In Bonn, Germany, the United Nations held a climate change conference to discuss their final position on the matter before meeting in Paris, in December, to make a treaty.  Usually, climate change conferences are dominated with talk about preventing it, but not this one. In fact, the majority of the conference was dominated with talk of money –– the largest setback to climate change prevention.
Of course, you can’t deny how important money is to preventing climate change. You need money to pay for research into renewable resources, to develop eco-friendly machines, and to spread this technology around the world. Not to mention the massive amount of restructuring something like this would take; having to rework an entire century of technology that runs on oil. Something like that wouldn’t be cheap at all.
But money also presents an even larger issue. All of the countries involved are providing billions of dollars to this project, but the biggest question is how much should each country give? Developing countries argued that they shouldn’t have to pay as much as richer countries, because they contributed less to the acceleration of climate change and because they cannot afford it. They blame the more developed countries for the climate crisis and feel that their finances should be treated more delicately than the more developed countries.
This raises the larger question of whether or not the treaty in Paris will happen, seeing as their treaties on climate change usually fall through. It’s not enough that nearly every scientist agrees this is a serious issue; most of these countries are looking out for their own interests. This world does not need a bunch of independent countries worrying about their finances, what we need is a bunch of independent countries working together to fix the planet they broke.
This isn’t just about climate change though, this is about seeing if our world’s diplomats are capable of working together to solve a worldwide crisis. We live in a very random and chaotic universe, and maybe one day we’ll face an imminent crisis that will call for them to all work together. If we can barely solve climate change in decade, it scares me to think of what will happen if they are given a shorter span of time.
The United Nations is supposed to be about bringing the worlds nations under one body to fix major issues, but they aren’t immune to money. If they fail, they will eventually see the cost of their mistakes, but let’s hope they get their act together before that.