Wealthy nations must step up on climate change

We stand at the edge of the abyss, with one last chance for the world to avoid climate disaster.

That last chance comes in Glasgow, Scotland, six months hence when the world’s leaders gather, yet again, and try to back away from the abyss, where wildfires, rising sea levels, extreme weather events and worse, are waiting.

It was the American special envoy on climate change, John Kerry who said COP26 — the Glasgow gathering — is the last chance to avoid disaster, and UN Secretary General António Guterres who has us at the edge of the abyss. Neither man is given to hyperbole.

COP26, as the name suggests, marks the 26th time the world’s leaders have gathered to wrestle with but, to date, not meet the challenges posed by global warning.

There have been hopeful signs, like the Paris Agreement at COP21, but for the most part the meetings have disappointed, and much of the world, Canada included, hasn’t kept promises made in Paris.

So, will Glasgow be any different? Only if wealthy, developed nations are willing to step up to the pay wicket, and the world’s leaders collectively act with an urgency that often finds its way into their rhetoric but rarely into their actions.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is an unfortunate example of the latter. No one talks a better game on climate change and all things environmental. Yet, his government continues to subsidize the fossil fuel industry, up to and including buying a pipeline to ship western Canadian crude to Pacific waters.

Guterres would find much to fault in Trudeau’s inconsistency.

“We can no longer afford big fossil fuel infrastructure anywhere,” Guterres said last week at a Un-sponsored event on climate change. “Such investments simply deepen our predicament.”

The predicament is hard to understate.

At the current rate of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, the world will blow past the emission reductions needed to hold global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2027.

Last year, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that global warming that exceeds 1.5C will deliver the dire results referred to above.

The reality is that the socalled "emissions gap" between what’s been promised and what is needed to stay below 1.5C is enormous.

Even if nations honour their latest round of commitments — ranging from 45 to 65 per cent reductions in GHG emissions by 2030 — the Earth would still warm by 2.4C in this century.

A recent study published in the journal Frontiers in Conservation Science (January 2021) concluded that warming of that magnitude “will be far more dangerous than currently believed. The scale of the threats to the biosphere and all its life forms — including humanity — is in fact so great that it is difficult to grasp for even well-informed experts."

Year after year, including last year when COVID crippled economies worldwide, carbon concentrations in the atmosphere keep increasing.

Human activity has already caused a 1.2C increase in global temperature, so we’re perilously close to the 1.5C target set in Paris already.

Even if the world is seized by the urgency of the moment, how to deliver on the required GHG reductions promises to be the stumbling block, because equity demands that the rich, developed world carry the bulk of the load.

The Fair Share movement is gaining traction in the scientific community, among human rights activists and it is embraced by many of the world’s poorest and least developed nations, which stand to suffer disproportionately from climate change.

Simply put, Fair Share argues that since developed nations got rich burning fossil fuels they must accept their responsibility and pay the price.

In real terms, that means, rather than the 50 per cent reduction in GHG emissions the U.S. recently pledged, it’s fair share would be equivalent to a reduction of 195 per cent. The U.S. would need to completely decarbonize its economy and facilitate huge emission reductions in countries around the world to achieve that number.

You can see how discussions around the equitable distribution of climate change solutions will present tough hurdles to clear. And there’s more.

As Guterres said, climate change investment can’t stop at mitigation (slowing and stopping global warming) but must also pay the costs of adaptation (preparing for Mother Nature’s certain wrath).

Here again, the wealthy have a responsibility to the poor.

Developed nations, Guterres said, need to provide an estimated US$70 billion a year, increasing to $300-billion annually by 2030, to help underdeveloped nations adapt to climate change.

“This is a matter of urgency and trust,” Guterres said, but the wealthy nations of the world will see it as a matter of dollars and Euros and that’s more than enough to derail action that should have been taken years ago.

When the big shots leave Glasgow, we’re as likely as not to be at the edge of the abyss still, and left hoping COP26 wasn’t really our last chance.