Please join us in this urgent prayer for the final days of COP25
It is Thursday of the final week of the COP25 climate summit, originally scheduled to close tomorrow. Please join us in urgent prayers that beseech: “O God, this is a prayer of a strong finish that yields a strong beginning. We appeal to the creator, sustainer, and redeemer of all creation to deliver COP25 from a failure that we and our neighbors in this world can no longer afford.” (The remainder of the prayer is written below.)
Four revealing stories from Wednesday alone:
1. Canada’s National Observer reports:
Protests led by Indigenous leaders shut down the main hall of COP25 in Madrid on Wednesday. In an unprecedented event, about 500 people stormed the area outside the high-level negotiations decrying the lack of action by assembled governments to address the climate emergency.
The state of negotiations at COP25 was described as a "Kafkaesque absurdity" by the head of Climate Action Network Canada, Catherine Abreu. On Tuesday, negotiators at one session spent 20 minutes arguing over whether to "adjourn" or "close" their meeting and an equal amount of time debating whether to display items on a projection screen.
The protests themselves had a Kafkaesque quality, taking place in the grand hall festooned with enormous UN signs declaring "#TimeforAction."
Protestors were joined by youth and faith-based allies and found themselves detained in an attached warehouse while the UNFCCC considered the fate of their credentials. Please consider that these are not outside protestors; these are credentialled observers. What have they observed at COP25, and previous COPs since Paris in 2015, that would lead them to risk their credentialing, if not arrest, for “unauthorized protest”? People are frustrated and angry.
2. Consider as well the prophetic witness of Greta Thunberg, just yesterday named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year for 2019. She did not step up to the microphone and look approvingly on COP25 as if we were her people, as if we were aligning ourselves with the prophetic vision that she espouses and symbolizes. Instead she accused world leaders of “creative PR” and noted that “since the Paris Agreement, global banks have invested $1.9 trillion in fossil fuels.” Our youth are not satisfied with the efforts of COP25 negotiators.
3. Three Canadian participants of CCOP enjoyed a long conversation with environmental hero Elizabeth May, the first member of Canada’s Green Party to ever be elected as an MP. She has been to more COPs than she can enumerate, she said. “Copenhagen was the worst. I don’t mean to sound cheesy, but there are good cops and bad cops, and COP25 so far is a bad COP.” May thought it unlikely that negotiators would finish their work in time, and that COP25 would be adjourned until Sunday, but even worse: that the unfinished work of COP25 mightly likely spill into 2020, further delaying attention on ramping up the NDCs which reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Seasoned veterans are not pleased about the prospects for success.
4. One of our most enthusiastic CCOP participants has been Fernando, a climate researcher from a small university in Argentina. Last night, he was invited to a reception at the Argentinian embassy. When he returned back to Base Camp that evening, he was discouraged. “I’ve had so many dark conversations,” he said. He had talked to too many officials who whether out of discouragement or disingenuity, were ready to blame others (like the IMF) or their circumstances (like poverty) for their own hesitancy to take the climate action which is under their control. Even our most hopeful new arrivals battle despair at a closer “inside look” at COP25.
The outcomes of COP25 seem to be on a razor’s edge. Will you pray with us?
The build-up to COP25 made two tactical errors and now is in critical danger of paying the price:
1. The sentiment was bantered around that COP25 was a “minor COP,” almost a matter of housekeeping. COP26 however! When the U.K. hosts COP26 in Glasgow in November 2020—now, that’s the truly significant COP. Christiana Figueres is the former UN official who presided over the Paris climate negotiation. Her current organization is called Mission 2020, and before COP25 could bang its gavel in 2019, she said, “2020 is the first time since the Paris Agreement that countries will come together to assess how much they've been able to do and how much more they can do.” She says, “If we do not change course by 2020, we risk missing the point where we can avoid runaway climate change with disastrous consequences for people and all the natural systems that sustain us.”
I understand the necessity of markers and timeframes, but we realize, don’t we, that to “change course by 2020” means that we must change course in 2019? It’s not like the Paris Agreement is a freight train and that our hand is on the railway switch, our eye on the stopwatch, waiting to pull the switch and change tracks at the orderly time. Instead, the Paris process is like a cumbersome ocean liner and the entire weight of the officers and sailors must be on the wheel, dragging it desperately around in order to avert a collision with the looming iceberg. I can’t imagine a successful COP26 without a successful COP25.
And to tell you the truth by way of confession, without projecting on anyone else: there is the hint of ethnocentrism to a too overly fond gaze on our younger son, COP26. Our older son, COP25, is swarthy and malnourished. Rejected once already by Brazil, cobbled together by Chile here in Madrid, what are we to expect of COP25? By contrast, a UK news website declared the headline: “Could an upcoming climate summit become the next Paris agreement?” No one—absolutely no one—is asking COP26 to be the next Paris Agreement, but the writer insists, “The Glasgow 2020 event could be key to the fight against climate change—but the UK needs to make sure it does its part. . . . There is a lot of optimism around COP26 because it is being branded as the ground on which to build upon the work achieved at the 2015 Paris summit where ambitious national emission reduction commitments were made by many countries.”
We have made the error of comparing COP25 to a COP that doesn’t even exist yet, while assuming that the youth, island nations, and indigenous peoples will be willing to wait one more year until “the main event.” We failed to understand that from here on out, THERE IS NO SUCH THING as a minor COP. May the Lord forgive our arrogance for the future and our neglect of the present.
2. The second error involves COP25’s agenda. It was published beforehand and attends to related work and to some unfinished business from Katowice (COP24): namely carbon markets (also referred to as “Article 6”), loss and damage, gender equity, finance, and stock take. These are important subjects and they do pertain to the completion of the “rule book” that will free up 2020 to focus primarily on Ambition. And yet, why did we assume that in the year of Greta Thunberg and School Strikes and Extinction Rebellion that the world was going to be content to discuss anything other than Ambition? In this year of devastating wildfires, droughts, hurricanes, and flooding, why did anyone think that we would be content to talk about anything other than challenging each other on the ramped-up NDCs that are 100 percent serious about our warming targets?
And Article Six may prove to be have been the worst possible discussion topic to dominate COP25. For whatever the reality of honest and transparent carbon markets might be, the perception is that they are just another way for rich nations to become richer, for rich nations to pawn off their CO2 reductions on developing nations, and for rich nations to avoid emission reductions in their own right. Perception-wise, it is an added slap in the face to engage with such commitment the topic of carbon markets while engaging tentatively the topic of Loss and Damage. A nation like Tuvalu might wish for a carbon market on its soil, but alas, they will have no homeland to host an exchange of any sort. May the Lord forgive our failure to listen and our lack of empathy.
This is a preliminary analysis, and just one interpretation, of why COP25 is at its present crisis point here on Thursday afternoon. These four stories and these two analyses form the basis for the following prayer, a prayer asking for the Lord’s intervention in the final days of COP25, a prayer that is a prayer for COP26 in a foundational way, a prayer we are calling “The Strong Finish” prayer. Please join us in praying:
The Strong Finish Prayer
O God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ
This is a prayer of a strong finish that yields a strong beginning. We appeal to the creator, sustainer, and redeemer of all creation to deliver COP25 from a failure that we and our neighbors in this world can no longer afford.
May the negotiating nations finish the work of the final days of COP25 in such a just, merciful, and humble way that the year 2020 is rendered free and serious.
May the run-up to next year’s COP26 be freed up, without distraction, to be focussed on an ambitious ramping up of the emission reductions (NDCs) which will finally MATCH, not simply approximate, what scientists tell us can prevent the warming that will surely cause our worst suffering.
May a strong finish at COP25 send a signal that the governments of the world are serious about the Paris Agreement, that they have listened to the voices of our youth, our indigenous neighbors, our Pacific Island neighbors, indeed all our neighbors. Lord God, may they send the signal that next year’s COP26 is not some false hope, not some promise kicked down the road one more year, not some deus ex machina ready to save us in November, 2020—but instead that the next eleven months will be spent with the eye kept firmly on the prize: the promotion of the Common Good through serious and cooperative effort.
Creator God, at this moment at COP25, we feel like we are asking for a miracle, and so that is why we have come to you. We believe you are able to do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine, according to your power that is at work within us. We say NOW, NOW, NOW to you be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus throughout all generations, for ever and ever!
In and with the name of Jesus Christ,
Amen.
Picasso’s “La Guernica” in Madrid
(COP25 reflections by Lowell Bliss)
The Reina Sofia is just around the corner from here at CCOP Base Camp. The museum houses Pablo Picasso’s famous reflection on the horrors of the Spanish Civil War, and in particular, the devastation of April 26, 1937 when Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe conducted an aerial bombing of the Basque village of Guernica, almost as a practice run for WWII’s blitzkrieg. Before I wrote “Strong Finish” prayer, I ran down to the Reina Sofia and stood for forty minutes in front of Picasso’s painting. It is a massive canvas, measuring 3.49 meters (11 ft 5 in) tall and 7.76 meters (25 ft 6 in) across. When I entered the marble room, five men were already standing in front of the painting. They wore around their necks the light blue lanyards and the red badges of a COP25 party. They were from India.
I’ll leave you to your own meditations on the painting, and just share one relevant interpretation of my own. It was the inspiration I was looking for about praying for the final days of COP25. There are only two hands in the painting which are not flayed open in lament. One is at the bottom, but it is part of a severed arm and the sword it still clutches is broken and useless. The other, directly above at the top, seems to still retain strength. It clutches a candle stand with a lighted flame. It is not the only light source in the room, a room which impresses itself upon the viewer like a torture chamber, but the light that presumes to be the sun may really only be an incandescent bulb, or an eye that looks dispassionately and technologically from above. The flame of the candlestick, however, looks organic, like an apple core. Its wick looks like a seed.
When we pray that COP25 finishes strongly, we hold out boldly the light, and we trust in the seed. This year of ramped-up ambition needs Madrid’s steady light to see by; COP26 needs the successful germination of COP25’s seed. I asked Simon Chambers of ACT Alliance last night, “What is your gut feeling of when you are going to stop talking about the 1.5 degree target?” He replied, “I’ll stop when the IPCC tells us that 1.5 is no longer possible.”
I now feel the same way about COP25: I’ll stop praying for it only when the gavel comes down on it.