The international climate summit is wrapping up. What’s been done and how are the Adirondacks involved?
By Chloe Bennett
Update: A new COP28 agreement with different wording was finalized after this story was published. Read about the document here.
Some interests of the Adirondacks were present at COP28, an international climate summit with world leaders, lobbyists and nonprofits, this year held in the United Arab Emirates.
Aaron Mair, director of the Forever Adirondacks campaign of the Elizabethtown-based Adirondack Council, attended this year’s summit to represent the council and Adirondack Wild.
After several days of talks, presentations and meetings, a deal between delegations at the conference was drafted, calling for a reduction in fossil fuel production and consumption. Now, the summit is in overtime as diplomats work to seal an agreement.
Environmental groups have expressed disappointment in the latest document’s wording which does not directly call for a phase-out of fossil fuels.
“It’s just profoundly disappointing,” Mair said of the draft.
However, the decision was not shocking to Mair. “This was that dark fear folks had going into this COP,” he said. “And now the draft texts are just bearing that out.”
While officials were discussing the future of fossil fuels, Mair was presenting the Adirondacks as a model for natural climate solutions like forest carbon sequestration.
Carbon sink
Research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows that nature-based solutions, including forest management, have a large role to play in reducing the worst of climate change. Resilient nature such as Adirondack forests boosts carbon storage and can act as buffers in extreme weather, which is projected to increase along with temperatures.
In 2015, an agreement in France was signed by nations at the annual climate summit to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by substantially reducing global greenhouse gas emissions
Mingling with scientists and government officials, Mair said he pitched the Adirondacks as a model for “being a nature-based solution with regards to our desperate need for action, knowing full well that we are clearly not going to make the 1.5-degree Paris (goal), but we can offer hope by investing in nature-based solutions.”
Localizing international climate talks
Ideas derived from conversations at COP28 flew back with Mair after the first full week of the summit. With sizable climate funding on the table from the Inflation Reduction Act and New York’s Environmental Bond Act, the Adirondack lobbyist said he wants to see more investment in sustainable transit and affordable housing.
“What is a hyper-local effort to now look at in front of say, can we see a national model and opportunity (as) something to test here?” Mair asked. “Because this is not unique just to the Adirondacks. This is rural America.”
He said he hopes for more coordination between transportation authorities to create a more frequent transit system in and out of the Blue Line, with lower-emission vehicles.
“It bolsters the ecotourism of the Adirondacks, it’s a lot cleaner because they’re not bringing in the cars and congestion,” he said. “But by the same token, it gives a very significant boost to the working-class communities and families.”
All the world’s elite traveling by private jet to eat and drink the finest food and wine, to stay in luxury hotels, to place that is manufactured, to decide how the rest of us live. All this could have been done by zoom. Walk the walk, if you talk the talk. A destination of hypocrisy.
Nailed it!
Shut the power off.
They need us more than we need them that’s for sure!
They rely on our hard endless work to survive.
If we stopped feeding them.
They would die.
No need for them or thier money war!
The climate conferences from Kyoto in 1997, to Copenhagen in 2009, to Paris in 2015, to Glasgow in 2021, to Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt in 2022, to Dubai in 2023, reveal a disturbing shift away from host countries that are democracies to authoritarian host countries. Is it coincidence that these countries welcome oligarchs and industry lobbyists while severely limiting climate activists freedom to speak and protest? And next year promises more of the same in Azerbaijan!
Add this to the dismal record of backsliding and broken promises on climate and common sense might lead us to conclude that “regulatory capture” has now morphed into “democracy capture” by special interests dominated by the rich and powerful elites and their political enablers.
Meanwhile climate is warming, and the future of all life on Earth hangs in the balance…
We will look back at the Biden presidency eventually and understand that outside of all the talking, they failed miserably at obtaining any significant climate goals. People who have been forced to use their credit card for groceries by faulty money policies, have little interest in spending more money to “ save the environment “. A puppet president and a stuffed shirt snob “ climate czar” have few followers.
On a local note, after my 70 years seasonally at Limekiln Lake, I have little use for “ ecotourists “ milling through the Adirondacks telling us how to live our lives, before driving back to New Jersey or Connecticut.
While I do agree that sustainable and free(!) transit is within reach if we work for it, on the other hand the luxury emissions impact of these international extractive lobbying conferences in authoritarian countries is itself asocial and environmental horror and deeply unsustainable. And as far as the housing crisis, we certainly need to mark and organize around the connections between the private equity groups that drive the housing crisis and the climate and biodiversity crisis. They are often the same private equity groups! The problem is capitalism.
I also want to point out that many environmental orgs are responding to the lobbyists for carbon sequestration, and other “nature based solutions” are often from extractive industries who seek to greenwash their image by offsetting their rapacious climate and biodiversity impacts with such technological and, most importantly, profitable! These industries are not just fossil fuel industries either, hydropower is an emerging industry that seeks to rebrand itself as ecologically restorative, even while emitting methane, poisoning water and disturbing the hydrological balance of vast natural forests and watersheds. I highly recommend the work and the wonderful education curriculum created by climatefalsesolutions.org on the false promises of “nature based solutions.” We all really need to educate ourselves and the next generation on the illusory language and inequities of greenwashing extractive industries such as reflected here.