Immanuel Kant in 1784 wrote, “Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made.” It is still true.
The 24th Conference of the Parties – the 180 countries that signed the climate change treaty in Paris in 2015 – opened Sunday in the Polish city of Katowice. The Polish government chose the venue, and it presumably selected Katowice because it is home to Europe’s biggest coal company. It was a thinly disguised show of defiance.
It’s not just Donald Trump who loves coal. It’s by far the worst of the fossil fuels in terms of greenhouse gas emissions, but Poland gets 75 per cent of its electricity by burning coal and it has no intention of changing its ways.
Fifteen hundreed kilometres to the west on the same day, in Paris, municipal workers were picking up the debris after the third and most violent weekend of protests against President Emmanuel Macron. The demonstrations are not as big as those of the great revolt of 1968, but they are certainly the biggest in decades.
And what were the protesters upset about? In Paris and in other cities, they were building barricades, torching cars, and setting banks and houses on fire because Macron’s government has raised the tax on diesel fuel by 6.5 cents per litre.
This was on top of an increase of 7.9 cents per litre earlier this year, and most French vehicles run on diesel. The fact Macron justified it as a green tax intended to reduce fuel use only seemed to make the protesters angrier, and at least until the extreme violence of last Saturday, the majority of French people supported them.
Poles clinging to coal despite the fact that the fog of coal smoke that envelops Polish cities in winter kills thousands every year, and ordinary people in France rioting for the right to go on burning cheap diesel in their cars despite a comparable death toll from atmospheric pollution there, suggest the quest to cut greenhouse gas emissions before global warming goes runaway faces even greater resistance than the experts feared.
Bear in mind that Poland and France are relatively well-educated countries that belong to the European Union, the region that has led the world in terms of its commitment to emission cuts.
Bear in mind also that the emission cuts promised in the 2015 agreement will not actually come into effect until 2020: we have a mountain to climb and we are not even in the foothills yet. Much bigger sacrifices than a few cents extra on the price of diesel or an end to burning coal will be required before we reach the end of this process, if we ever do.
The question therefore arises: can we really expect that the relatively large (although still inadequate) cuts in emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases promised in Paris at the 2015 summit will ever gain the public support necessary to make them happen? If not, then our current global civilization is doomed.
For the EU, the biggest distraction from the task at hand is the very high rate of unemployment in many Western European countries.
In fairness to the French protesters, many of them have lost sight of the bigger issue because they just can’t make ends meet.
We are entering this critical period for dealing with climate change – the next five years are make or break – just as the world’s economy is undergoing a hugely disruptive transformation that will leave many people permanently jobless because of automation.
If you were designing a species capable of making this difficult transition, you would certainly prefer to start with one that was wiser, more co-operative, and less excitable than ourselves.
Something a little less crooked, at least. But this is the timber we have to work with. Good luck.
Gwynne Dyer’s new book is Growing Pains: The Future of Democracy (and Work).