The 29th United Nations Climate Change conference, COP29, entered its second week in Baku, Azerbaijan, with a focus on holding corporations and policy makers accountable for their climate change actions. This conference is the world’s most significant international climate conference, where political leaders, climate change experts, academics and community members discuss climate change mitigation.
Todd Paglia is a climate advocate and executive director of the non-profit organization, stand.earth — an organization built to hold corporations and billionaire figureheads accountable for their climate change and sustainability policies. At the forefront of their list of campaigns is the Cargill corporation, which says its mission is to be an international food corporation that partners with farmers and suppliers to produce food with less environmental impact.
At the same time, based on stand.earth’s investigation, Paglia and his team found that Cargill’s front-facing climate policies were not in line with the real environmental impacts. The report found global deforestation among the more serious allegations.
In his stand.earth bio, Paglia is described as an environmental leader who has “succeeded in the practical business of hitting earth’s abusers where it really hurts — their wallets.”
Paglia explained that the campaign to pressure Cargill to be upfront about their climate action initiatives began in conversations with Indigenous Munduruku leaders in Brazil. Stand.earth worked with Beka Munduruku who advocated for the Cargill corporation to listen to their demands for transparency.
Stand.earth “adopted the policy to end deforestation due to this campaign, and the pressure that the family exerted upon the company,” said Paglia. “So they’re making progress, but they’re hiding how much progress they’re making.”
In corroboration with reports from the Rainforest Action Network, Paglia also named Cargill as a “prime sponsor of a railroad that would go through the Amazon rainforest and potentially triple grain production in the area where the Munduruku has already said ‘no more.’”
For Amy Wilentz, a professor of literary journalism who teaches a course about climate change writing at the University of California, Irvine, her counterpoint to climate denial is to give students the language to talk about climate change in their own communities, which may be indifferent to talking about the human impacts on the environment.
She compared climate change to earthquakes to illustrate why climate change education can be so unattainable: “Earthquakes are powerful. And people believe that these are God’s creation and God’s judgements, and God’s ideas and concepts, things that God made part of the whole creation. And so when you say, oh well, humans are affecting that — that’s almost heretical.”
Wilentz explained how farmers of the Central Valley who believe that God’s role in the environment outweighs their individual impacts on the earth still think about climate change.
“As long as you don’t call it climate change, which they think is some sort of [buzz] word of the progressive community, but call it ‘problems with the climate’ or ‘differences from now and the past with the harvest,’” she said that action would be taken more seriously.
“When you have the vocabulary to discuss it, then it becomes something comprehensible,” Wilentz said.
She alluded to the biblical story of Adam and Eve, where in the text, God warns them not to eat fruit from the tree of knowledge, and by going against God’s wishes, Adam and Eve suddenly have a newfound understanding of life’s real prejudices.
So, why might having that knowledge be seen as “misbehaving?”
“The whole world economy runs on fossil fuels, that is the simple, clear and obvious reason why climate change has been so politicized in the electoral process,” Wilentz said. “Certainly, if you are expecting to get a big donation from a political action committee run by [and] funded by a fossil fuel industry, you’re not likely to say climate change is an imminent danger to the planet.”
According to reporting across international news outlets, even the UN climate conference’s location in Baku, Azerbaijan has come under strict scrutiny because of its tainted human rights record and reliance on growing wealth from oil and natural gas reserves.
Paglia echoed this sentiment. “If you’re looking at building new power, wind and solar is cheaper than coal, right, the only reason there’s some momentum around coal is because of vested interest in lobbying, and momentum around building coal,” he said.
In the face of cynicism surrounding global policymakers’ promises to sustainability, both Paglia and Wilentz provided hope for the future of climate change mitigation.
On the heels of the November presidential election, Paglia sees the upcoming Trump era as something that will make “cities, states, counties, and corporations that have been a little less ambitious be more willing to become a counterpoint to the chaos and climate denying that Trump brings to the US government.”
Paglia said that Democratic stronghold states can work on their own to mitigate climate change.
He said, “if you actually join, just the blue states together, it’s the fourth largest economy in the world. California is the fifth. Add Washington state, Oregon, New York and other blue states. And if we can move the fourth largest economy in the world faster, we’re going to be able to actually erase a bunch of the backsliding by Trump.”
If that doesn’t work, Wilentz has a more radical proposal.
She alluded to action taken by leaders in England to protest climate change as efforts that would be considered “so radical that [they’re] not even acceptable in America.” Actions that would be considered “civil disobedience,” like stopping traffic on a freeway, would contribute a great deal to climate change mitigation, she said.
Wilentz explained, “I don’t think Trump is going to make it any easier, and I think he’s going to put out a lot of metaphorical roadblocks, and maybe that we should respond with literal like actual roadblocks, like… getting in the way of fossil fuel vehicles.”