These are not the "key" nations. Those are USA, China, India, Japan, EU, Britain. Until they get on board, it's still too little (and probably too late).
> The group of 14 looks nothing like the usual assemblage of international leaders recruited for global initiatives. France, with its vast array of overseas territories that gives it one of the planet’s largest ocean footprints, was not invited. Nor were the powerhouse players of Russia, China, or the United States.
> “Negotiation with that category of country isn’t all that easy,” says Vidar Helgesen, Norway’s former Minister of Climate and Environment and the driving force behind the project. “We decided to get a group where high politics wouldn’t get in the way and we could be focused on the task.”
> The idea, Helgesen says, was to gather a coalition of the willing—a like-minded group of countries with the ocean deeply embedded in their culture and history—to conduct discussions that would be underpinned by science.
I think this looks like a good move. IMHO, a big problem with environmental challenges is this idea that a solution has to be some all-or-nothing affair, and because of the perceived insurmountability, nothing gets done politically. Getting a group of nations to do something because they _need_ to seems like a good fire under people's asses to get the ball moving.
When it comes to the oceans, add France to the list. Due to their island holdings around the globe, they have the world's largest maritime exclusive economic zone, covering 8% of the surface of the Earth.
The EU is not a nation, and foreign policy is a bit of sovereignty several member states really do not want to give up. And France perhaps more than most.
Right, but it depends where. The EU does not say much about how France runs most of its overseas territories, including French Polynesia and New Caledonia. Less than 10% of France’s surface area (land+sea) is actually in Europe.
> The 14 members are Australia, Canada, Chile, Ghana, Indonesia, Japan, Kenya, Mexico, Namibia, Norway, Portugal, and the island nations of Fiji, Jamaica, and Palau.
Australia is comfortable doing their per capita bit plus extra destroying arguably one of the most valuable biological assets in the world (the Great Barrier Reef), so it’s kind of sad to see the hypocrisy.
How so is Australia actively destroying the Barrier Reef over and above the world as a whole? The main issue is coral bleaching, which seems to driven by sea temperature rise - Australia only contributes maybe 2% of global CO2 emissions at worst.
Australia is generally figured to have the highest, or very nearly the highest, per-capita emissions of the developed world, and that's not accounting for its coal exports (which are the second largest in the world).
I think you can put together a list of counter examples pretty easily. Blind optimism is perfectly fine for making progress, in the cases where the action taken turns out to work.
Plenty of people started businesses on what may be termed blind optimism and succeeded.
I think it even helps a little to underestimate the obstacles in innovation - otherwise one might not attempt it in the first place. But just a little, because diverging too far from reality brings its own problems.
Let's agree to be cynical about the motives and results of institutions that are by and large out of control, and to be optimistic about the outcome of our own individual actions.
You can build a better future with or without optimism. You cannot build a better world if the default position being communicated and adopted is cynical and defeatist.
You mean the cynicism that the nations producing the most waste (UK, US, etc) are not part of the effort? Yes, that's very cynical of those nations indeed.
Disagree! This is a smart way to go about this. As they say in the article, “Negotiation with that category of country isn’t all that easy,” whereas they can form effective policies in their absence and then gain momentum to pressure others to join.
