This week brings the opening of COP30, taking place in Belém, Brazil. It was in Brazil, in Rio, that the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC, an acronym made easier to remember if you sound out the letters with extra inserted vowel to add a second syllable), along with the Convention on Biological Diversity. It’s under the rubric of the UNFCCC that these COPs or Conference of the Parties take place.

This year the U.S. will not send a government delegation. This could be a hopeful sign, since one less petrostate obstructing the negotiations can only be seen as a positive. However, our citizens are attending in numbers in the form of oil company lobbyists.

To bring this closer to home, this week also sees state Rep. and co-chair of the Joint Committee on Telecommunications, Utilities and Energy Mark Cusack declare his intention to cancel our state’s 2030 interim emission targets lest someone sue us for not meeting them. He claims to still support the 2050 goals, telling the Commonwealth Beacon, with hilariously bad ear for irony, “we aren’t taking our foot off the gas.”

I might call this kicking the can down the road, except that it’s very difficult to kick a can down a road when you don’t walk anywhere. Perhaps we’re kicking it down the road by opening the door of our Super Duty truck and stretching out one of the spanking new hiking boots we got such a great price for on Amazon. And perhaps these days we would use an AI to better target the can, with the extra energy from the data centers that implies leading our otherwise respectable governor to welcome fossil gas pipeline expansions lest she face voter wrath from higher energy bills.

Rep. Cusack, sensing a fight coming on, also states that he is the adult in the room. I suspect that the children in the room, the ones who will see what our actions lead to later this century, agree wholeheartedly with that characterization but in a different sense. Indeed, this is just what we, the adults in the room, have been doing since the Rio summit and why we are in such trouble.

Mike Small

Greenfield