Glasgow Climate Negotiations Money, Ambition and


GLASGOW — International climate talks turned overtime Friday evening as negotiators battled behind closed doors on a deal that could determine whether nations could prevent the planet from warming dangerously by the middle of the century.

A draft agreement released Friday morning called for a doubling down on helping developing countries cope with climate impacts, and said nations should strengthen their emissions reduction targets by next year. The draft called on countries to accelerate the coal phase-out and remove subsidies for fossil fuels.

Negotiators from nearly 200 countries worked through the night to discuss various aspects of the document, including whether countries should be asked to come back with stronger emissions plans next year, money for the worst-hit developing countries, and how to structure a global market. carbon.

They even debated whether the words “fossil fuels”, which had never been included in a global climate agreement before, should be mentioned in the final agreement, although their combustion is the primary cause of climate change.

One of the most divisive questions involves whether industrialized, wealthy countries and developing countries that have grown rich for more than a century by burning coal, oil and gas and releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere will pay for it. irreparable damages they have caused.

The state of the negotiations, intensifying pressure not only to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions much faster than they thought, but also to address the damage these emissions do to the countries least responsible for the problem.

“There is a huge disconnect between where we are, where we will be according to current estimates, and where we should be in terms of what science is telling us,” said Saber Hossain Chowdhury, a negotiator from Bangladesh.

According to the summit organizers, a new draft text was expected on Saturday morning. All parties must approve in order to reach a final agreement. Tradition has it that if a country objects to the language in the treaty, talks can stalemate.

The UK, which hosted the summit, said its goal is to collectively prevent the planet from warming more than 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 compared to pre-industrial times, according to country-to-country climate targets. This is the threshold that scientists say is where catastrophic heat waves, fires and floods become significantly more likely.

This goal cannot be achieved anywhere.

The world has warmed an average of 1.1 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, although some places have already warmed more than that. an analysis found Even if all the commitments countries have made in Glasgow to reduce emissions this decade are met, temperatures will skyrocket by 2.4 degrees Celsius by 2100.

Kenya’s environment minister, Keriako Tobiko, noted that an average global temperature rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius would translate into 3 degrees Celsius in Africa, intensifying the erratic patterns of precipitation and drought that are already penalizing farmers.

“We cry, we bleed in Kenya and Africa. “When it rains, we bleed, when it doesn’t we cry,” he said. “So for us ambition is not a 1.5 statistic. It’s a matter of life and death.”

Increased pressure throughout the day to deliver a strong final document. At noon, more than 700 climate activists marched through the summit venue, chanting “climate justice” and calling for more ambitious goals, before taking to the streets to join the roaring crowd of more protesters.

The protests enlivened a two-week period dominated by well-prepared speeches on stage and debates on verbs in small meeting rooms. But they also served as a reminder to politicians and diplomats of the demands of ordinary citizens. In the middle of the summit, for two days, more than 100,000 protesters, most of them young people, filled the streets of Glasgow, angrily demanding that world leaders step up their climate goals.

A British diplomat, who closely follows the negotiations, said that the talks will go down to the wire fence.

“There are a number of key issues still at play here and we are still a bit far from reaching a conclusion,” said David Waskow, international climate director at the World Resources Institute, a Washington-based environmental think tank.

The latest draft also “requests” nations to return annually to strengthen their emissions reduction targets until the 1.5 degrees Celsius target is met. Diplomatically, this is more docile than the ‘impulses’ used in the previous draft.

Even in the current temperatures, Bangladeshi Mr. Chowdhury said, “We are seeing the devastation, destruction, pain and suffering that all countries of the world are facing”. He received constant applause from the delegates in the general assembly hall.

The latest draft calls for countries to accelerate “the phasing out of undiminished coal energy and inefficient subsidies for fossil fuels.” Unreduced coal refers to power plants that do not capture carbon dioxide emissions using a new technology that is not currently available on a commercial scale. This language will allow power plants with the technology to continue burning coal, a change from the previous language that asked nations to “phasing out coal and speed up subsidies for fossil fuels.”

John Kerry, the United States special envoy for climate change, unveiled the fossils in a statement Friday. Fuel subsidies as the “definition of insanity” Condemning the measures taken by governments that artificially lower the prices of coal, oil or gas.

According to the UN Development Programme, the world spends approximately $423 billion each year subsidizing oil, gas and coal; that’s nearly four times the amount needed to help poor countries address climate change.

Officials from other countries argued that the terms “continuous” and “inefficient” should be removed from the agreement.

“We need clear language about the need to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies and accelerate coal power phasing out, not just inefficient ones,” said Andrea Meza, Costa Rica’s environment minister.

“Weasel words,” said Catherine Abreu, executive director of Destination Zero, an environmental group.

Mr. Kerry defended the language about non-reducing coal, saying that commercial carbon capture technology may be available in the future.

It is unclear whether the coal language will remain in the final version. Chinese, India, Poland and the United States still relies heavily on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel.

During Friday night’s negotiations, diplomats grappled with how to write regulations to govern the fast-growing global market in carbon offsets, where a company or country compensates for its own emissions by paying someone else to reduce their own. One of the most challenging technical issues is how to properly account for these global trades so that any reductions in emissions are not overestimated or counted twice, and negotiators still have not settled the debate about how best to do this.

It is common for United Nations climate conferences, which are expected to last two weeks, to work overtime. Diplomats usually don’t get down to the smallest details until the last night.

Lia Nicholson, who represented the small island countries in the negotiations, said the group “found ourselves overwhelmed by the work still ahead of us in the final hours of this conference”.



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