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COP-26: Stopping Climate Change and Other Illusions
Do not expect significant progress from COP-26 on climate change mitigation. There are fundamental barriers that prevent the deep and rapid changes that scientists advocate. Most countries adhere to economic growth policies – which create ecological overshoot. Unless and until we accept that we must live within ecological limits, then climate change will not be adequately tackled. Energy and resource consumption must be addressed through controlled economic contraction.
The world in 2021 was buffeted by an unprecedented barrage of extreme weather events. This is the leading edge of the climate catastrophe that lies ahead should world governments remain fixed on our present global ‘development’ trajectory.
The good news is that the recent uptick in violent weather has increased pressure on participants in COP-26 finally to implement the kind of determined measures that will dramatically lower GHG emissions and put global heating on hold; the bad news is that whatever is agreed to at COP-26 is unlikely to make any positive difference.
There have been 25 COP meetings on climate change since 1995 and several international agreements to reduce carbon emissions, including the ‘legally binding’ 1997 Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement of 2015. Nevertheless, atmospheric GHG concentrations have increased unabated during this entire 25 year period — CO2, the principal anthropogenic GHG, has ballooned exponentially from ~360ppm in 1995 to almost 420 ppm in 2020 — and mean global temperature has risen by ~1 oC. History suggests that what should emerge from COP26 cannot emerge from COP26.
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Snatching Defeat
Snatching Defeat
Last week we concluded our post on climate change with a quote from James Hansen, “the matter is urgent and calls for emergency cooperation among nations.” All this year we have been leading up to our collective fin de seiclemoment in December, the granddenouement of the Framework Convention on Climate Change and Kyoto Protocol in Paris. At this late date, we are frankly pessimistic for the outcome there.
It isn’t that we expect the parchment won’t get inked, but rather that the document won’t actually accomplish its task even if the conference is a complete success. After more than two decades of negotiating for every paragraph, the Paris Treaty will be two decades out of date and strategically misdirected.
In those 20 years the goalposts have moved. They are not farther away now. They are closer.
The United Nations, Eleanor Roosevelt’s singular passion, is showing signs of age, architecturally symbolized by its under-maintained (owing to deadbeat nations who never pay their dues, nudge to the ribs of USAnians) 1950s rusting steel and chipped glass edifice fronting the East River on the New York skyline.
Instead of peering through the mists into a bright but challenging future, the building peers out across the river to Roosevelt Island and back in time to a Rooseveltian utopia with strong labor unions and a chicken in every pot. Actually, a-chicken-in-every-pot was the 1928 campaign slogan of Herbert Hoover, a Republican president who presided over the Crash of ‘29. Hoover advocated “kinder, gentler” capitalism. He said, “We want to see a nation built of homeowners and farm owners. We want to see more and more of them insured against death and accident, unemployment and old age.” It would become the mantra of future candidates of both parties, a code for enslaving the working class through health and home insurance, college and mortgage loans while feathering the nest of banks and insurance companies.
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As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him
As Harper Stalls on Climate, Canada Moves Without Him
Students, provinces, investors and unions are taking action. How long can he ignore it?
One of the first things Stephen Harper did after winning a majority in 2011 was to build a system of levees around the Prime Minister’s Office. They weren’t physical levees, of course, like the type designed to keep water from flooding New Orleans. Rather, they were ideological ones, erected on the belief that climate action is at odds with a healthy economy. Surrounded by those levees, Harper did whatever he wanted on climate change, which for the most part meant ignoring it completely.
His Conservative government passed laws to accelerate the growth of Canada’s oil and gas industry, while pledging carbon regulations that never came. He pulled Canada from the Kyoto Protocol, muzzled federal scientists and cut funding to their research, strong-armed the U.S. on bitumen pipelines and set climate targets he had no clear intention of meeting. But something unexpected happened. A frustrated cohort of students, provinces, investors and unions decided to take decisive climate action on its own.
Harper’s done his best to withstand this rising tide. He’s argued that climate is low on the list of “significant challenges,” for instance, after 400,000 people marched for action in New York; that regulating the emissions of polluters is “crazy,” as Ontario readied a system of cap-and-trade; that Canada is a fossil fuel “superpower,” as billions of investment dollars flowed into clean energy; and that taxing carbon is “job-killing,” as Canada’s largest private sector union argued the exact opposite.
Levees don’t break bit by bit. They collapse all at once — and with a destructive fury. The storm surge that breached New Orleans’ defences in 2005 killed 1,800 people. The surge of anti-Tory opinion in Alberta’s recent election swept away a 44-year-old political dynasty. For four years Harper has been governing on climate change, as well as many other issues, from behind a system of ideological levees. As the federal election this fall nears, how long will Harper ignore the forces rising against him?
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The G7 and its 85–year carbon pledge
The G7 gives itself a lifetime to fulfil its climate change promise
If you thought it was hard to keep up your New Year’s resolution, try keeping an 85-year pledge.
That’s exactly what Canada and the other G7 countries are committing themselves to as they try to get control of global greenhouse gases. While Canada failed on its Kyoto agreement and won’t meet its 2020 Copenhagen target, that’s not stopping Prime Minister Stephen Harper from making even more long-lived environmental pledges.
First, a deep cut in carbon emissions by 2050 and second, an eventual end to fossil fuel use by 2100.
At first glance, it’s praiseworthy. The world’s leading economies commit to decarbon the world economy. Some environmental groups were quick to call the G7 announcement “groundbreaking,” although not everyone is as supportive and approving.
- Difficult to invest in green energy in Canada without Big Oil
- Rising carbon emissions from oilsands a ‘unique’ challenge
“It’s not groundbreaking. It is politically cheap to pledge a non-binding commitment that falls way behind someone’s time in office,” said David Keith, an engineering professor at Harvard University and former University of Calgary professor who was one of Time magazine’s “heroes of the environment” in 2009.
“What we really need is specifics in the next few years or decades.”
Vague on execution
The pledges do add weight to the movement to get off of fossil fuels, but how the G7 countries achieve their goals is unclear.
That shouldn’t come as a surprise considering how vague Canada has been in the past about achieving its emissions targets. Just last month, the federal government promised a 30 per cent cut to emissions below 2005 levels by 2030. It gave little indication how it exactly planned to do it. Eliminating all cars for a year would only put a dent in carbon emissions.
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Squabble Over $100 Billion Aid Stalls Global Warming Deal – Bloomberg
Squabble Over $100 Billion Aid Stalls Global Warming Deal – Bloomberg.
A dispute about how to link greenhouse-gas emissions cuts to a promise from the wealthiest nations for $100 billion a year in climate aid emerged as a major stumbling block at UN talks on global warming.
After a week of discussions that ended today in Bonn, envoys from some 190 nations were deadlocked about the formula countries will use to set out their commitments on reducing fossil-fuel pollution in time for the deal they plan to sign in Paris in 2015.
That means higher-level officials will have to deal with the issue when they meet in Peru in December. The exact way in which those pledges are put on the table is the cornerstone of the pact that the United Nations is promoting as a replacement for the Kyoto Protocol, whose limits on emissions in richer countries lapse in 2020. Delegates also failed to make progress on the actual draft text of a future climate treaty.
“The talks here can’t fairly be called negotiations,” Meena Raman, who tracks the UN negotiations for Malaysian nonprofit group Third World Network, said today in an e-mailed statement. “I can’t see how they’ll pull the elements together if they continue like this.”
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