In just a few days, nations from around the globe will gather in Glasgow, Scotland to talk climate and sustainability at the United Nation’s COP26 meeting.
The talks come as most of us come to grips with the fact that keeping the global temperature rise, due to greenhouse gas emissions, below 2 C is likely impossible, and, as the World Health Organization declares that climate change is the “biggest health threat facing humanity.”
On the table at the conference is the ongoing plan to raise US$100 billion to help developing nations tackle the climate emergency—this was part of the plans associated with the Paris climate talks in 2015.
But, like so many of the grand plans from that conference—or maybe we should call them gestures—it hasn’t happened.
“They just failed to do it,” Saleem Huq, director of the Dhaka-based International Centre for Climate Change and Development told CBC recently.
“That strikes me as being totally incompetent and negligent.”
I have to be honest—that last sentence pretty well sums up how I feel about the middle and high-income nations and their actions on climate change.
Yes, absolutely we all have to do our bit to help deal with the climate emergency, from driving less or switching to electric vehicles (though let’s not stick our heads in the sand about the environmental issues that comes with them), to managing what we eat, how we consume and thinking about our carbon footprint.
But at this point the heavy lifting has to be done at the government level, and that’s a real challenge when you have huge polluters like China, the U.S., India (the world’s second largest consumer of coal), Russia and Japan belching out CO2 (given in descending order of emissions).
China is the world’s largest contributing country to CO2 emissions—a trend that has steadily risen over the years—now producing 10.06 billion metric tons of CO2—and the biggest culprit of CO2 emissions for all these countries is electricity, notably, burning coal.
One of the stated goals of COP26 is to “secure global net zero by mid-century and keep 1.5 degrees within reach.” Modelling by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows the impacts ranging from drought to sea level rise to species extinctions are much, much worse if the temperature increases more than 2 C.
It’s even more difficult to feel hopeful when we learn that some nations are trying to find a cheat for what the COP26 meeting is supposed to be accomplishing.
Last week, documents were leaked that show Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are among countries asking the UN to change language, playing down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels.
It also shows some wealthy nations are questioning paying more to poorer states to move to greener technologies.
According to the BBC, the leaked documents consist of more than 32,000 submissions made by governments, companies and other interested parties to the team of scientists compiling a UN report designed to bring together the best scientific evidence on how to tackle climate change.
I mean, let’s connect the dots here. Saudi Arabia is the one of the largest oil producers in the world, and Australia is a major coal exporter—of course they don’t want their industries impacted by language out of COP26.
On the food front, Argentina, one of the biggest producers of beef products and animal feed crops in the world, asked that references to taxes on red meat and to the international “Meatless Monday” campaign, which urges people to forgo meat for a day, be removed from the COP26 report.
Let’s not forget that infamous 1992 adage, “It’s the economy stupid.” Everything to do with the climate emergency is attached to the economy.
But, while educating yourself about COP26 and looking to see what changes you can make, spare some bandwidth for hope.
I am, and I’m taking it from a recent working paper from the University of Oxford’s Institute For New Economic Thinking. It states that the transition to a lower-carbon economy could save the world US$26 trillion.
“The belief that the green energy transition will be expensive has been a major driver of the ineffective response to climate change for the last 40 years,” states the paper.
“This pessimism is at odds with past technological cost-improvement trends, and risks locking humanity into an expensive and dangerous energy future.”
It explains that renewable energy cost is declining from things such as solar, wind, batteries, hydrogen electrolysis and other zero-carbon technologies, and this will continue. For example, according to calculations in the Oxford paper, the cost of solar dropped nearly six times faster than anticipated.
“It’s not just good news for renewables. It’s good news for the planet,” Matthew Ives, one of the report’s authors and a senior researcher at the Oxford Martin Post-Carbon Transition Programme, told ArsTechnica.
Hold onto that thought…
