- St Vincent PM Ralph Gonsalves Delivers Speech At COP28
Your Excellencies. The global community has the settled view that human beings, by their acts of commission and omission, have been causing and are accelerating dangerously a climate change crisis that portends an envelope in global disaster for life, living, and production. Essentially. Human beings are sleepwalking into a disaster of historic proportions. Nothing that has been proposed so far at this conference of parties has risen to this level of urgency and scale in terms of the transformation required or demanded to avert the impending debacle for humanity.
The leaders of the countries, which are the major emitters of greenhouse gases, know it. The profiteering barons and corporate barons globally know it. The informed population of our planet knows it, and we in the Caribbean know it quite well because we feel it. So to the world’s poorest people, who experience daily the consequences of calamitous climate change, they know it very well.
Yet we continue to tinker here and there with paltry initiatives. And then celebrate them falsely as epoch-making and transformative. We may fool ourselves. We cannot fool nature. Humanity is facing a metaphoric chasm, a sprawling divide between what is required and what is being timidly advanced. We cannot cross this chasm with baby steps. If we seek to do so, we would fall below and beneath the widening gorge.
Saving humanity from the disaster of man-made climate change is a great cause. Men and women who are unsure of their abilities have never won great causes. We know that the planet cannot survive beyond global warming in excess of 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. On the present course, humanity will exceed this target soonest. We know the compelling answers to this existential challenge, but we recoil from embracing them and acting upon them.
In any case, for any great cause, the answers, or solutions, revolve around four critical requisites. Nothing is possible without people. Nothing is doable without high-quality strategic leadership. Nothing is achievable without the mobilisation of a sufficiency of resources, and nothing is sustainable without specially crafted institutions to deliver the transformative results agreed upon.
We have not been involving the Earth’s people in an informed and structured manner. The planet’s leadership on this essential existential matter has been, by and large, very uneven and shows currently little sign of improving. The resources that are available among the rich countries and the rich people of our planet have not been mobilised in sufficient quantity for the tasks at hand. And the global institutions to address the haunting bundle of sustainable issues are in a ramshackle condition, and there is currently very little likelihood of their efficacious reform to make them fit for purpose.
Unless we address collectively and in solidarity each of these considerations, optimally, humanity as we know it is doomed. This is not the usual end-of-time doomsday scenario of inevitability grounded in religious prophecy. In this great cause, it is necessary and desirable to apply the Aristotelian proposition. Equity among equals, proportionality among unequals The rich and powerful countries have a huge obligation to right historic and current wrongs.
We, the metaphoric unwashed multitudes, must, in solidarity, insist on that. And at the same time, do our part responsibly and urgently. Justice and solidarity are thus to be combined.
