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| Sat, 14th May 2022 7:21:00 |
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‘This is about survival’: will Cop27 bring action on Glasgow climate pact? |
Amid an energy crisis caused by war in Ukraine, climate experts say November talks must act on plans to limit global heating
When weary delegates tumbled out of the emptying halls of the Scottish Event Campus into the chill of a Glasgow night last November, the mood was buoyant, if exhausted. Workers in hi-vis began dismantling stages and pulling down scaffolding, as the departing representatives of nearly 200 countries exchanged weak high-fives and wry grins. After two weeks of gruelling climate talks, there was a broadly successful outcome: the world had agreed, at last, to make concrete plans to limit global heating to 1.5C.
True, the deal reached in Glasgow was fragile. Most countries came to the Cop26 climate summit without carbon-cutting plans of the level of stringency scientists said was needed. They left the talks with targets that would imply heating of about 1.9C – a “historic” achievement compared to the 6C of heating we were heading towards a decade ago, but still far off 1.5C, the figure scientists say is the threshold of safety. That left plenty to do in the months to come.
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Alok Sharma, the UK cabinet minister who presided over Cop26, summed up the agreement soon after as one that was “on life support”. He wrote in the Guardian: “The 1.5C limit lives. We brought it back from the brink. But its pulse remains weak.”
But the pace and brutality of the geopolitical changes since mid-November have been to a climate deal on life support like a cluster bomb dropped on a hospital. In just six months, a world slowly recovering from a pandemic has been wracked by war which, in turn, has created chaos in energy markets, sent food prices surging and threatened shortages, raised inflation and the spectre of recession and unrest, and has upended geopolitical relations.
Fossil fuel companies are enjoying a bonanza when they were supposed to be dying out. World leaders, who six months ago were pledging net zero carbon emissions, are now licensing new oil and gas drilling. Coal demand has surged and investors are sitting on scores of “carbon bombs” - high-stakes oil, gas and coal projects that, if followed through, would eliminate any hope of a 1.5C world.
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