Joey Wagemans
“After years of excess and willful ignorance, the climate bill has finally come due. Who will pay? Right now, it is being paid by the poorest and the most vulnerable. Small Island Communities pay in the droughts that destroy livelihoods and the record cyclones that steal lives. We see a small toll exacted every day as our shorelines are slowly eroded. Larger payments are made when the foundation of our marine ecosystems are bleached away.”
Thus spoke the president of the island state Naura, Baron Waqa, at the COP21/CMP 11 world leaders event in Paris this Monday, an event with more than 150 countries participating to talk about the climate change. Not everybody was convinced. Mohammed VI, king of Morocco, rather just points fingers at rich countries and is not done playing for money: “Is it fair to advocate frugality when one already has everything?" But when one has little, is it a crime against the planet to want more?”
At the start of the COP21 event, president Obama announced, along with Bill Gates, a new plan: investing millions in researching clean energy. A total of 28 investors, including Facebook inventor Mark Zuckerberg, will invest a total of 10 million dollars each year into this research and they hope to double this amount within 5 years.
These ideas may sound great, but perhaps these politicians and CEO’s are two steps behind engineers. The technology is already here, there are just socio-technological boundaries that need to be crossed. Throwing money at it could make the process go faster, but the end product will just be a commercial shadow of what we already have, a solar panel running on Windows 10 or a wind turbine with Facebook connection.
I’m not writing this column just for bad talking big commercial companies. It’s more matter of the amount and type of players. The COP21 event has over 150 countries taking part and not all of them have the best intentions, as we can see from Mohammed VI. The same goes for these 28 investors of clean energy research. Perhaps, before we all start to shake hands to achieve this great goal, we need to set up certain rules of playing the game. One player might take the money and run, leaving the rest of us behind on a dying planet. I do hope they understand this in Paris. If you want to be 100% clean, you also need to play the game 100% fair.