A United Nations agreement to accelerate greenhouse gas cuts this year has stalled, according to some negotiators, as most of the world’s biggest emitters have done little to follow through on the deal since it was struck seven months ago at the climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.
The surge in global energy prices and the war in Ukraine have prompted major economies to increase their investments in fossil fuels. [bold, links added]
China, the world’s biggest carbon-dioxide emitter, produced more coal than ever last year and approved plans this year to build at least five new coal-fired power plants.
In the U.S., gridlock in Congress has stymied the Biden administration’s climate legislation.
The lack of progress has cast a shadow over climate negotiations this month in Bonn, Germany, that are slated to end Thursday.
In Glasgow, negotiators struck a deal on a number of technical issues, including broad rules for an international market in carbon credits.
But they couldn’t agree on how to cut emissions in line with the Paris climate accord of 2015, which called for governments to limit global warming close to 1.5 degrees Celsius above temperatures of the preindustrial era.
Instead, the Glasgow pact urged governments to present new plans to cut emissions by September of this year—and left the details to be hammered out in future meetings in Bonn and elsewhere.
Analysts and some officials now see little prospect that will happen before the next U.N. climate summit in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, this November.
“We have to acknowledge the broader geopolitical context and the challenges many face this year,” said a European Union official familiar with the talks.
Without faster emissions cuts, officials and scientists say the world is likely to blow through the 1.5-degree limit.
[Some] climate scientists say that greenhouse-gas emissions will need to fall 43% by 2030 compared with 2019 to hit that target; emissions are expected to fall around 7% by 2030 under the plans submitted ahead of the Glasgow summit, according to the U.N.’s latest climate-science report.
Questions loomed over the Glasgow deal from the start. To secure backing from more than 190 governments, the agreement urges but doesn’t require governments to accelerate their emissions cuts to hit 1.5 degrees.
Analysts and officials questioned whether major economies would quickly commit to doing more even before passing their existing climate plans into law.
In recent months since the outbreak of war, large developing countries including India and South Africa have voiced misgivings about the agreement.
They say it shifts more of the burden to developing countries to cut emissions, even though emissions from rich countries are responsible for most of the earth’s warming since the industrial era.
Developing world officials are demanding more money from wealthy nations to respond to climate change —particularly to protect themselves against the effects of rising sea levels and extreme weather.
“We really need to achieve a new balance in this negotiation process,” said Bolivian climate negotiator, Diego Pacheco, who is a spokesman for a group of countries that includes China and India.
Mr. Pacheco called the agreement the “Glasgow Colonial Pact” and said developed countries need to do more to cut their emissions.
The standoff has meant that of the Group of 20 major economies, only South Korea and Brazil have submitted a new emissions-reduction plan to the U.N. since the Glasgow summit.
Climate Action Tracker, a consortium of analysts and scientists that rates nations’ emission-reduction plans, says both plans are highly insufficient to satisfy the 1.5-degree warming limit.
“The momentum for increased ambition is pretty much deflated,” said Bill Hare, who helps run Climate Action Tracker. “Everyone is blaming the Russian energy crisis as causing the focus to shift away from energy transition to energy security.”
Surging global energy prices leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine have had a profound impact on global climate policies.
The European Union has proposed accelerating its deployment of wind and solar power to end its purchases of Russian oil and gas.
But it is also planning to build new infrastructure to import natural gas from non-Russian sources, worrying environmental groups who say the moves could prolong Europe’s use of fossil fuels.
The U.S. is also spending more on natural-gas infrastructure, mainly facilities to export liquefied natural gas to Europe to replace supplies from Russia.
China has boosted its investments in coal mining and coal-fired power since surging energy costs last year pushed the country to impose rolling blackouts.
Mr. Hare said Climate Tracker still sees China lowering its emissions by 2030, but he has begun to question whether that assumption will hold, adding: “Will they back out of that? We don’t know.”
Read rest at WSJ
Time for America to pull out of the UN and moved the whole lot to Moscow where they belong without America to push around
Why not to Beijing, where their puppet-masters are located?
As usual there are [some] climate scientists who say such-and-such on what we must do. But alas there are no names associated with these so-called “scientists” whose only proof we need to do something is their models which have been shown to not actually represent reality.
Humans are not capable of controlling climate change, regardless of their choice of tools. Humans can and have affected climate change, but not in any controlled fashion. However, hubris abounds.
There is no need to control climate change to the extent that it might be caused by human emissions of CO2, CH4 and other gases, as the absorption bands of these gases are essentially already saturated.
There is no reason not to transition from the current energy economy to a more efficient and effective energy economy; and, there is no reason to transition to a less efficient and effective energy economy, as we are currently in the process of attempting.
There is no “climate crisis”, or “climate emergency”, or “existential threat” except in the outputs of unverified and unvalidated climate models, which are rapidly falsifying themselves; and, in the minds, or at least in the assertions, of global and national politicians with their own agendas.
It is far easier to identify and quantify the damage caused by climate change policies than any damage caused by climate change as it affects weather events.
There is far too much disinformation and misinformation regarding climate change originating from political science and magnified in the media. It is ironic that the US Department of Homeland Security has chosen to establish a Disinformation Governance Board rather than a disinformation elimination or exposure board. The US government was managing climate change disinformation before this Board was proposed and would likely continue to do so.
Maybe its to to cut off all the Electricity and Water to the UN facility