The deal in Glasgow
After a fortnight of gruelling negotiations in Glasgow, the Cop26 climate talks ended with a deal late on Saturday. Alok Sharma, the UK cabinet minister who chaired the talks, was reduced to tears by a last-minute concession demanded by India, with China’s backing: they insisted on replacing a pledge to “phase out” coal with one to “phase down” its use. Nevertheless, Sharma urged the conference to approve the entire package lest it all unravel. Nearly 200 nations agreed rules for implementing the 2015 Paris Accords, and pledged to accelerate their decarbonisation plans. However, these pledges fell well short of those required to meet the Paris goal of limiting global warming to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. Temperatures have already risen by 1.1°C.
What the editorials said
It may have ended on a sour note, said The Times, but Cop26 was a success overall. It brought new commitments on curbing methane emissions and deforestation, and on decarbonisation. Some 90% of the global economy is now covered by net-zero targets, compared with 68% a year ago. And although the watering down of the coal pledge was disappointing, this is the first UN climate agreement “to contain any mention of the need to end the world’s reliance on coal”. The summit certainly wasn’t “a train wreck”, agreed The Economist. Among other things, it approved rules to create a framework for a global carbon market, “settling a problem that has plagued negotiators since 2015”. Still, the gap between the action taken and what needs to be done to limit global warming to 1.5°C “remains all but impossibly” wide.
Several small island nations criticised the agreement, and Boris Johnson conceded that the result was “tinged with disappointment”. But he insisted that, even so, the talks had “sounded the death knell for coal power”. The countries have agreed to return to the negotiating table next year, with a view to increasing their ambition on cuts.
Cop26 has kept that goal just about alive, said The Guardian, but only by requiring countries to revisit their commitments in a year’s time, and annually thereafter. If they hadn’t been required to do so until 2025, as agreed in Paris in 2015, that really would have been “a disaster”. The beginnings of a “ratchet” system are in place, said The Independent. Things are moving in the right direction – just not nearly fast enough.
What the commentators said
As someone who “specialises in groundless optimism and empty pledges”, our PM was well qualified to host a summit that produced plenty of both, says Gideon Rachman in the FT. The informal slogan of the gathering was “keep 1.5 alive”. Yet achieving that goal requires an immediate, steep reduction in fossil-fuel use that simply isn’t going to happen. It won’t happen in the West, where voters react badly to any environmental measure that hits them in the pocket. And it certainly won’t happen in countries such as China and India that are still heavily reliant on coal power. As this reality becomes ever starker, attention will inevitably switch from cutting emissions to looking for ways to mitigate the impact of climate change.
You can see why India, in particular, has resisted efforts to phase out coal use, said Samir Shah in The Spectator. The “livelihood and lives” of millions of its citizens depend on the fuel, which generates 70% of the country’s electricity. “From the perspective of India, this is the West – having fuelled its own economic growth during the 19th and 20th centuries thanks to coal – now kicking the ladder away.”
The lesson of previous climate summits is that what follows on from them is more important than the exact wording of the final communiqué, said Hamish McRae in The Independent. I suspect it will be “economics as much as environmental concerns” that determine the pace of change. A huge amount of money is being directed towards green technology. Look at the news last week that Rivian, a US start-up that manufactures electric trucks, had floated on the New York stock market for $91bn, valuing it at more than Ford and General Motors. Economic transformations can be very rapid once entrepreneurs notice which way the wind is blowing, agreed Will Hutton in The Observer. Public awareness and concern about climate change has grown considerably in recent years, and where consumers go, businesses and politicians follow. “What is vital is not so much Cop26, but, rather, the process, movement and social change it represents. Humanity has to save itself. It will be messy and imperfect – but we’ll get there.”
What next?
The UK’s role doesn’t end with the Glasgow summit, reports The Independent; we’ll formally hold the Cop presidency until Egypt takes over when it hosts Cop27 in Sharm el-Sheikh in November next year.
The Pacific island nation Tuvalu, meanwhile, is exploring ways to keep its status as a state even if it loses all its land to rising sea levels. Foreign minister Simon Kofe, who delivered a video address to Cop26 last week, standing knee-deep in water on a recently submerged area of land, said his country was planning for the worst and looking into keeping the ownership of its maritime zones. The average height of its islands is two metres above sea level.