GLASGOW — This is when the going gets tough. Really tough.
There are two days left in the international negotiations aimed at stemming catastrophic levels of global warming. Two days to iron out disputes over what goes into the final document that will come out of the annual United Nations summit and serve as a guide for the global fight against climate change.
Every country has to agree on every word in the text. If the negotiators huddled inside the huge conference center here had windows to look out of, they might be reminded of the stakes. On the banks of the Clyde River, just behind the center, is a 230-foot-long art installation made of 3,723 LED lights. “No New Worlds,” it reads.
On Wednesday, summit organizers issued an initial draft of an agreement that called on countries, by the end of 2022, to “revisit and strengthen” their plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions, and to “accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.”
If it stays in the final version, the language on coal and government fossil fuel subsidies would be a first for a U.N. climate agreement. But environmental groups said the rest of the document was too vague on crucial details.
Money is one of the big differences looming over the final negotiations, which will be focused on reaching a consensus among all the nearly 200 nations represented. Rich countries have failed to deliver $100 billion a year by 2020, as they had promised, for poor and middle-income countries to shift their energy systems away from fossil fuels and adapt to the impacts of climate change. This year, there’s a push to create another pot of money to compensate for the irreparable harms of climate change in countries that are least responsible for the problem, a fund for what’s known as “loss and damage,” and one that rich countries have blocked for nearly 30 years.
There’s also disagreement over the call to end fossil fuel subsidies, rules on carbon markets, and whether countries should return every year with new climate targets instead of every five years.
Calls for tougher action from activists and nations are growing louder. Scientific consensus demands that countries around the world limit global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, between preindustrial times and the end of this century. Beyond that threshold, the risks of deadly heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and species extinction grow considerably.
At the moment, that goal is not within reach — nowhere close, in fact, according to the latest independent analysis by Climate Action Tracker.
Still, there was some promising news from the summit on Wednesday evening, when the United States and China, the world’s two biggest polluters and its biggest rivals, announced an agreement to “enhance ambition” on climate change and do more to cut emissions this decade. China also committed for the first time to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and said it would “phase down” coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, starting in 2026.
But both pledges came without precise timetables — a reminder that at these climate talks, promises are easier than details.
With just two days left until the climate summit in Glasgow ends, time is growing short. Not so, the list of hurdles that still face negotiators.
Four stand out.
EMISSIONS CUTS Under the landmark Paris climate agreement of 2015, every nation agreed that humanity should be “pursuing efforts” to hold warming to just 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels. The initial pledges in Paris would not get the world there, but over time, the hope was, nations would ratchet up their efforts. Exactly how to accelerate action remains a big source of contention.
PAYING THE BILL Money has long been a sticking point in the fight against climate change, and it was no different in Glasgow. Developing countries are being urged to accelerate their shift away from coal and other fossil fuels, but they say that they lack the financial resources to do so, and that rich countries have been stingy with aid. The world’s wealthiest economies have pledged to do more, but are still falling short of their promises.
REPARATIONS When climate-fueled storms wreak havoc, it is the poorer nations that often suffer, even if they have done little to contribute to the problem. Demands for compensation are continuing to grow.
CARBON OFFSETS The Paris accord called for regulating the fast-growing global market for carbon offsets, but that it is an extremely dense and technical subject. Negotiators are still trying to find a way through the thicket.
Pope Francis urged Scotland’s Catholics on Thursday to pray for a “fruitful outcome” as negotiators at the United Nations climate talks in Glasgow try to reach an agreement by week’s end.
In a letter released by the Vatican, Francis said he regretted he could not attend the COP26 summit as previously planned, and asked for “God’s gifts of wisdom and strength” for the summit’s decision makers.
“Time is running out,” Francis said. “This occasion must not be wasted, lest we have to face God’s judgment for our failure to be faithful stewards of the world he has entrusted to our care.”
The summit, the pope said, was meant to address “one of the great moral issues of our time: the preservation of God’s creation, given to us as a garden to be cultivated and as a common home for our human family.”
The Vatican said last month that the pope would not attend the summit and that its delegation to the talks would instead be headed by the secretary of state, Cardinal Pietro Parolin.
Just before the summit, Francis urged global leaders to “take radical decisions” that would “provide effective responses to the present ecological crisis.”
Since the beginning of his papacy in 2013, Francis has made it clear that environmental issues were important to him. He has noted that poor people suffer most as a result of ecological problems brought about by economic models, industrial systems, and policies that hurt the environment.
China’s top climate change envoy, Xie Zhenhua, apologized as he entered late for a weekend meeting at the United Nations climate summit.
“We have quite busy schedules,” Mr. Xie said, according to two people who were present for the exchange. “Especially for me, I have to meet with John Kerry almost every day.”
In an unexpected development, the United States and China on Wednesday announced in a joint statement that they will both do more to cut fossil fuel pollution this decade. The terms of the deal weren’t groundbreaking — but the fact that agreement occurred at all is notable, considering the badly strained ties between Washington and Beijing over trade, human rights, Taiwan and other serious differences.
Despite that, according to American and Chinese officials, the agreement was the product of months of meetings between Mr. Xie and Mr. Kerry, President Biden’s global climate envoy, before they arrived in Glasgow for the conference, known as COP26. The two also held near daily discussions at the summit, these officials said.
Even as Mr. Biden earlier in the summit publicly scolded President Xi Jinping for not attending in person, setting off a round of sniping from Beijing in return, Mr. Xie and Mr. Kerry continued to quietly meet to discuss whether China could increase its ambition on climate.
Over the past 10 days the two envoys, as well as their negotiating teams, met frequently in one or the other’s delegation office, windowless makeshift white rooms of thin partitions held together by metal hinges, set up in a cavernous exhibition center where the two weeks of talks are being held in Scotland.
Mr. Kerry, 77, and Mr. Xie, 72, have known one another for more than 20 years and both came out of retirement to take on their country’s top climate positions. Speaking through masked interpreters, they talked about their grandchildren, Mr. Kerry’s vacation home and Mr. Xie’s garden before launching into more intense negotiations about coal, methane and greenhouse gas emissions, according to a senior U.S. official who was part of the talks.
Thursday’s events at the Glasgow climate summit are focused around cities. On Wednesday, the theme was transportation. The two topics are deeply connected.
Cities on every continent are wrestling with the question of how to make transport greener. Some are even wrestling with the tough political question of whether so much of their public space should be devoted to cars at all.
This is important now because cities, where more than half of humanity lives, produce more than two-thirds of the world’s greenhouse gases. Transportation accounts for a very large share of that, sometimes the largest share. So, to slow climate change, cities have to quickly shift away from fossil fuels.
Many cities, rich and not-so-rich, big and small, are turning to a relatively simple solution: They’re plugging in their public transit.
Berlin is reviving electric tram lines that were ripped out when the Berlin Wall went up. Bogotá, the Colombian capital, is building cable cars that cut through the clouds to connect working-class communities perched on faraway hills. Bergen, a city by the fjords in western Norway, is moving its public ferries away from diesel and onto batteries.
On the menu of things that can address climate change, this is low-hanging fruit. It’s a way to cut a big share of emissions. And it has the added benefit of making even cities cleaner and quieter. Read more in the article below.
Activists who traveled from across the world to Glasgow to take part in the global climate talks and protest on the sidelines have expressed disappointment at what they see as empty promises from world leaders.
Yet many also found a new unity in their ranks and a renewed sense of purpose as they came together to demand urgent action, further strengthening a global climate movement that has transcended borders.
For young activists in particular, who have led some of the most urgent calls for action, and who organized the largest climate demonstration in Glasgow, the two-week conference known as COP26 has provided a moment to push for climate justice while elevating some lesser heard voices.
On the Scene: Climate Protests
On the Scene: Climate Protests
The protests related to COP26, the United Nations climate summit, peaked on Friday and Saturday, drawing tens of thousands of people to Glasgow’s streets.
Here’s what I saw →
Evelyn Acham, a 30-year-old activist from Uganda, was attending her first United Nations climate conference. She said the protests provided an platform to communities on the front lines of the climate crisis who are least responsible for the emissions blamed for heating the planet.
“People need to learn something from what just happened,” she said of the marches in Glasgow. “We’re not leaving Glasgow the same, we are not leaving the world the same.”
Ms. Acham represents a group called Fridays for Future MAPA, which stands for Most Affected People and Areas, a branch of the climate advocacy group that grew out of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s solo school strike that began in 2018. Ms. Acham hailed the opportunity for activists like her — who often face clampdowns on dissent in their home countries — to gather with counterparts from around the world.
Luisa Neubauer, a 25-year-old who founded the German branch of Fridays for Future, said that while “governments have been great at making promises and pledges and setting targets,” in previous conferences, they have not yet followed through.
Last year, Ms. Neubauer won a lawsuit against the German government, in which a judge ruled that the country’s climate protection measures were insufficient. She said that solidarity in the global climate movement is growing, and that the strong turnout for protests showed “what a human movement on the street can look like.”
“You see the faces of the climate crisis, you’ll see people that look like you and me who really care, who walked through the rain,” she said. “And we’re really saying this is the power and this is a people who are not letting go of their own future and of their own presents. And that’s beautiful.”
Many of the most prominent climate justice activists come from the Fridays for Future movement. President Barack Obama acknowledged the impact of these mostly young protesters in a speech to the conference on Monday. “They are forming a movement across borders to make the older generation that got us into this mess see that we all have an obligation to dig ourselves out of it,” he said.
As the conference draws to a close on Friday and negotiators from some 200 countries try to reach an agreement, activists said that they were seeking not just stronger targets for reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions, but also an acknowledgment that the global response to climate change has long neglected the needs of developing nations.
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