Dominika Zarzycka/NurPhoto via AP
Environmental protesters from Pacific island states hold their countries’ flags during a COP26 demonstration in Glasgow, Scotland, November 6, 2021.
When future historians parse the great climate crisis of the 21st century, COP26 will figure prominently as a missed opportunity. As nearly 200 countries met in Scotland over 12 days to mull over their next steps, some of the signs carried by climate protesters during the Glasgow demonstrations forecast the regrettable outcome in three words: “Blah blah blah.”
The United States, China, and India set the terms of engagement, coming up with measures that nudged the fight against planetary disaster along. But they were essentially designed not to antagonize allies, upset rivals, or rouse domestic audiences coping with pandemic trauma. At the end of the Northern Hemisphere’s warmest summer on record, the United Nations announced that limiting planetary temperature level increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius relies on reducing global carbon emissions 45 percent by 2030, a goal that world governments are not on track to meet. Although pledges to curb methane emissions, deforestation, and phasing down (but not phasing out) the use of coal were secured, the COP26 countries punted on stronger emissions targets, deciding to come back next year. In short, COP26 failed to pulverize the status quo.
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One of the major culprits was a Biden administration wanting badly to reclaim the mantle of global leadership with a show of decisive action, but dragged down by the Democratic Party’s internecine feuds and the residual shock to the international system that was Donald Trump. Biden has been proclaiming that “America is back,” presumably to summon forth some of the authority that his predecessor had sapped away. But at Glasgow, he was rendered ineffective by members of Congress operating more like the de Medicis in 15th-century Florence than legislators in a representative democracy faced with a planetary emergency. House Democrats finally passed the bipartisan infrastructure framework—which only works as a climate policy if the companion Build Back Better Act passes—but couldn’t get it together before the president left home.
To circumvent interference from the Manchin-ian opposition, the U.S. watered down its stance on coal, refusing to sign an agreement early in the conference that would have ended coal use by 2030, instead opting for a wind-down during the course of the third decade. This “phase down” rather than “phase out” strategy raised its ugly head again midway through COP26, thanks to an agreement between the U.S. and China. Though India got blamed for eleventh-hour maneuvering that saw the phrase “phase down” inserted into the final agreement, the table had already been set by Washington and Beijing. Whether this move tempers the goodwill the Chinese gained with a September announcement to stop building new plants is so far unclear.
Biden is playing a cynical and dangerous game on climate, with rhetorical flourishes followed by business-as-usual decision-making. On Wednesday, the administration announced that it would pursue the largest sale of oil and gas leases ever in the Gulf of Mexico, not a week after the climate talks ended and only two days after prohibitions on new oil and gas leases near Native American cultural sites at Chaco Canyon and Chaco Culture National Historical Park in New Mexico.
With the uncertainties posed by the approaching American midterms, the European Union, for its part, sees the U.S. as an unreliable partner at best. However, the EU has its own energy crisis and significant internal climate divisions. Creating a green-finance “taxonomy,” a framework that spells out which economic activities can be considered environmentally sustainable, has split the Europeans on nuclear energy.
The EU plans to decide in the coming weeks whether nuclear power is sustainable and will, under its regulations, “do no significant harm.” The discord over this issue has split off an anti-nuclear bloc led by Germany, Austria, Denmark, Luxembourg, and Portugal and a pro-nuclear bloc led by France. Having abandoned nuclear power in the wake of Fukushima, Germany has returned to burning coal, faces high energy prices, and is agonizing over an undersea natural gas pipeline that links the country to Russia and its national natural gas company Gazprom. The deal, supported by outgoing Chancellor Angela Merkel, is fraught, especially with Russian President Vladimir Putin stoking a migrant crisis in Belarus and provoking the EU and NATO with military maneuvers in Ukraine.
The most searing takeaway from COP26 was the reaction of smaller countries collectively known as the Alliance of Small Island States (AOSIS) to the rich-nation talkathon. Punting new emissions pledges effectively into 2023, after the conclusion of COP27 in November 2022, is dereliction of the most cynical sort. The developed world did not make any firm financial commitments to emerging markets at Glasgow.
At Glasgow, Biden was rendered ineffective by members of Congress operating more like the de Medicis in 15th-century Florence than legislators in a representative democracy faced with a planetary emergency.
Small countries that are ill-equipped to finance energy transition projects wanted movement on the $100 billion Paris climate accords commitment (an annual “floor” that developed countries signed on to). Only now, they want those sums doubled. They are also seeking monetary assistance, “loss and damage” in COP26-speak, to compensate for harms already suffered from past and ongoing climate events caused by the developed world’s activities. Global power brokers had little to say about adaptation funding and nixed compensation for losses, settling instead for “dialogue,” which appears to be COP’s forte.
The EU, at least, appears ready to put its money where its mouth is, committing roughly $1 billion to an international fund to protect and sustain forests, a portion of which will go to protect the Congo Basin, the second-largest rain forest on Earth. Indonesia and Brazil are wild cards in the quest to end deforestation by 2030, however. Indonesia’s environment minister Siti Nurbaya Bakar backed away from the document, labeling it “inappropriate and unfair.” Satellite monitoring indicates that deforestation continues to accelerate in Brazil, increasing nearly 5 percent in October compared to the same period in 2020.
For many, the real leader of COP26 was Simon Kofe, the minister for justice, communication and foreign affairs of Tuvalu, a nine-island Pacific Ocean nation and an AOSIS member. While standing in knee-deep Pacific Ocean waters to dramatize his country’s crisis, he delivered a visually arresting recorded statement to the conference imploring the world to act. Thousands of Tuvaluans have already moved to New Zealand, and plans to relocate some of the remaining 10,000 people and retain some degree of territorial integrity are in progress. Kofe’s statement this week got scant coverage. Asked for his views on COP26 outcomes, Kofe noted that he would have liked to have seen “bigger countries take bigger cuts in emissions” and singled out Australia’s declaration to keep mining coal.
“I see it as a dilemma that Australia and other countries face,” he said. “You have your immediate economic interests that you have on one hand and then you have the well-being of the world.”
