The Rise of the Little Green Robots.

The 22nd Conference of Parties (COP22) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) took place in Marrakesh, Morocco between November 7th (7/11/16) and November 18th (18/11/16) 2016.

The Greenhouse Gas (ghg) layer of the Earth's atmosphere responsible for global warming occurs roughly 1000km (600 miles) above the surface of the Earth. Therefore climate change negotiations deal with everything that takes place below this layer. Literally everything.

For many nations involved in climate change negotiations their main concern is that action to combat climate change will damage their attempts at economic development. This is particularly true of nations that don't have much economic development to begin with and live in extreme poverty. Their main concern is providing new jobs to help raise their constantly growing populations out of poverty.

Many of them see the mining of fossil fuels such as coal as a convenient way to do that. After all mining is particularly labour intensive meaning you have to employ a lot of people to do it. Plus mining is often very dangerous meaning you constantly have to recruit new people to replace all the ones who have been killed.

Also at the very basic level we're talking about mining is literally just smashing rocks to pieces with pick-axes. Therefore you don't need much training to learn how to do that job. You certainly don't need a basic level of education - reading and writing essentially - in order to learn how to become a miner.

Although it doesn't actually involve coal the example that springs to my mind is the platinum miners in Marikana, South Africa.

Many of these men cannot read nor write but in 2012 they went on strike to win a pay rise that would allow them to pay to send their children to school. The hope being that having received a basic education their children would then be able to get more technologically advanced jobs. Or at least learn how to mine more efficiently.

Unless a government can suddenly find the vast amount of money needed to establish a free at the point of use public school system it is extremely difficult for nations to skip over this stage of economic development.

On top of all their other developmental challenges environmental activists are also constantly nagging governments to build public transport networks such as railways to help reduce vehicle emissions.

Due to its transactional approach to foreign policy China is actually very keen to help many developing nations build railways. It gives those nations better transport links while at the same time giving China a market for all the steel it produces.

The development of railways also provide quite a neat example of how technological development is making job creation harder.

In the very early days of steam locomotives to operate a train you needed a driver. However you also needed a fireman/stoker to keep the fire going to heat the water in the boiler. You also needed a boilerman to keep the boiler functioning without exploding.

As steam locomotives pulled what were essentially just carriages on wheels further down the train you also needed at least one brakeman/engineer to help slow down and stop the train. 

On top of that you also needed at least one guard/conductor to check passengers tickets and make sure those passengers didn't fall to the deaths out the sides of the carriages.

So to operate even a small train you needed a minimum of five members of staff.

Then someone invented Diesel-Electric locomotives. These use a diesel generator to produce electric power. So suddenly you no longer needed the boilerman and the fireman.

Then someone invented all electric trains. Rather than being pulled by a single engine at the front these are actually powered by small motors mounted in every carriage. So with the help of a computer the driver can start and stop the train all their own. That means you no longer have to employ a brakeman.

Many of these electric trains also allow the driver to operate the train doors on their own. Along with electronic tickets such as Oyster cards and electronic ticket barriers this means that you no longer need to employ train guards.

Things have got so advance we now have driverless trains controlled by computer. London's Docklands Light Railway (DLR) being just one example.

So in the space of about 100 years you've gone from running a single small train creating five jobs to it creating no jobs at all. This is a major problem for developing nations that really need to create new jobs.

Obviously as developing nations build railway systems they don't have to use the latest state-of-the-art equipment. For example rather than buying brand new driverless trains they could simply buy the old surplus diesel-electric trains. Likewise although strictly speaking you may not need a train guard maybe it's worth under-employing some people if the alternative is riots in the streets and the collapse of society.

The problem with this is Private Finance Initiatives (PFI's). These rely on private enterprises providing the upfront funding. In order to recoup that funding and then make a profit these private enterprises then cut costs to the absolute minimum. Normally by laying off under-employed staff.

The UK currently actually has quite a good example of the problems this causes in the form of Southern Railways. Their entire business model is built on the principle of employing far too few train drivers. They then effectively force the drivers they do employ to work overtime to fill in the gaps.

After being extensively overworked and Southern Railways planning to lay off even more people the train drivers have simply decided that they're going to refuse the overtime on offer. As a result Southern Railways network has pretty much collapse.

Southern Railways though apparently have no problem continuing to charge people four grand for a yearly season ticket for a service they're not providing.

A life-long railwayman my father remains rather proud of the role he played battling the trade unions in the 1970's to allow Margaret Thatcher to lay-off all the firemen and boilermen. So this is a topic that tends not to be discussed in my house. Or one that is discussed very loudly.

One of the main problems with the so-called Paris Agreement - there are so many to chose from - is that it has collapsed the market for climate funding in terms of things like carbon credits. Instead it relies almost entirely on PFI's to fund action against climate change.

With PFI's creating all these extra problems for developing nations it's pretty clear the Paris Agreement is not going to combat climate change.

14:35 on 11/12/16 (UK date).