Sixteen years after Al Gore’s historic documentary “An inconvenient truth”, UN
Secretary General António Guterres told world leaders at the opening of the
COP27 in Egypt on Monday: “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on
the accelerator.”
اضافة اعلان
Sadly, though,
the UN itself has had a hand in the miserable state of affairs we find
ourselves in today. By abandoning the original language and intent behind
Gore’s warning about a looming “planetary emergency”, the UN fell, in effect,
in the trap of extreme capitalism, while touting a sustainable future.
In 2006, Gore
took the Democratic party’s environmental message to the next level with his
famous slideshow-based documentary, through which he aimed to open the world’s
eyes to the imminent threat of global warming. But Gore’s influence started
long before this award-winning film. While serving as vice president under Bill
Clinton for two terms, from January 1993 to January 2001, Gore’s environmental
thinking was all over the US Free Trade Agreement (FTA) with Jordan, which was
negotiated during the Clinton administration’s time in office, but came into
force some 11 months into George W. Bush’s presidency, in December 2001.
On Gore’s watch,
the Clinton team insisted on adding two clauses to the FTA to get guarantees
from the Kingdom with regard to environmental protection and labor rights.
To honor its
commitments, Jordan ended up establishing its first-ever Ministry of
Environment, in 2003, essentially expanding on the mandate of a small
environmental directorate with limited scope under the Ministry of Municipal
Affairs.
In the late
1990s, the Clinton administration’s environmental approach and language were
quite straightforward and in a sense purist. As such, negotiations with Jordan
were in the same spirit, explicitly about “environmental protection”, which was
the focal terminology used to seal the FTA.
But this started
to change once Bush’s Republican administration took over. UN agencies
operating in Jordan started asking reporters writing about the environment to
use the term “sustainable development” instead of the previously widely
accepted purist terms that underscored the need to protect the environment.
As a reporter
covering the environment beat in the early 2000s, I can still remember
receiving a phone call from one of my contacts at a UN agency asking me to
start using suitability-focused vocabulary when reporting on projects with an
environmental edge. At several events afterwards, local reporters received
repeated guidance to avoid making the “mistake” of using language that
advocated for environmental conservation.
The rationale
appears to have been influenced by Bush’s ruling Republican party and its
emphasis on unbridled economic and industrial development. Till this day,
members of the GOP continue to lend support to coal, oil and gas companies,
showing lack of interest in transitioning to clean energy.
The UN, being
largely influenced by US domestic politics, seems to have decided to take the
middle road, by marrying the party lines of both Democrats and Republicans.
These changes
have affected everything, from the international body’s actual approach to
global warming to the language UN agencies like the UNDP used in the irrelevant
communiqué.
This obsession with political differentiation and partisanship without the slightest concern for humanity’s overall welfare has cost us all dearly, especially those of us living in the Middle East and suffering from the direct effects of climate change.
“Environmental
preservation” slowly disappeared from the lexicon in favor of
“sustainability”, a non-committal expression that, strangely enough, sounds
commercially appealing (because of how misleading it is to the unsuspecting
consumer).
This reflected
directly on Jordan. During the Clinton era, Jordanian governmental and
non-governmental environmentalists were more purist in their messaging. One of
the scenarios they envisioned for the role of the Environment Ministry was to
obligate “polluters” in the local industrial sector to outfit their factories
with filters to curb air pollution.
Shortly after
Bush took office, the language started to change. Words like “pollution” were
substituted in press releases and public statements with phrasings that avoided
putting the onus on the industrial corporations and nations causing lasting
environmental deterioration.
Even now, at
COP27, countries have been pledging “zero carbon emissions”, which is another
way of tiptoeing around the notion that certain industries pollute the
environment uncontrollably, and irreversibly affect biodiversity and ruin
people’s health.
Unfortunately,
in polarized politics, everything becomes political, even global realities that
are substantiated by research and evidence. Even though climate change is
visibly upon us (with floods, fires and drought ravaging several parts of the
world), Americans and Europeans in the right-wing camp think it is a hoax —
just because global warming is a key agenda topic for the Democratic party in
the US and like-minded leftist groups in the EU.
This obsession with
political differentiation and partisanship without the slightest concern for
humanity’s overall welfare has cost us all dearly, especially those of us
living in the Middle East and suffering from the direct effects of climate
change.
Real climate
action should affect semantics as well as actual policies. Just like it was
important to craft a language of ambiguity 20 years ago, to address
environmental concerns in a way that watered down the perils of pollution and
the abuse of natural resources, today the UN needs to correct course by
adopting a straightforward and purist vocabulary that puts people’s health and
the environment at the core of its communications and overall lexicon.
Simply put,
“sustainability” has proved to be unsustainable, or else why are we here today
grappling for salvation?
Facing the
globe’s current realities starts with truthful language that reflects an honest
political will to reverse the ill-effects of climate change in an unapologetic
manner, before it is too late.
Ruba Saqr has reported on the environment, worked in
the public sector as a communications officer, and served as managing editor of
a business magazine, spokesperson for a humanitarian INGO, and as head of a PR
agency.
Read more Opinion and Analysis
Jordan News
.jpg)
.jpg)
