COP26 Debrief: The Good News and the Very Bad News

Short of the mark

On the bright side, a significant majority of the parties updated and toughened their NDCs, including the US, which had rejoined the Paris Agreement after the Trump administration’s ignominious withdrawal. The final COP decision, known as the Glasgow Climate Pact, urges those parties that did not offer new or updated pledges to revisit and strengthen them before COP27 in Egypt. A high-level ministerial roundtable was also established to drive up pre-2030 ambition. On the sidelines, voluntary pledges and declarations were made by various countries to reduce methane emissions, and to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation.

However, the revised collective promise for mitigation efforts falls well short of the mark. The UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) updated Emissions Gap Report, released after COP26, found that the parties’ new NDCs offered little appreciable improvement on the projection of 2.7 degrees warming by 2100, made just prior to COP26. Climate Tracker’s model indicates 2.4 degrees. The net-zero 2050 pledges, if fully implemented, could shave off a further 0.5 degrees (UNEP) or 0.3 degrees (Climate Action Tracker). Here, we might contrast the Glasgow Climate Pact with the Climate Vulnerable Forum’s Manifesto, which called for annual increases to Ambition 2030, mandated to occur at every single COP until 2025.

The US, as the world’s biggest historical emitter and second highest aggregate emitter, has committed to emission reductions of 50-52 per cent by 2030 from 2005 levels. However, this is still well below the US’s fair share based on its historical responsibility and capacity. Even so, the US may not be able to meet this target. Democrats have wafer-thin control of the Senate, and President Biden is struggling to get the clean electricity component of his signature Build Back Better programme passed, thanks to a hold out by Democrat Senator Joe Manchin from West Virginia. The Republicans are poised to regain control of Congress in the mid-term elections in November this year.

On finance, the good news is that new talks were launched to define a global goal on adaptation and there was a collective commitment to double finance for adaptation – a win for developing counties although funding for adaptation will remain well below what is required. The parties also embarked on a new process to define the post-2025 climate finance goal, and this time the talks will be informed by an assessment of what is needed to do the job. However, developed countries have failed to reach the $100 billion target by 2022. The Glasgow Climate Pact presses developed countries ‘to fully deliver on the $100 billion goal urgently and through to 2025’.

Diplomatic breakthrough

Perhaps the most significant diplomatic breakthrough at COP26 was that the parties agreed, for the first time, to phase-down (as distinct from ‘phaseout’) ‘unabated coal power’, to phaseout ‘inefficient’ fossil fuel subsides, and recognised to the need for support towards a just transition. Fossil fuels were not named in the Kyoto Protocol 1997, the Copenhagen Accord 2009, or the Paris Agreement 2015, due to the extreme tetchiness on this issue by many carboniferous economies, particularly major oil exporters. They were mentioned only twice in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change 1992, but this was at the behest of oil exporting countries (led by Saudi Arabia) to protect themselves from the adverse economic effects of the climate policies of other parties.

By focusing only on what comes out at the end of the pipe – the emissions – previous climate agreements bordered on the farcical, by literally ignoring the most powerful driver of climate change: the burning of fossil fuels. This three-decade long charade helps explain why global CO2 emissions were 60 per cent higher in 2020 than in 1990, when the climate negotiations began. It also explains the shocking findings of the 2021 UNEP Production Gap report, released in time for Glasgow, which estimated that the parties’ current fossil fuel plans and projections will produce 240 per cent more coal, 57 percent more oil, and 71 per cent more gas by 2030 than is consistent with holding to 1.5 degrees.

To fulfil their differentiated responsibilities, developed countries need to crank up domestic mitigation to the maximum. They must also be a lot more creative in working out how to mobilise the quadrillions of dollars that will be necessary not only for mitigation and adaptation but also loss and damage from climate impacts.

Political challenges

COP26 did not keep the ambition of 1.5 degrees alive but rather kept it at death’s door. The political challenges confronting those wishing to preserve this goal are enormous, and here’s why. Even if all developed countries were to adopt 2030 targets well above the IPCC’s global average of 45 per cent, in recognition of their greater historical responsibility and capacity, this would not be enough to keep 1.5 degrees alive. The reason is that the bulk of the growth in emissions since the climate negotiations began have come from developing countries. This growth is set to continue, especially for China and India.

In 2006, China overtook the US as the biggest aggregate emitter. By 2019, its emissions reached around 27 per cent of the global total, compared to the US’s 11 per cent. If we count all greenhouse gas emissions, including from land use, then in 2019 China’s aggregate emissions exceeded those of all developed countries combined. India is the third highest emitter at 6.6 per cent, which is more than the 27 countries of the EU, at 6.4 per cent, but unlike China, its per capita emissions remain very low.

Of course, China and India have the largest and second largest national populations (just above and just below 1.4 billion), with unmet development needs, so their emissions are unavoidably large and growing as they develop. Moreover, it is the total cumulative or ‘historical’ emissions in the atmosphere, not annual aggregate emissions, that determines the degree of global warming and here the US still leads by a significant margin. China is next, but its cumulative emissions remain well behind those of the developed world as a bloc.

The key problem is that the ‘fair shares’ of developed countries with the highest historical responsibility and capacity under the regime’s burden sharing principles – such as the US – are much greater than their domestic mitigation potential. This means these countries must not only step up their national mitigation to the maximum possible but also ramp up their financial and technological support for developing countries.

Major economies in the developing world could go even further. Yet this is unlikely. China and India have highlighted the broken promises of developed countries in mitigation and climate finance, and they consider it unfair that developing countries should commit to net zero by 2050 given their own development needs. Instead, they argue that developed countries should commit to full decarbonisation by 2030 to save the remaining atmospheric space for developing countries. To do otherwise is tantamount to kicking the ladder down.

China’s COP26 commitments are consistent with these arguments. In 2015, China promised to peak its emissions by no later than 2030. In the lead up to COP26, it further announced it would aim to achieve net zero before 2060, lower CO2 emissions per unit of GDP, and increase the share of non-fossil fuels in primary energy consumption to around 25 per cent by 2030. It also committed to end the overseas financing of coal power and start the domestic phase-down of coal in 2026. This is a major shift in China’s stance, recognising the growing responsibility attached to its outsized emissions profile. At COP26, India committed to reaching net-zero emissions by 2070, reducing the carbon intensity of its economy by 45 per cent by 2030 and increasing uptake of renewable energy.

To fixate solely on the future growth in emissions of major developing countries is to miss two crucial back stories. The first is the long story of colonialism, which gave the European powers, and then later the US, a huge head start in economic development based on the exploitation of non-European peoples and their lands, and later fossil fuels. This created a world of early and late developers based on an unequal exchange between core and periphery, which has made it hard for the latter to catch up and meet their development needs.

OPEN IN VIEWER

The second is the more recent story of neoliberal economic globalisation that began in the 1980s, and included the ambitious Uruguay round of trade negotiations that liberalised trade and investment and culminated in the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 1995. Although the Uruguay round favoured the global North more than the global South, it also opened up growth opportunities for developing economies. China seized this opportunity and joined the WTO in 2001 and its spectacular rapid growth followed, along with its emissions. Yet the changing patterns of investment and trade that ensued, also enabled many OECD (Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development) countries to effectively ‘outsource’ their emissions to Factory Asia while enjoying the cheap consumer imports. Yet emissions associated with consumption do not form part of the climate regime’s GHG accounting system, which is based solely on territorial production.

Climate rapproachement?

So, what sort of rapprochement between the major emitters in the global North and global South might address the problem of future growth in emissions in ways that keep faith with the principle of differentiated responsibilities and keep 1.5 degrees on life support?

To fulfil their differentiated responsibilities, developed countries need to crank up domestic mitigation to the maximum. They must also be a lot more creative in working out how to mobilise the quadrillions of dollars that will be necessary not only for mitigation and adaptation but also loss and damage from climate impacts, which will become increasingly incalculable and uninsurable.

In return, the major economies in the developing world might then consider taking some responsibility for the emissions from their large and high consuming middle classes, rather than hiding behind their poor. After all, the climate injustices of the future will be felt most keenly and undeservedly by their own poor communities, as well as poor communities everywhere else.

Finally, all parties, but especially the major emitters in the G20, should stop framing mitigation solely as a burden to be avoided or distributed, and acknowledge the new economic, social and ecological benefits of decarbonisation, not to mention the massive and incalculable, longer-term costs of decarbonising too slowly. If they fail, then sooner or later, political reality will be mugged by climate reality.