Glasgow – A Meeting Based on Failed Promises and Fleeting Expectations

 Kiribati, a small island state in the Pacific

Glasgow – A Meeting Based on Failed Promises and Fleeting Expectations

As Our Planet Escalates Its Punishing Revenge – Part Two on that Climate Summit

“This COP26 [the 26th UN Climate Conference] is just like the previous COPs. Inside COP, they are just politicians and people in power pretending to take our future seriously, pretending to take the present seriously of the people who are being affected already today by the climate crisis. Change is not going to come from in there… That is not leadership. This is leadership!” 18-year-old Swedish climate activist, Greta Thunberg, to gathered protestors outside the Glasgow climate conference.

To appreciate the frustration people who have to deal with the horribles of climate change with few if any resources to pay the hard economic realities they face, it is necessary to understand their world. Island nations that are rapidly disappearing under rising seas (like Kiribati, pictured above). Farmland is drying up and blowing away. It’s not drought, it’s desertification. Rivers, lakes and streams are overflowing their banks. Coastal regions are losing land mass as local fish have moved elsewhere. Diseases, well beyond the devastating pandemic, are spreading as insects migrate to deal with the heat… and bring their diseases with them. Fires burn vast sections of valuable land everywhere. Tropical storms kill and destroy more than ever. Searing heat is killing people.

The powerful argument that poorer nations make is rather simple: the first world got rich and powerful by raping the environment, consuming on steroids and extracting natural resources from underdeveloped nations while paying them vastly less than the resources they removed were/are worth. The victims were almost always those countries that had little but natural resources… which were removed at their expense. Their cry, dramatically clear, is that it is now time for those rich beneficiaries of that exploitation – the cause of climate change – to reimburse those poorer nations mercilessly used to transfer that wealth.

“Twelve years ago, at a United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen, rich nations made a significant pledge. They promised to channel US$100 billion a year to less wealthy nations by 2020, to help them adapt to climate change and mitigate further rises in temperature… That promise was broken. Figures for 2020 are not yet in, and those who negotiated the pledge don’t agree on accounting methods, but a report last year for the UN concluded that ‘the only realistic scenarios’ showed the $100-billion target was out of reach. ‘We are not there yet,’ conceded UN secretary-general António Guterres…

“Compared with the investment required to avoid dangerous levels of climate change, the $100-billion pledge is minuscule. Trillions of dollars will be needed each year to meet the 2015 Paris agreement goal of restricting global warming to ‘well below’ 2 °C, if not 1.5 °C, above pre-industrial temperatures. And developing nations (as they are termed in the Copenhagen pledge) will need hundreds of billions of dollars annually to adapt to the warming that is already inevitable. ‘But the $100 billion is iconic in terms of the good faith of the countries that promised it,’ [says Saleemul Huq, director of the International Centre for Climate Change and Development in Dhaka].” Jocelyn Timperley, a climate journalist in San José, Costa Rica, writing in the October 20th Nature.com. 

Even with a flurry of pledges just before the Glasgow meeting, that “big money” fell well short of the pledges. The World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington DC tracks the measurable contributions of those wealthy nations to this poor nation pledge. How did the US do? Not well. “An October report from the WRI reckoned that the US should contribute 40–47% of the $100 billion, depending on whether the calculation takes into account wealth, past emissions or population. But its average annual contribution from 2016 to 2018 was only around $7.6 billion, the WRI estimates.” Nature.com. 

Not only have the richer nations have failed to deliver on these most basic pledges to those countries that have absolutely no way to cope with the cost of climate change without massive financial help, but they have equally failed to adhere to their own promised internal cutbacks of fossil fuels. In fact, there has been a recent developed-nation surge in the use of coal – the biggest offending fossil fuel (there is no such thing as “clean coal”) – to meet a surprise ending-of-pandemic surge in demand for more electrical power. The 200-nation, 26th UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) began meeting in the first days of November in Glasgow amidst these and so many more failures. See my recent Two Mega-Greenhouse Gas Producers in a Hate-filled Common Cause blog, the first part of my presentations on the Glasgow climate summit. Today’s blog is part two.

The immediately preceding G-20 Summit in Rome produced little more than some name-calling and generic unenforceable rhetoric about reducing greenhouse emissions. Glasgow followed.  But exactly what did COP26 accomplish? We won’t know until the designated diplomats finalize a program over the next week and a half. Not a lot of optimism, by the way. Meanwhile, in their opening  COP26remarks, Biden apologized for his predecessor’s withdrawal from the Paris climate accord, and UK’s Boris Johnson compared climate change to a James Bond “doomsday device,” but those were just words. Outside, as mostly younger protesters gathered even before the COP26 began, Greta Thunberg helped start a petition that called on heads of government to divest from fossil fuels. By Monday [11/1] afternoon, it had more than a million signatures.

With two of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gasses, China and Russia, refusing to participate and India’s making little more than a token pledge, hopes for a successful united posture seemed to fade away from day one, despite this impassioned speech by UN Secretary General, António Guterres : "Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice: Either we stop it, or it stops us. And it's time to say 'enough.' Enough of brutalizing biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon. Enough of treating nature like a toilet. Enough of burning and drilling and mining our way deeper. We are digging our own graves.”

Biden’s speech to the COP26 leaders was meant to reassure: “We’ll demonstrate to the world the U.S. is not only back at the table, but hopefully leading by the power of our example…I know it hasn’t been the case, and that’s why my administration is working overtime to show that our climate commitment is action, not words.” Biden “clearly knows that while the U.S. might now be back at the table in a very big way, for a lot of countries it is hard to forget the damage done by the Trump administration to the international climate fight,” Thom Woodroofe, a fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and former climate diplomat told the November 2nd Los Angeles Times. Plus, most delegates were acutely aware of the struggle within the US Congress to pass a set of infrastructure bills with serious climate change dollar commitments.

Before departing, Biden chided both and Russia China for their no-show amid a few general agreements across a large number of the attendees: More than 100 countries committed to stopping and reversing deforestation by 2030, and the US led a group of 90 governments pledging to reduce methane emissions by 2030. Once the senior leaders departed on Tuesday, the nuts-and-bolts negotiators began trying to create a coherent and meaningful written international climate commitment, particularly noting the need to provide massive funding for the poorer nations. 

“[The targeted goal: Diplomats] and delegates will set to work on negotiations on a hoped-for agreement that lays out how the world will limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius [2.7 degrees Fahrenheit]. They will also try to settle disputes over financial assistance and attempt to finalize a set of rules for how countries report and claim credit for greenhouse gas emissions reductions… 

“What they accomplish, or don’t, over the 12-day conference will be a sign of whether the unity and common resolve on display in Paris can be revived.” LA Times (10/2). No one is holding their breath, particularly given that neither Russia nor China were part of that conference. Right now, the planet is heading to well north of 3 degrees Celsius (5.4 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. 

I’m Peter Dekom, and if you think all the coastal erosion, tropical storms, searing heat, desertification, melting polar and glacial ice, massive tropical storms/flooding and wildfires we have now are bad, think of what our future will look like with even higher average global temperatures.