Something that I’ve struggled with as a columnist is the incredible sensitivity to certain words and phrases inherent in the science and politics of climate change. With science, it’s important to be careful to qualify statements appropriately; with politics, it’s important to realize that words are often assigned to very specific issues. Using a word that is a synonym in conversational English may expose you as a sympathist for some agenda you didn’t know existed. As a delegate told me yesterday, the word “sectoral” is effectively dead to the UN process because of a controversial proposal for sectoral targets that happened years ago. New proposals dealing with treating emissions from different sectors of the economy separately suffer from using “the s-word,” but using any other word obfuscates what’s actually going on.
The UN climate process is full of acronyms and synonyms, often with thick, invisible ropes to certain negotiating years and delegations. It’s hard to keep track of them all, and in a lot of ways, their volume blocks “transparency” (also a buzz word!). In many other ways, though, their inherent nuances make things a lot clearer once you finally start to learn them. It’s an investment in an often frustrating process that really does help. Because, yes, there are big differences between the way that countries present topics in different years.
Losing words to failed proposals mostly leads to an occasionally annoying, sometimes endearing (at least to a former Model UN-er) negotiation dialect. A more serious problem, in my opinion, is that of losing entire systems to failed implementations.
Cap and trade, offset markets, financing mechanisms. Particularly with the more innovative or exotic efforts, it’s often really difficult to tell whether a failure is inherent to the policy action or is just an effect of improper implementation: expecting something to operate too quickly, failing to appropriately define parameters and scope, not devoting enough human or other resources to the action. But one failure often gets associated with the whole concept, and suddenly the concept—which at a different time, under different circumstances may be completely viable and very effective—is poisoned by the memory of a past failure.
And then we end up needing to brand concepts with new titles and superficial differences, hoping just to lose a few words instead of entire branches of theory.
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