unfccc

Every year, the world’s governments gather at what the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC, calls a Conference of the Parties, or COP, to talk about lowering carbon emissions while they just watch emissions continue to rise. It is time to start calling these annual UNFCCC gatherings what they are: COP-OUTs.

The U.N. climate negotiations are failing so miserably I have been thinking for years these COP-OUTs should be boycotted by civil society with the UNFCCC excoriated for its failure to adhere to its stated mission to “stabilize greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that will prevent dangerous human interference with the climate system.” Earth to U.N.: We are already experiencing dangerous human climate interference at current levels of carbon pollution. Negotiations that allow even more lethal pollution are in direct contravention of the UNFCCC’s publicly declared goal.