Without rich nations committing to phase out fossil fuels and without funding to help the developing world, humanity faces a grim future
oday, 11:41 am
Climate activists march through the streets of Glasgow, Scotland, on November 5, 2021. (AP Photo/Jon Super)
Let’s not beat about the bush. The Glasgow climate conference, COP26, which ended Saturday, was a resounding failure.
It underlined the lack of vision, leadership and backbone of so many politicians, whose narrow interests and small-mindedness look set to cost us all dear.
It was the biggest-emitting countries and the fossil fuel industry, the largest single delegation at the conference, according to the BBC, that ultimately triumphed.
The so-called Glasgow Climate Pact, not even legally binding and squeezed out painfully at the end of the summit, does not commit signatories in any way to getting rid of fossil fuels — the one thing that will arrest global warming and climate change and possibly save us all.
It does not bring us within striking distance of the 2015 Paris agreement goal of keeping the average global temperature rise down to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), and preferably 1.5°C, by century’s end, compared with a baseline set before the world started industrializing.
Youth climate activists protest that representatives of the fossil fuel industry have been allowed inside the venue during the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland, November 11, 2021. (AP Photo/Alastair Grant)
The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change has warned for years that stabilizing the climate at 1.5°C requires slashing emissions by 45 percent by the end of this decade.
But no such thing will happen, if national targets for emissions cuts submitted to COP26 are anything to go by.
Even if those targets are fully implemented – and there are big question marks over that – we are looking at a rise of 2.4°C.
Not only does the pact not even mention oil or “natural” gas — a fossil fuel — at all, but attempts to get the world to phase out coal — the single biggest driver of climate change — were heavily watered down.
Following much political wrangling, the final version of the pact says that efforts need to be stepped up not to phase coal power out but to it phase it “down,” and even then without any quantification, after a last-minute change submitted by India and China.
In this photo taken October 3, 2018, smoke rises from the chimney of Serbia’s main coal-fired power station near Kostolac, Serbia. Chinese companies are the world’s largest investors in overseas coal plants. (AP Photo/Darko Vojinovic)
Furthermore, this “phasing down” is only to apply to “unabated” coal power and “inefficient” fossil fuel subsidies.
“Unabated” refers to coal that is burned without so-called CO? carbon scrubbing, which separates carbon dioxide from the mix of gases emitted by burning, before it can be released into the atmosphere.
Are we to understand that continued coal burning with carbon dioxide scrubbing is therefore OK? The process is not only expensive — it also requires huge amounts of energy. Only in the fossil fuel industry’s wildest dreams does this make coal burning acceptable.
And what are efficient fossil fuel subsidies, if we are only to worry about “inefficient” ones? According to the G20, inefficient subsidies “encourage wasteful consumption.”
But any subsidy of the fossil fuel industry channels taxpayers’ money into the continued emission of harmful global warming gases. How much better that money could be spent speeding up the rapid dissemination of renewable alternatives such as solar and retraining workers in the fossil fuel industry for green jobs. Narrow and misguided national self-interest triumphed
Despite the best efforts of UN General Secretary Antonio Guterres, COP26 chairman Alok Sharma, US climate envoy John Kerry and others to get a better deal, narrow and misguided national self-interest triumphed.
Just days before COP26 started, the BBC saw documents showing that Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia were among nations pressing the UN to downplay the need for moving quickly away from fossil fuels.
After this reporter’s podcast on Thursday, an angry listener from Australia wrote to The Times of Israel to complain that portraying the country as “not on board” at COP26 was grossly unfair.
Prime Minister Scott Morrison went to Glasgow and signed up to net-zero emissions by 2050, she said. “This is a fact. He has done this at great personal, political cost. He and his party are up for re-election early in 2022 and they will likely lose many votes because of this from voters who rely on the fossil fuel industry for employment and income.” The listener added that Australia was “on target for its emissions reductions pledge made in Paris for 2030.”
Climate Action Tracker saw things very differently when it reported on the country in September, saying: “Australia’s 2030 domestic emissions reduction target is consistent with warming of 4°C if all other countries followed a similar level of ambition. Under Australia’s current policies, emissions will continue to rise and are consistent with more than 3°C warming.”
It went on to say that the Australian government’s policy was “rather to support carbon capture and storage (a technology at an early stage, seen by many as the wet dream of countries determined to continue emitting) and fossil fuel derived hydrogen, (as opposed to green hydrogen generated by renewable energy) which prolongs the life of aging fossil fuel fleets in the energy system.”
Morrison himself hedged the net zero announcement by stressing that getting there would not include ending Australia’s fossil fuel sectors. “We want our heavy industries, like mining, to stay open, remain competitive and adapt, so they remain viable for as long as global demand allows,” Morrison said, promising that his plan would not involve shutting down coal and gas production or exports. How this meshes with reaching net zero by 2050 he conveniently did not explain.
What the podcast listener and Scott Morrison and his supporters have apparently failed to grasp is that retraining for green technology should have started a long time ago precisely in order that jobs are not lost when polluting industries are phased out and cheaper, healthier green ones replace them. Again, it is about a failure of leadership.
But it is the US – the second biggest emitter of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, after China, and ahead of India, Russia and Japan, in that order, which really takes the biscuit for hypocrisy and double standards.
While President Joe Biden has laid his reputation on the line to clean up the climate and persuade other countries to do likewise, US delegates at COP26 refused to sign an agreement that would see major economies phasing coal out in the 2030s, and developing ones doing so a decade later.
Instead, the US teamed up with 20 nations, including China, in a promise to end public financing for “unabated” fossil fuel projects overseas by the end of 2022.
The latest Global Carbon Budget report predicted that if the world continues to behave as it is doing today, there’s a good chance that it will hit that 1.5°C target in 11 years.
The US delegation was among those pressuring not to have this included in the climate pact text.
An Indian laborer loads coal into a truck in Dhanbad, an eastern Indian city in Jharkhand state, September 24, 2021. India asked for a crucial last minute-change to the final agreement at climate talks in Glasgow, calling for the “phase-down” not the “phase out” of coal power. (AP Photo/Altaf Qadri)
India and other developing nations must be judged differently from the US, Australia, Europe and the other rich nations of the West.
It is sanctimonious to wag a finger at them now for wanting to climb the ladder of economic development that the developed nations scaled long ago.
It is these countries that are suffering much of the brunt of climate change, due to little or no fault of their own — catastrophes of sea level rise, flooding, drought, heatwaves and more.
And yet, predictably, the richer nations, by and large, have resisted putting their hands in their pockets to help their poorer brethren skip the fossil fuel stage and move directly to renewables to help mitigate climate change.
Nor, as we saw in Glasgow, will they stand by previous promises to help these nations adapt to the already devastating effects of climate change.
FILE – In this October 18, 2015 file photo, a young girl wades in the water outside of Fatou Faye’s home in Diamniadio Island, Saloum Delta in Senegal. The place where Faye’s kitchen once stood is now outlined with short branches of mangroves that she hopes will slow the nearby sea from destroying the rest of her house. The rising sea levels pushing into the waters of Senegal’s Saloum Delta already threaten to carve the rest of her gray cement home from its foundation, leaving her and 30 other relatives homeless on the low-lying island. (AP Photo/Jane Hahn, File)
Developing countries had hoped to create a “facility” through which wealthy nations would compensate them for loss and damage — unavoidable, irreversible harm caused by climate change.
That “facility” was watered down to a “dialogue” about compensation as the wealthy nations resisted being held to account.
The Glasgow Climate pledge says that it “recognizes the importance of the best available science for effective climate action and policymaking.”
The science is clear.
But the world’s so-called leaders are still not listening.
Ted, I am puzzled; why did publish this article?
In my opinion it is total garbage.
What is all this demagoguery about
The above disasters are not related to human use of fossil fuel.
First of all there is nothing catastrophic about sea level rising.
And no, India and China are not suffering from it.
Here are the counterpoints to the above garbage
1. The sea level has been rising for the last 10,000 years
2. The temperature has been rising long before the industrial revolution started.
3. There have been many warm periods in the last few thousand years.
4. The rising CO2 level are highly beneficial to humanity,
a. they increase agricultural productivity
b. greed the planet
5. The increased CO2 concentration is not caused by humans and it is not causing the warming, rather it is the warming that causes the increased CO2 levels by releasing it from the oceans.
6. Historically the warmer periods have been more prosperous, healthier and more peaceful than the colder periodes.
7. The proposed measures will have ZERO measurable impact on the climate. The climate is going to change, as it always has, independently from our “measures”.
8. The windmills, and the electric cars are more, rather than less polluting than the current fossil fuel sources.
9. Only idiots can say “science is settled”. Science is not a dogma.
100 times more money is given to researchers supporting the CO2 causing the catastrophic global warming proposition, then to the scientist who want to prove the opposite. (E.g. astrophysicists who tie climate changes to the solar activity)
10. It is not safe to oppose the climate hysteria.
11. Greta Thunberg is mildly retarded. She does not know what she is talking about. She is just repeating propaganda.
“The Glasgow climate conference failed us, and the planet, big time”….What did you expect?
So, let’s review this thingy about developing countries. If memory serves, China and India are both prominent on the list. But wait; aren’t these countries also at the head of the list of economic powers? So they get to lean back and propose empty promises about reduction of their emission of greenhouse gases and the so-called rich nations of the west would put up and shut up. That would make me laugh if it weren’t so obviously wrong.
Finally, the so called greenhouse gas called carbon dioxide is required to support life on this beautiful planet of ours. After reading countless articles on this site and others over the years about how the data was “massaged” to generate the desired outcome of global warming, although some cities in this world would love that to be the case, it is simply NOT TRUE.
The Glasgow Conference did what it was supposed to do: provided a forum for the elite to parade its ‘concern’ without in the least committing them to doing anything specific. It also provided free junkets for media flunkeys.
And the point is that we can do something specific: develop nuclear power plants and geo-thermal sources of power. Not sunshine and wind. We don’t need carbon-guzzling conferences to do this. All we need is a genuine commitment to this issue and the political will to make it happen.
People should read Rupert Darwall’s two books: ‘The Age of Global Warming’ and ‘Green Tyranny’ to see what all this puffery is about. Put simply, it’s about control and income redistribution. Darwall has the quotations to back him up.
Darwall also exposes the Nazi roots of this movement and how it was re-fashioned after 1945 to make it more palatable in the post-war world. The Nazi is gone, but the authoritarianism remains.
Darwall also goes into some detail about Germany’s experience with switching to wind and sun after deciding to shut down its nuclear plants in 2014. In order to provide reliable sources of power, it is depending more and more on importing wood. And where does the wood come from? Why, the old-growth forests of North America. But you never hear a peep from Greenpeace or the Sierra Club, do you? Why, I wonder.
“The science is clear.” Yes, just like COVID science, Climate science employs the hypotheses and solutions which trample humanity’s freedom and prosperity.