Is this what the end of the world looks like? Not in a blinding flash of nuclear self-annihilation, but death from a thousand paper cuts.
Reams of opaque text have poured forth from Glasgow over the past fortnight. After an intense 72 hours of negotiation, an agreement was finally reached on Saturday afternoon. Through tears, conference president Alok Sharma hailed the Glasgow Climate Pact as a major milestone in humanity’s efforts to avoid climate catastrophe. But in reality, COP26 continues decades of failure. At this stage in the crisis, finely crafted legal documents amount to nothing more than blah, blah, blah.
Glasgow was meant to deliver the Paris Agreement, which in 2015 committed the international community to limit warming to 1.5°C. That demanded rapid cuts to fossil fuel use. Six years on, emissions are not only higher, but increasing at near record-breaking rates. We are not even slowing down let alone reducing our climate impacts. To continue to claim that our existing political and economic systems can limit warming to no more than 1.5°C is now borderline delusional. We are heading towards 3°C by 2100.
Consequently, the greatest disappointment of COP26 was the lack of any progress made on the issue of loss and damages. Rich industrialised nations are being asked to pay for the climate-driven destruction and death that is already happening in poorer, less industrialised nations. These poorer nations have made only a tiny contribution to climate change, yet it is these nations that are most affected. Future COPs and the rest of humanity will struggle with this fundamental injsutice over the rest of this century.
‘Wrangling over words and phrases is equivalent to arguing over how best to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic’
As climate change impacts accelerate, more will need to be spent repairing storm-damaged infrastructure, defending cities from increasing sea levels, and beating back raging wildfires. Worse will happen when these effects interact. The 2007-2008 global food price crisis led to demonstrations and violence across the world. The vast majority of humanity lives within a tightly interconnected, industrialised civilisation. A civilisation that will become increasingly vulnerable to climate destabilisation. Consider the magnitude of what is at stake. And now compare that to the language of the Glasgow Climate Pact, which “notes with concern that the current provision of climate finance for adaptation remains insufficient to respond to worsening climate change impacts in developing country Parties”. Why do politicians continue to fail?
There are two great lies that COP26 and the entire circus of climate negotiations promote. The first is that we can avoid dangerous climate change by simply carrying on with business as usual. This is the net zero lie. We are told future technologies will remove the carbon that we are pumping into the atmosphere today, so there is no need to decarbonise rapidly now. But there are no credible plans for how we will safely remove and store billions of tons of captured carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Carbon dioxide removal is a convenient fiction that allows politicians to claim they are taking action.
The second great lie is that rapid decarbonisation is simply impossible. But we have more than enough money, technology and scientific capability to replace fossil fuel infrastructure at the same time as ensuring all of humanity has a good standard of living. This would involve sharing some of the vast wealth and power that fossil fuels have generated. Of course, the problem is that the wealthiest of humanity – a tiny fraction of the global population of 7.9 billion – do not want to share.
Those most vulnerable to climate change would be right to call the Glasgow Climate Pact a betrayal. For some countries, it is locking in their extinction. For those outside the negotiations, there is also deep frustration about how the text was produced. Endless wrangling over specific words and phrases is equivalent to arguing about how best to rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic. Noble sentiments will provide no protection from the impending devastation. It is deeds not words that matter now. That is how COP26 will be judged as a failure.
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