Nearly 200 nations gathered at a conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow, known as COP26, and struck a deal intended to propel the world towardmore urgent climate action. Proposals aimed at reducing methane emissions, a potent greenhouse gas that contributes significantly to global warming, and to end deforestation in the coming decade were considered big achievements of COP26. However, climate change experts noted that such promises have been made and broken before.
The hard-fought agreement doesn’t go nearly far enough. The agreement does not achieve the most ambitious goal of the 2015 Paris accord — to limit Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels. Instead, delegations left Glasgow with the Earth still on track to blow past that threshold, pushing toward a future of escalating weather crises and irreversible damage to the natural world.
In the streets of Glasgow, over an estimated 100,000 protesters marched to get the conference’s delegates to walk the talk and come to an agreement that included more concrete targets and specific funds to combat climate change. Due to the objections of countries such as India, Australia and China, the agreement could not even target a phasing out of coal burning and fossil fuel subsidies. Instead, the agreement only proposed to “phase down unabated coal”, most likely over the next fifty years. Too little, too late.
Yes, the industrialized countries, such as the U.S., Britain and Germany, pledged funds to help the poorer, lesser developed countries cope with the environmental and economic consequences of climate change given that natural disasters are expected to escalate. For example, President Biden has pledged to boost U.S. climate aid to poor nations to more than $11 billion a year — a promise that will require help from Congress. However, the proposed funding amounts are nowhere near enough to effectively reduce the real impact on these developing countries, particularly from severe droughts and crop-destroying floods which could put millions of people at risk of starvation. Then there are the environmental migrants, people who are forced to leave their home region due to sudden or long-term changes to their local environment. For example, there is the devastating drought that has gripped Syria since 2006 and reportedly has driven more than 1.5 million people from the countryside to cities in search for food and economic normality. The International Organisation for Migration estimates that there are now several million “environmental migrants”, and that this “number will rise to tens of millions within the next 20 years, or hundreds of millions within the next 50 years”.
The protesters, many of them representing today’s youth, shouted: “Hurry up please. It’s time.” Unfortunately, all one what got was more “blah, blah, blah”. Cautious optimism about the potential outcome of the talks gradually turned into overt pessimism. Clearly, many participants, including delegates, left Glasgow with feelings of dismay and regret. Once again, it’s now up to each individual country to sort out its “climate change” policies and the allocation of its resources. No doubt, President Biden and Prime Minister Trudeau will be discussing their plans at a joint meeting today in Washington. It will be interesting to see if anything concrete comes out of the discussions given their shared mutual political and economic concerns about the impacts associated with climate change and fossil fuels. We’ll just have to wait and see, but I wouldn’t hold my breath! I’m expecting a lot more “hot air”.
FROLITICKS 