The recent global gathering of political and business leaders in the Scottish city of Glasgow, who were then joined by a legion of environmental scientists and activists to discuss our planet’s sustainable future, ended up becoming overwhelmed by the worrisome high number of attendees whose industrial footprints and associated dangerous impacts on the earth’s ecosystems were intended to be curtailed, or even rolled back, at the conference in the first place. In this feature, the Valuechain’s Acting Editor, YANGE IKYAA, probes into whether or not, this comparative numerical supremacy was responsible for the shortcomings and lack of consensus in the end.
Environmental activists and climate defenders were clearly outnumbered by delegates from the fossil-fuel industry at the just concluded annual climate talks hosted by the United Nations (UN) during the 26th Conference of Parties, or COP26, which took place in the UK city of Glasgow.
This international contingent of energy merchants from different nations, or their sympathizers and lobbyists, whose business activities and commercial interests are known for severe ecological disruptions, and even dangerous climatic shifts, recorded 503 accreditations at the 2021 global climate summit.
According to environmental campaigners with competent knowledge of COP26 proceedings, the figure stated here is higher than the number of delegates that attended the conference from any single nation, as over 100 fossil-fuel companies were represented at COP26, with 30 trade associations and membership organizations also in attendance.
Ironically, these dominant firms and personages at the conference have long been known to lobby for oil and gas undertakings that unfortunately represent the most potent source of environmental pollutants, such as carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide.
Figures from the United Nations, which hosts the annual gathering, indicate that about 40,000 people were in attendance at COP26, with Brazil assembling the largest team of 479 negotiators, while the UK, which was the host country had 230 negotiators officially registered. Yet, fossil fuel lobbyists were still derived from members of 27 country delegations, including Canada and Russia.
Consequently, the fossil-fuel lobby at COP26 became larger than the entire delegations from the eight countries that are known to have been worst affected by climate change in the past 20 years.
In its Global Climate Risk Index (2020) based on the impacts of extreme weather events and socio-economic losses from them, the Germanwatch Institute, listed Japan, the Philippines and Germany as the three most affected places by climate change. Some of the other affected nations in descending order of severity are Madagascar, India, Sri Lanka, Kenya, Rwanda, Canada and the Fiji Islands.
The International Emissions Trading Association (IETA), which brought in 103 delegates to the conference, represented one of the largest industry groups, and was also made up of three persons from the global oil and gas giant, British Petroleum (BP).
As a result of this, the conservancy constituency of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was comprehensively diminished by the massive rollcall from the global hydrocarbon industry by around two delegates to one.
So, was this numerical dominance of delegates from the fossil-fuel economic constituency responsible for the shortcomings and lack of consensus at the close of debate in the Scottish capital?
This is exactly the opinion of Global Witness, one of the most concerned conservancy groups regarding the worrisome planetary diplomatic outing in Glasgow.
Established in 1993, Global Witness is an international non-governmental organization (NGO) that specifically works to break the vicious links between natural resource exploitation, conflict, poverty, corruption, as well as human rights abuses, and it runs offices in London and in Washington D.C.
Murray Worthy, who is a prominent figure at the NGO said “the fossil fuel industry has spent decades denying and delaying real action on the climate crisis, which is why this is such a huge problem.”
According to him, “their influence is one of the biggest reasons why 25 years of UN climate talks have not led to real cuts in global emissions.”
Worthy described IETA as “an association that has an enormous number of fossil-fuel companies as its members, and its agenda is driven by fossil-fuel companies and serves the interests of fossil-fuel companies.”
Global Witness also insists that IETA enjoys the backing of several major oil firms that support the principle of carbon offsetting or carbon trading as a pretext to secure regulatory approval and operational allowance for continuous oil and gas extraction. This is notwithstanding the fact that the natural environment is severely harmed or badly injured in the process.
And if COP26, which is undoubtedly the biggest climate change summit in years, could not reach a real consensus on limiting global warming to the preceding target of 2°C that was set by the Paris Agreement in 2015; or get wealthy nations to double their support to help poorer nations meet their clean energy and carbon neutrality targets; or even accelerate the phasing-out of fossil fuel subsidies, then there are reasons to think that the primary aims of the conference were hardly met.
It is also tempting to believe that the countries that are chiefly responsible for environmental pollution, global warming and climate change suffered a technical failure or actually refused to show enough commitment.
For instance, China and the United States, two of the highest contributors of greenhouse gas emissions, made a pledge to boost cooperation on climate issues but with no much details concerning the nature and extent of the cooperation.
Experts posit that the new pledges at COP26 to contain global warming and climate change in the present decade may result in 2.4°C within the century, which they also say is slightly better than the thermometric ceiling of 2.7°C projected under the current policy framework. Yet, this is still far above the safe limits of 1.5°C and may be too weak to stave off environmental calamity.
Although many promises were made at COP26 to halt the spread of deforestation by 2030, shift away from coal, slash 30 percent of current methane emissions by 2030, commit more to clean energy technology and channel finance away from fossil-fuel burning industries, general optimism was unfortunately paled out by a seemingly lack of commitment by rich developed nations to previous de-carbonation ambitions.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, publicly criticized the outcome of the summit as “lacking ambition” and rather called for “an end to trillions of dollars of subsidies given to the fossil-fuel industry.”
The challenge here is that the world has run out of carbon budget, but some 70 per cent of the world’s people need and still claim their right to development, using fossil fuels.
And as these countries grow, they will add emissions and take the world to catastrophic levels of temperature margins.
Yet, Australia, Japan and Russia, who are now joined by China – have consumed roughly 70 per cent of the global carbon budget, which is the space in the atmosphere that is scientifically available to keep the earth below the 1.50C temperature safe limit.
In the face of all these, “the Glasgow climate pact’s only achievement– if it could really be so called– is that it acknowledges and reiterates the need for financial support for adaptation, but it does nothing more than this,” said Sunita Narain, director general of the Centre for Science and Environment (CSE) in New Delhi, India.
CSE also argued that the first point of failure for COP26 was in the area of climate justice, where it failed to acknowledge historical emissions but rather diluted or even erased them, whereas climate justice needs to be the bedrock of climate action.
This argument is predicated on the reality that about 70 per cent of the world’s population needs access to carbon space for their own development, and they also feel they cannot, and should not ,be told not to develop using energy resources that the developed world previously exploited to reach their present levels of social and economic advancement. It was expected of COP26 to confront this inequality and ensure that it is logically addressed, while continuing to work towards securing low-carbon pathways for the whole world, but enough of that was not seen.
In an official note, CSE said “it is a mockery of the principle of Common but Differentiated Responsibilities (CBDR) that poor nations with minuscule per capita carbon footprint are asked to constrain their developmental health in trying to abide by the Paris Agreement. COP26 should have ensured that the burden of emissions reduction was shouldered by the historical polluters who currently play a small role.”
The document further listed many other injustices it said were perpetrated during the climate talks in Glasgow, claiming that civil society and activists were locked out of the discussions; that India’s net zero goal of 2070 was criticized, even though it is in line with CBDR; that an upwardly increasing climate finance goal was not agreed upon; and that the final text acknowledged the needs of developing countries for climate finance, but without setting out a process to deliver on those needs.
Then, as if this was not bad enough, only six countries submitted NDC updates to the UNFCCC during COP26 – Brazil, Argentina, New Zealand, Ghana, Comoros, and Venezuela. Rapid assessments by four different groups-UNEP, IEA, Climate Action Tracker and Climate Resource– found that even if the 2030 NDCs are achieved, the world will still be on track for 2.4 °C of warming, which is climatically very unsafe.
However, major developed countries that are the big polluters did not commit to domestic fossil-fuel phase-out, but only committed to halt funding it internationally.
Then, no loss and damage finance was announced, but only dialogue between parties, stakeholders and relevant organizations was established to support efforts to avert, minimize or address loss and damage associated with climate change.
Worse still, China, which is the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter and environmental polluter, was not given any CO2 reduction targets, but will rather take up 33 per cent of the remaining global carbon budget for this decade. In 2020, it accounting for 30.64 percent of all global emissions, amounting to 10.06 billion metric tons of CO2. The biggest industrial culprit for these CO2 emissions in China is electricity, notably through the burning coal.
It is therefore already known that the world’s most populous nation will not be able to achieve carbon neutrality, unless coal-powered electricity production is halted. But while it has since communicated its decision not to build coal-fired power projects abroad, it is still silent about the operation of such power plants at home.
China’s President, Xi Jinping, also did not attend COP26 in person, prompting US President, Joe Biden, and former president, Barack Obama, to challenge him for not showing enough ambition and commitment. The accusations leveled against China by the American presidential figures may be considered with some measure of validity, even as its delegation at the conference eventually joined India in watering down the regulatory language on coal from “phase out” to “phase down” in the final Glasgow Climate Pact.
In its 15th Five Year Plan from 2026 to 2030, the Asian geopolitical giant and world’s largest market says it will “phase down coal consumption” during the period under review. It is rather worrisome that even though most major economies have announced net zero targets, either in law, in a policy document, or via a statement, these targets are greatly prolonged, as Russia and Saudi Arabia have set their target for 2060, while India has announced 2070 as a net zero target.
Then, while the Paris Agreement demanded that rich countries must ensure the transfer $100 billion annually through 2025 to developing and poor countries, only Germany, Norway and Sweden are paying their share. Yet, finance is crucial, and it seriously needs transparency to measure how much and for what purpose it is needed. This is because many of the NDC targets are conditional, and if finance is not provided, they can never be pursued or met.
Even after the deal to end the damaging practice of deforestation by 2030 was signed by more than 100 countries, the over-emphasis on net zero emission targets and markets, or offsets, means that land grabs, ecosystem disruptions, habitat loss, and even the extinction of biological species are still likely to continue through the impact of carbon forcing.
One major breakthrough at COP26 could have been the fact that article 6 on carbon markets was adopted after six years, thereby completing the Paris Rulebook, but unfortunately, disagreements that still persist on issues such as the carry-over of Kyoto “carbon credits” and “double counting” have remained a stumbling block.
On the issue of double counting, it has been decided that any country that generates a carbon credit will decide whether to authorize it for sale to other nations or to count towards their climate targets. If authorized and sold, the seller country will add an emission unit to its national tally and the buyer country will deduct one in order to ensure that the emissions cut or slash is counted only once between the transacting countries.
However, with the carbon posture of the United States, which is the world’s second largest emitter of greenhouse gases after China, one wonders about the extent to which the above net-zero CO2 targets and the various measures or parameters devised to meet them will be useful. For instance, The Biden administration’s decision to sell off more than 80 million acres of the Gulf of Mexico to oil and gas drilling companies in the largest federal offshore drilling auction in U.S. history, just less than a week after COP26, where nearly 200 nations promised to reduce fossil fuel emissions is discouraging. The 80 million acres on sale will produce around 1.12 billion barrels of oil and 4.2 billion cubic feet of natural gas over the next 50 years, representing massive economic opportunities but also an enormous amount of environmental pollution.
More than 250 environmental, indigenous and social justice groups sent a letter to President Biden and other officials in his administration with an “urgent plea” to cancel the lease sale, which they said “makes a mockery” of the climate commitments made at COP26 in order to avoid a disastrous increase in global thermometric readings of over 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
This failure of the leading global environmental polluters to match their words with action and commit to previous pledges that were made in safeguarding the planet may have prompted the tone of the speech delivered by President Muhammadu Buhari at COP26 in Glasgow, where he queried “the hypocrisy of the developed world” which, having somewhat reached the goal of energy self-sufficiency, “is imposing standards that would clearly stunt development in “countries such as ours.”