they already had 35,000 party-goers who have, I bet, 35,000 different ideas for how to solve the climate change problem. (And 35,000 different ideas for how to hook up.)
Even if I wanted COP27 to achieve something — and knowing full well that they haven’t done much in 27 years, except throw big parties — who am I to tell them how to save the world? I don’t even know how to change the oil on my car.
But I guess I was feeling energetic on Saturday, and even thinking that maybe I had some good ideas. Since WEF was asking… how could it hurt? So I logged into the Comments section of the WEF webpage, and gave them a piece of my mind, such as it is.
First of all, change the name.
“COP” has some negative connotations to Americans. Like, “what a cop-out!” And, “he copped the money and ran.” Or it can mean a policeman. We don’t want the police running a global climate change conference. Politicians and scientists are bad enough.
Another bad choice for the name would be “Convention on Climate Change Parties”. If for no other reason than “CCCP” was once the Russian acronym for “USSR”. (For anyone interested, it stood for Союз Советских Социалистических Республик.)
Americans like me ought to have priority input into the name, because historically, we’ve been the biggest contributors to the problem. Just lately, China has been emitting the most CO2, but they’ve only been in first place since about 2011 (thanks, Obama!), while America has been emitting CO2 since about 1783, when the first steamboat crossed the Delaware River, leaving its trail of black smoke floating up into the atmosphere.
That’s 239 years of fouling the air. So China has a lot of catching-up to do.
Secondly, I’d like COP27 (or actually, COP28, assuming that COP27 ended in failure) to stop making me feel guilty every time I hop into my car, or bump up the thermostat.
Of course I feel sorry for the people living on the South Pacific islands that are going to disappear under water. But that’s going to take decades to happen, and right now, it’s winter in Pagosa Springs. Every morning, I have to let my car idle for ten minutes with the heater running, just to melt the ice on the windshield.
They don’t have that problem in the South Pacific. They just start their cars, and drive away.
So we all have our reasons for living the way we do, and our own reasons for feeling guilty.
It seems to me, this uproar is all about getting us to stop doing things we really like doing, instead of using technology to fix the problem.
So I’m thinking, what if we just asked everybody to leave their refrigerator door open for an hour a day?
Am I the only person who comes up with outside the box solutions like that?
Underrated writer Louis Cannon grew up in the vast American West, although his ex-wife, given the slightest opportunity, will deny that he ever grew up at all.