COP27 is not going well so far. Lots of complaints about it being sponsored by Coca-Cola, about there being more representatives of oil and gas industries than ever before, about world leaders jetting in by plane, about them pontificating, but doing little in practice.
Gloom pervades. “We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator,” United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres told delegates in his opening address.
“We are on a highway to climate hell with our foot on the accelerator”
Inside the last gasp saloon
Everybody knows we are not going to reach the Paris Agreement aspiration of limiting warming to 1.5°C.
“The 1.5 degree Celsius target is still on emergency life support,” explained Wolfgang Obergassel, co-head of the Global Climate Governance Research Unit at the Wuppertal Institute.
The Glasgow Climate Pact called on countries to revise and strengthen their Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) by the end of this year but so far only 23 countries have done so. Moreover, many countries’ current concrete actions are not even sufficient to achieve their current, too weak, NDCs.
“The COP must therefore re-emphasise the need to close both the ambition and implementation gaps and call on countries to strengthen their NDCs and their current national policies as soon as possible,” Obergassel said.
Tragic loss and massive damage
In the titanic struggle of the conference, developing countries are being opposed by the richer developed countries on “loss and damage” – billions of dollars of aid to help them adapt to the consequences of climate change which the rich countries have historically caused.
Talks to resolve this issue, at the top level, are behind schedule. To finance this there have been calls for a tax on energy companies, who have recently been making exorbitant profits.
Some have followed Al Gore in wanting an independent fund set up to which all developed countries would contribute. This would be managed by a reformed World Bank, to refocus its spending on the climate crisis and end its contribution to “fossil fuel colonialism,” says the former US vice-president.
The Big 5 oil companies (Chevron, ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and TotalEnergies), who have reported over $170 billion in profit in 2022 alone, are collectively responsible for 11.38 per cent of global historic carbon dioxide emissions, so there is a solid argument for making them pay US$65 billion (A$97b) per year in loss and damage funding by 2030, said the campaign group Global Justice Now in a statement.
Fiddling while the planet burns
Overall, the mood in Sharm El Sheikh, a tourism resort in Egypt where the talks are taking place, is one of “uncertainty,” according to Eddy Pérez at the non-governmental organisation Climate Action Network.
There is a “sense of delay, that we risk being distracted when we need to focus on landing this as soon as possible”.
The Global Carbon Budget report by more than 100 scientists highlighted the gap between the promises governments, companies and investors have made to cut planet-warming emissions in future years, and their actions today – which cause emissions to keep rising.
Teasers of hope
However, a positive sign was that on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Bali, Indonesia, on 14 November, US president Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping agreed to restart formal talks on climate issues, after a three-month hiatus following US politician Nancy Pelosi’s visit to Taiwan.
Week two of the UN climate summit has also seen new developments on decarbonising energy systems, with the US, Japan and other partners brokering a climate finance deal worth US$20 billion (A$29.8b) to help Indonesia increase its renewable energy supply and retire ageing coal plants.
The Just Energy Transition Partnership follows the same model as a deal signed in Glasgow to support South Africa. Its combination of public and private finance is “probably the single largest climate finance transaction or partnership ever,” a US official told Reuters, but the terms of funding are still to be ironed out.
Food and regenerative agriculture have elsewhere provided the basis for several events and finance negotiations, as farmers, world leaders, climate experts and corporate executives work to turn agriculture from a problem into a solution.
In January, the British COP26 President Alok Sharma warned that climate promises made in Glasgow a year ago could “wither on the vine” without urgent action. But this is exactly what has happened.
It’s all Russia’s fault
The blame is being pinned upon Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and tense US-China relations. Rising inflation, sparked by escalating energy prices, and unsustainable debt burdens have pushed economies to the edge.
The energy crunch in the wake of the Ukraine war has led to a dash for gas in Europe and prompted some countries to burn more coal as they seek to replace energy supplies from Russia.
Despite this, many countries remain committed. The US passed the historic Inflation Reduction Act’s US$369bn (A$550) package, the single largest investment in climate and energy in US history, “which analysts say gives the US a credible path to cutting greenhouse gas emissions at least 40 per cent from 2005 levels by the end of the decade,” Credit Suisse related in a research note. Nations within the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development policy forum and the European Union are on track to close more than three quarters of their coal power capacity from 2010 to 2030.
With REPowerEU, Europe has doubled down on decarbonisation in response to the energy crisis. China continues to roll-out low carbon technologies like electric vehicles and solar power like there’s no tomorrow – which is quite possible.
But it’s hard to kick the habit of a lifetime
But new oil and gas deals are happening even more intensely than before, at odds with science showing that to stay under 1.5°C there can be no new fossil fuel extraction. The agreements made at COP26 to phase down coal and phase-out fossil fuel subsidies are essential for limiting warming but there is no sign of them.
Still we don’t know what will happen until the final deal is brokered.
The UK’s New Scientist magazine opines: “Whatever happens at COP27, the global climate community needs to wrestle with fundamental questions about how to advance climate action at the pace and scale needed.
“Climate diplomacy is still not mainstreamed across venues outside the UNFCCC, such as in areas of economic, industrial and trade cooperation.
“The world’s financial architecture is designed for the challenges of the last century, not today.
“The global climate regime is not facilitating national conditions for faster action at the rate it must.”