If Michael Jacobs really thinks that the Cop28 agreement won’t mean what the petrostates and their enablers want it to mean (Letters, 19 December), then he is letting hope triumph over experience. “Transition away” is classic weasel wordage, and the loophole allowing it to be taken as referring only to fossil fuels for energy and heating will be as ruthlessly exploited as Rupert Read (Letters, 15 December) expects it to be. It will also be gleefully seized on by all those like Rishi Sunak (and Keir Starmer?) who will be looking for wriggle room when push comes to shove.
And if that sounds just too jadedly pessimistic at the pragmatic level, there remains the key conceptual point. Jacobs rightly highlights a battle over interpretation. But Cops are only worth the effort to the extent that their upshots channel genuine constraint on human activity by upcoming planetary limits, and an agreement subject to contested interpretation over so fundamental a point can channel nothing worth calling “constraint” at all. It is well past time to find radical alternatives to this failed process.
John Foster
Author, Realism and the Climate Crisis
• I suspect that Rupert Read and Michael Jacobs are both right, justifying the former’s call for citizens’ action of an unprecedented nature.
Peter Allen
International committee, Green party of England and Wales
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