Pirate's Cove

The world is a scary place, you guys! And you did it to yourself, because you drove a fossil fueled vehicle, ate a burger, and didn’t unplug all your appliances before leaving home. So says a group of self-styled big wigs who wouldn’t be hurt if their cost of living skyrocketed from the policies they push

In a scary world, the biggest worry has to be climate change

In a world of troubles, the battle against climate change must take priority. That is the clear message of the 28 leading global think tanks that together comprise the Council of Councils (CoC). The CoC’s 2018-2019 Report Card on International Cooperation, released today, designates global warming as the top international priority for the first time in the report card’s five-year history. Alas, those same experts see little opportunity for progress in the coming year.

Each year since 2015, the Council on Foreign Relations has asked the heads of CoC institutes to answer three questions: First, how would you grade international cooperation in the previous year, both overall and across 10 major issue areas? Second, how should world leaders prioritize these 10 global challenges? Third, which of these issues offer the most hope for progress in the coming year? (snip)

International cooperation on individual issues areas was also mediocre. The highest individual grade, for promoting global health, was a B minus. The biggest disappointment was in mitigating climate change. Less than four years after the Paris Agreement, the Earth is poised to overshoot the 2 degrees Celsius rise in average temperatures that negotiators set as a fallback target. Moreover, recent reports on ocean warming, collapsing biodiversity, and natural disasters paint a dire picture of the planet’s future. Mitigating and adapting to climate change received a C in 2018. (snip)

But the biggest impediment to multilateral cooperation, most think-tank experts agree, is President Trump’s “America First” agenda. By abdicating US global leadership, testing Western solidarity, and escalating trade tensions, the American President is undermining the legitimacy and stability of the existing multilateral system, contributing to the sense of a world adrift. The world has benefited for decades from “an international order in which the rules of the road are well established and widely observed,” explains Michael Fullilove, director of the Lowy Institute in Sydney, Australia. “But increasingly those rules are under challenge, including by those who wrote them.”

See, the United States isn’t allowed to think of itself first, like every other country does. Just some TDS, and exposes the political agenda of the Council of Councils (rather pompous, eh?)

The CoC report card signals a shifting global agenda alongside this changing international landscape. Five years ago, think-tank leaders were preoccupied with combating terrorism and mitigating violent conflict. Today, they define the premier challenge as ecological: cooperating on climate change to ensure a sustainable environment for both nature and humanity. Their second priority is managing the global economy in the face of rising inequality, a situation underlined by the startling fact that the world’s richest 26 people own as much wealth as the bottom half of humanity (3.8 billion), according to Oxfam. Their third main concern is preserving the nuclear non-proliferation regime, at a time when existing treaties risk unraveling and North Korea is testing the world’s will.

Sadly for them, when you put climate change on a list with real world issues which directly affect citizens, it is low hanging fruit. Most barely care. Nor is that changing, no matter how much they push their agenda of ‘climate change’.