As the U.N. Climate Summit underway in Glasgow Scotland entered its second week, a stream of positive announcements were issued by various groups of the 25,000 representatives of nations from around the world gathered there. But 18-year-old Greta Thunberg, perhaps the planet’s best known climate activist, told tens of thousands of protesters in the city center that the conference is a failure, for what she described as a “global north greenwash festival” and a “two-week celebration of business as usual.”
Against the backdrop of decades of inaction at international climate summits, government leaders and business executives in Scotland issued several agreements, including a deal to cut emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, by 30 percent by 2030, a commitment to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030; and a coalition of banks and insurers who said they were committed to fund green projects to help get companies and nations to net-zero emissions by 2050.
Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Reynard Loki, editor and chief correspondent with Earth | Food | Life at the Independent Media Institute, who talks about what’s at stake at the Glasgow climate summit, and why so many people around the world are skeptical that leaders gathered in Scotland will succeed in making substantive commitments to address the climate crisis.
REYNARD LOKI: What’s at stake in the summit is basically life as we know it or have known it, because really, this summit has been going on since 1995. All the countries that have signed on to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change — they’ve been meeting every year except last year because of the COVID-19 pandemic — and they have been attempting to come up with an action plan to stem the climate crisis.
And particularly this year, they’re trying again to implement the Paris agreement goals, which is trying to get global warming, the temperature increase, to be less than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.
The problem with this meeting of the parties, the COP, Conference of the Parties (to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change) is that, well, not everybody is on board. They have different goals for when they want to achieve net zero, i.e. getting your country’s carbon emissions to be net zero by 2050, which is the goal of the Paris climate agreement. It’s a bunch of pledges and promises, but there has not been specific action or really meaningful action. The problem is that there’s really no penalties for a country that doesn’t abide by these agreements. As we know, Trump pulled out of the Paris climate agreement when he was president. So really, what’s at stake is is life as we know it.
I think that we are on target right now to hit the 2-degree mark of a temperature increase if all the policy promises are kept. That’s really at the very teetering edge of where we want to be. So the Paris climate accord is really trying to keep the temperature increase to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with a goal to really keep it at 1.5. But if we don’t keep the policy promises that have already been promised, we are on target to reach 3 degrees of warming and that would be completely disastrous for life on Earth as we know it. There would be massive heat waves, rising sea levels, coastal cities completely disappearing. Desertification — agriculture would collapse. Corn, soybean, wheat that would all that would all go to the wayside. So, so much would be would be gone. Biodiversity. Ocean acidification. The list goes on.
So I can see why Greta Thunberg and her youth climate activists are absolutely concerned when there are pledges and promises, but no actionable, meaningful things that are going on that are there actually penalize-able.
SCOTT HARRIS: Well, Reynard, I also wanted to have us review briefly, the announcements that have come out of this climate summit in Glasgow thus far, which includes a deforestation commitment, a deal on coal to limit the use of coal, an agreement to cut emissions of methane and a plan to stop investing public funds in fossil fuel projects abroad. Any hope in these agreements, or at least the prospective agreements that have been talked about in Glasgow?
REYNARD LOKI: I would say generally, no. These are again, these are pledges. These are promises. There’s really nothing there, but words. When we talk about the deforestation issue, a lot of companies are really part of this problem. The agriculture and meat industries in particular, are a problem when it comes to deforestation because they are going to Brazil. They’re going around the world and they’re clear-cutting land to create cattle farms and factory farms and all of the soybeans that are required to feed all these animals. But in the deforestation announcement at COP26, there was not a single mention of the meat or agriculture industries, which really is one of the main emitters — agriculture.
So that is one issue that they’re just not hitting the right mark. I would say that the methane, the methane announcement which they made last week to reduce emissions of methane, which is a global warming gas that has more than 80 times the warming power of carbon dioxide over the first 20 years it enters the atmosphere. That’s a good that’s a good step. And I think that it will be helpful because Biden has said for the first time that the EPA, the Environmental Protection Agency, was going to enforce limits on methane released by the oil and gas rigs across the U.S.
But again, this is an executive regulation. This is a power that comes out of the executive office. It’s not in law. So the next president could just simply overturn Biden’s announcement on methane. So it’s really probably is a wash at the end of the day on all of those commitments.
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