Climate summit ends with no firm pledges
What happened
The United Nations climate summit in Glasgow ended last week with an agreement among nearly 200 nations to reduce planet-warming emissions and to move away from fossil fuels—a deal that scientists and activists warned lacked the urgency and enforcement mechanisms needed to avert the most disastrous effects of global warming. Some breakthroughs were made at the two-week conference. More than 100 countries agreed to limit emissions of methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and the U.S. and China, the world’s two largest emitters of carbon dioxide, pledged to cooperate more on battling climate change. But negotiators failed to agree on emissions-reduction goals to hit the target of the 2015 Paris accord: limiting warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial temperatures. The world is on pace to warm 2.4 degrees Celsius this century. Instead, the final Glasgow agreement “requests” that countries revisit their emissions cuts next year.
Language in the final deal calling for countries to “phase out” coal power—the single biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions—was replaced with a weaker pledge to “phase down” its use, following last-minute demands from China and India. Still, the agreement marked the first time that fossil fuels or coal have been mentioned, and implicitly blamed for climate change, in a U.N. deal. U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres called the Glasgow agreement a “compromise” and said he understood that many people would be “disappointed” by the text. “The path of progress is not always a straight line,” he said. “Sometimes there are ditches.”
What the editorials said
What a “colossal failure,” said the Los Angeles Times. We need “bold and swift action” to tackle our climate emergency, but this summit produced “timid compromises, far-off pledges, and watereddown commitments.” Sure, President Biden cleared the low bar set by former President Donald Trump, who abandoned the 2015 Paris climate deal. But Biden is still dragging his feet on many climate issues, including providing aid to help poorer nations “deal with drought, flooding, and other already occurring climate impacts.”
No one should be surprised that this summit was a “carbon-neutral plantbased nothingburger,” said National Review.com. The grandees who gather for these conferences would rather spout meaningless eco-blather than take the practical but unpopular actions that would actually make a difference. That includes “converting relatively dirty coal-fired power plants to relatively clean natural-gas generation” and building more nuclear power plants, which produce zero-carbon electricity. But that would mean angering the environmentalists who seem to dictate the world’s climate change policies.
What the columnists said
America played a vital role in the progress that was made at the summit, said Steven Mufson and Michael Birnbaum in The Washington Post. U.S. climate envoy John Kerry managed to corral other countries into agreements to cut methane and fight deforestation. And the American delegation also helped convince Japan, South Korea, China, and other nations to stop financing coal plants abroad. After Trump yanked the country from the global stage, it’s clear the U.S. is back at “the forefront of galvanizing international action.”
Glasgow was “a tale of two globes,” said Tina Gerhardt in The Nation.com. The world’s 20 leading economies “are responsible for 80 percent of global emissions,” which disproportionately harm poorer countries that lack the resources needed to cope with extreme weather and rising seas. But those rich countries still refuse to commit to hard cuts in emissions, and they have yet to honor a 2009 agreement under which they were supposed to pay $100 billion a year to help developing countries adapt to climate change.
Our politics do not match “the urgency of what the atmosphere is telling us,” said John Sutter in CNN.com. Glasgow proved that delegates will always put their own short-term national interests ahead of the “future of humanity.” But this system of international haggling, flawed as it is, “remains our best hope for survival. The process is moving far, far too slowly, but it is moving.”