Editor’s note: Green Briefs is a regular series of commentaries by eco-leaders on Vashon, presented in The Beachcomber in partnership with The Whole Vashon Project.

To immerse yourself in the Conference of Parties (COP) convention is to enter a bewildering bureaucracy and a sea of acronyms.

The COP convention is a 29-year process in which humanity has attempted to stave off climate change and the disruption it will bring. As a result of our unending pursuit of economic growth and corporate wealth, powered by fossil fuels, we have released excessive CO2 in the air and are reaching the limit of many of earth’s resources.

The resulting warming climate is the most dire situation we face. It is disrupting the availability and distribution of resources needed by our ever-growing and demanding population — not to mention the rest of the species on our planet.

As a result, we are experiencing a dramatic loss of biodiversity — the first mass extinction event since the demise of the dinosaurs 66 million years ago.

Disruption also brings economic and political distress, which only makes it harder to come together to solve this complex of crises.

The COP is a UN-sponsored series of discussions and negotiations on climate change. In these conventions, the nations of the world have relied on the scientific community’s understanding of climate change to determine what is happening, why it is happening, how fast it is happening, what the likely results will be, and what humanity can do to counter it.

Then come the trickier negotiations about who will pay for it — and how to avoid, counter and defuse the inevitable political and economic destabilization that will continue to worsen as our world destabilizes.

The Rio Convention also meets regularly to study the particular aspects of the loss of biological diversity and desertification.

During the Industrial Revolution, a small group of nations grew immensely wealthy at the expense of the rest of the world while spewing pollutants. The accumulated CO2 between 1751 and 2017 by these industrialized countries amounts to about 80% of our current CO2 in the atmosphere.

The poorer countries in the global south, with more exposure to weather disasters and little infrastructure to combat them, are the ones that are suffering the most from the wealthy countries’ accumulation of wealth over the last 150 years.

Because the climate crisis is primarily the fault of the developed countries, there is an impasse over how much wealth to transfer to the poorer countries to help with climate mitigation, responding to climate damage and loss, and adaptation to climate change.

This is money well spent for all of us — because if the south goes down, so does the rest of the world.

This year’s COP conference was primarily to deal with the amount of money to be transferred to the poorer countries for climate mitigation, such as for building sustainable infrastructure and fostering sustainable and regenerative practices.

Negotiations at one point determined that $100 billion per year was required. But with no force of law to compel those voluntary payments, they were never made — and the poorer countries and scientific community now believe that a realistic transfer of wealth would now be $1.3 trillion per year.

This is a paradigm-changing request, but since the UN has no power to enforce this payment, the developed countries offered a far lesser $300 billion per year. The poorer countries considered this a “paltry sum” and, for the first time, many walked out of this year’s conference. Even reaching the $300 billion offer required a two-day extension of the convention.

Meanwhile, the other money transfers for damage and loss and climate adaptation have not been resolved and are only sporadically fulfilled. The developed countries have made some progress in building renewable energy infrastructure in their own countries, but have done little to mitigate their own carbon pollution.

It bears mention that, at least in the last decade, there were more fossil fuel lobbyists present at COP than any other single group.

Although this summary paints a very dire picture, I still remain cautiously optimistic. We have all the knowledge and capacity we need to solve these problems. It requires only an act of will on all of our parts.

These crises exist in part because of decisions that you and I make every day. Think about this the next time you fill up at the gas pump. In addition to pushing our corporations to change, we each have to become more mindful about the consequences of our actions. This can be an act of joy and love, if we are mindful of the wondrous treasure that our world is, was, and can be again.

I am also optimistic because nature has shown itself to be incredibly resilient and regenerative. If we stop harming it, it will bounce back of its own accord — sometimes with a little help from us.

It starts with you and me, and it starts today.

Terry Sullivan is an island writer and activist.