We were told at Waddesdon that Cop would be a religious revival for renewables: no oil or gas firms invited and no role acknowledged for them in the energy transition.
There was plenty of singing to the choir, but there was also heckling from the back and dissent from the podium. In the circumstances it was remarkable that anything got done, but the Glasgow Climate Pact did accomplish four main things:
- New Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) kept 1.5 alive.
- Next NDCs were brought forward to next year.
- Outline rules were agreed for global trading of carbon credits.
- “Coal” entered the Cop lexicon, to be “phased down”.
Separately, the giant climate conference made a case for giant climate conferences by producing a series of side deals that could prove more significant than its core agenda. These covered, inter alia, forests, China, finance and methane.
The 1.5 number. Does it matter? The short answer is yes. It started life as a notional figure below the 2 degrees of warming that Pacific island nations noted in 2009 would lead to their inundation. It gained power as a rallying cry with the IPCC’s 2018 report on the catastrophic difference between 1.5 and 2 in terms of sea levels, fire, drought and extreme weather events. Modellers in Glasgow said NDCs updated since Paris put the world on a pathway to 1.9 to 3 degrees of warming, with a median of 2.4 Add the effect of new net zero pledges, especially India’s, and that falls to 1.5 to 2.6 degrees. This is how 1.5 remains “alive” – on life support.
The ratchet. Glasgow’s headline achievement was to persuade 197 countries to come back with more ambitious NDCs in one year instead of the usual five. Climate Action Tracker said this was in fact the only reason the goal of 1.5 remained alive. Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh will be its next big health check, with this caveat: all NDCs remain non-binding.
Article 6. The dominant agenda item on the list of core Cop meetings was Article 6 – a
key chapter of the Paris rulebook that remained unwritten in 2015 and had to be finished to create a framework for standardised global and bilateral trading of carbon credits. In other words, to make offsets work. A deal was reached to end double counting of credits and cap the number grandfathered into new trading schemes. Opponents of offsetting have dismissed the Article 6 framework as a license for greenwashing, but this feels hasty. It might just be the conduit needed to channel $130 trillion of private finance towards climate-friendly investments (see ‘Finance’ below).
The c-word. The UK hoped to include a commitment to phase out coal power altogether in the final Cop communique. India and China balked at the last minute and would sign off only on phasing down unabated coal. Alok Sharma wept. He needn’t have. The c-word was in the text and India and China, still overwhelmingly dependent on coal for power, signed it. In Cop-world that counts as progress.
China-US relations on trade, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Xinjiang and diplomacy in general were at a nadir going into Cop. Could climate survive as an oasis of common ground? The question put the world’s two biggest carbon emitters on the spot. Xi Jinping was a no-show but climate envoys John Kerry and Xie Zhenhua delivered a bilateral pact under which China all but pledged to pass peak coal consumption before 2030. This too counts as progress.
Forests. 141 countries signed a pact to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030. Why it didn’t set a tighter deadline is a fair question, but at least Brazil and the DRC signed on.
Finance. Mark Carney, ex-Governor of the Bank of England, said $130 trillion from more than 450 financial institutions was “committed to transforming the economy for net zero”. As scepticism about the big number undermined his press release, Carney suggested the smaller one was more important. If 450 banks and institutional investors get behind the Article 6 framework (see above), he may be proved right.
Methane. More than 100 countries joined Kerry’s pact to cut methane emissions by 30 per cent by 2030, mainly by stopping leakage from oil and gas infrastructure. This was low-hanging fruit and about time it was picked. Methane is up to 80 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than CO2.
Not done. Rich countries have still not kept their 2015 promise of $100 billion a year in climate finance for poorer ones. That starts to flow next year, in principle. Compensation for loss and damage crept onto the Cop agenda, but only as an idea.
Since Cop. The US has held its biggest ever auction of offshore oil and gas drilling licenses. Indonesia has pulled out of the forests pact. Global CO2 emissions, which need to fall by 45 per cent to keep the world aligned with 1.5 degrees, are on course to grow by 14 per cent instead. But Shell has pulled out of the Cambo oil field project off Shetland, citing a weak economic case for investment. The signs are it will only get weaker.
Worth noting. The science of global warming is uncontroversial. The greenhouse effect was first explained by Eunice Foote of Seneca Falls, NY, in 1856. Without it Earth’s average temperature would be minus 18 degrees C.