The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson – 

WASHINGTON, D.C. — Wake up Washington. Wake up America. Wake up world.

I’ve been a tad busy in the campground for the past couple of weeks and was not able to make it to Glasgow, Scotland for the big Climate Conference this year and have not had a chance to write about it yet. But I have been following the coverage, and now the story seems to have culminated in a final agreement just in time for the Sunday papers.

Apparently the most shared news from the event on social media came from the teenager with Asperger syndrome who got famous for talking about climate change, Greta Thunberg, who called the event a “two-week-long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah.”

She is also being quoted from the streets calling it “ a failure,” “exclusionary” and “a global north green wash festival.”

“It should be obvious that this crisis cannot be solved with the same methods that got us into it in the first place,” she said.

But it also will not be solved by screaming at those trying to do something about it from the streets.

To reach agreements to slow the warming of the planet and the most catastrophic impacts of climate change, that will require a lot of talking, Greta.

I’ve been doing my part since before you were born, writing about the problem of global warming since 1989, and I never got famous for it. That’s OK by me. This issue requires lots of public education, and even more now that the so-called conservative movement in America has doubled down to fight against saving the planet.

Maybe, Greta, you should use your newfound fame to run for office and actually get into the room in the conference to see if you can hammer out a better agreement.

Meanwhile in other actual news coverage of what was happening inside the conference, The Washington Post lede story tells the tale: After going dark on the climate stage, United States reclaims the leadership role at COP26.

It should or could have been a large, banner headline: THE U.S. IS BACK FIGHTING CLIMATE CHANGE!

“In the sprawling encampment that has housed the United Nations climate talks over the past two weeks, delegates from around the world have praised the United States and condemned (it), but one thing they could not do was ignore the United States,” the Post reports. “The Americans, including 13 Cabinet members, seemed to be everywhere at the conference: speaking on public panels, disappearing into windowless rooms, and huddling in hallways and hotel bars to shape the outcome of the talks to protect the planet, along with U.S. interests.”

“We believe that this is existential,” said U.S. climate envoy John F. Kerry on Friday in a passionate speech on the floor of a plenary meeting. “And for many of you it’s existential today. People are dying. Today,” Kerry said. “All around the world, the impacts are being felt. Today.”

Throughout the closing debates on Saturday, Kerry worked the massive room, the Post says in on the ground reporting, “his 6-foot-4 figure easy to spot towering over other delegates.”

Background

“A year ago, the United States formally withdrew from the climate accord. President Donald Trump had mocked the deal as pleasing Paris rather than Pittsburgh. Biden signed an executive order the first day of his presidency to rejoin. Now the United States is once again, if not indispensable, at least critical, given its diplomatic muscle, financial power and responsibility for its outsize role in contributing to global greenhouse gas emissions that account for 13 percent of the annual total, second only to China.”

While climate talks largely stalled under Trump, Kerry’s approach to climate diplomacy put the United States at the forefront of galvanizing international action, even as Biden’s climate agenda remains stalled in Congress, the Post reports.

“President Biden made an unprecedented commitment to this,” Kerry said Saturday after the climate deal was signed.

Biden attended last week, making announcements on methane and deforestation.

“The United States took this seriously, as we should, after the previous administration was absent during their time in the White House,” Kerry said Saturday.

He acknowledged the young people who protested at the global climate summit, saying that they “don’t want this place just to be a place of words. It has to be in the next hours a place of action.”

But action can’t happen without diplomacy, and that requires a lot of meetings and a lot of words. It may seem like “blah, blah, blah” to someone who was not in the room.

During the conference here, the United States and European Union have corralled more than 100 countries into supporting deep cuts in emissions of methane, the potent greenhouse gas. The U.S. has taken part in a coalition to fight deforestation, which is destroying the world’s carbon sinks. The U.S. delegation has also helped convince other nations to halt financing for the construction of foreign coal plants, a pact that includes Japan, South Korea and China, all major funders of such projects.

Of course there are limits to how effectively the United States can lead, given the political realities at home, the Post points out.

“The U.S. delegation came under fire from other countries who wanted an unequivocal commitment to end all fossil fuel subsidies, but the United States ultimately agreed to end assistance to ‘unabated’ coal and ‘inefficient’ fossil fuel subsidies,” the Post reports.

“We have some of those subsidies,” Kerry admitted, adding that the $2.5 trillion that went into subsidies worldwide in recent years is the “definition of insanity.”

The Americans at the conference also admitted privately that signing such a deal would have strained relations with lawmakers like Senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia, who nows plays and oversized role in negotiating the Build Back Better legislation under consideration in Congress. As it stands now, that bill would provide $550 billion to address climate change, largely in the form of tax credits to ease the economic transition to electric vehicles, renewable energy and more efficient buildings and industry.

Bas Eickhout, a Dutch Green Party lawmaker who is in the European Parliament, said he believes that Democrats in Congress want to sharply increase U.S. funding for international climate assistance, but they don’t have the votes to do it. “They acknowledged there was a money problem,” he said, referring to talks he says he’s had with Democrats.

“Unfortunately, the U.S. leadership on climate change continues to be constrained by the limits of what a Democratic administration can do in the face of ongoing GOP opposition,” said Jules Kortenhorst, the chief executive of RMI, a nonprofit focused on renewable energy.

Many negotiators from poorer countries said that they were tired of waiting for a change in U.S. policy when climate change keeps growing more dire all the time.

“Small islands cannot always be the ones who are asked to compromise our interests with the objective of reaching consensus,” said Milagros De Camps, the deputy minister for the Dominican Republic and also a representative from the Alliance of Small Island States. “These are not just words that we are conceding, it’s our futures.”

The most difficult issues for the United States, as the richest country in the world, revolved around money, according to the Post‘s coverage.

“The United States failed to make its portion of the $100 billion payment wealthy countries had promised to deliver in 2020. Some developing countries wanted those funds to be owed to them. Instead, the wealthy countries will hit the $100 billion mark in 2023. By 2025, they plan to have made up for their initial shortfall.”

The $11.4 billion Biden promised to devote to climate change three years from now — assuming he gets what he wants from Congress — will only amount to half as much as the E.U. contribution. The population of the United States is three-fourths that of the European Union.

The United States has also avoided earmarking money for “losses and damages” accumulated from harmful emissions since the start of the industrial era. Some poorer countries wanted that money to go into a separate fund. The U.S. delegation worried that it sounded too much like reparations, and they fretted how the money would be managed. But a hedged reference to losses and damages remained in the text, and Kerry was flexible about growing the size of the adaptation funds. Adaptation helps countries cope with the impacts of climate change.

Kerry has been a linchpin of the U.S. climate team, the Post reports. A former senator, presidential candidate and secretary of state, “he has surrounded himself with an experienced team.” Younger delegates from other countries have scolded older ones for not understanding the urgency of doing something about climate change, but Kerry largely escaped that lashing.

“Senator Kerry, you could see the passion with him,” said the Pakistani climate envoy Malik Amin Aslam. Saturday afternoon, Kerry could be seen huddling with delegates from developing nations, his expression serious, glasses at the tip of his nose, listening intently in the talks.

“Having the U.S. back has really helped,” said one European negotiator, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss the private talks. “Because the U.S. has sway in parts of the world that we don’t.”

One of those places is China, whose chief climate negotiator Xie Zhenhua was brought out of retirement to explore a deal with Kerry. No relationship ranks as important as that of the United States and China, but it has been marred by tensions over trade, as well as Beijing’s policy toward Uyghur Muslims, which the Biden administration has called a “genocide,” and its crackdown on the democracy movement in Hong Kong.

Leading up to the conference, Kerry and Xie had mostly virtual contacts, but there was a meeting in Shanghai during which the two delegations were not allowed to eat together because of pandemic protocols. After staying on the edges in Glasgow, Xie swept unannounced into a media briefing room just before Kerry was to scheduled to speak. The two sides announced a joint working group, promising “enhanced climate action” to stay within the temperature limits laid down in the Paris accord.

Later, on the conference’s final day, Xie and Kerry shuttled back and forth across the room to iron out a deal. China and India insisted on changing the “phase-out” of coal to “phase-down,” a setback for most countries who had agreed to brush their domestic concerns aside.

Italian Ecological Transition Minister Roberto Cingolani said he could appreciate the subtleties of achieving progress on global warming. When Italy hosted the Group of 20 summit earlier this year, he had shepherded climate talks and was charged with forging a compromise between the United States, China and other major economies.

“I know that there is a world situation, but there is also your local situation, and you have to find a balance. I don’t even want to think how difficult this is in the United States,” Cingolani said. “The United States are back. We were missing you in the global fight for a while.”

Yes! The story is: THE United States IS BACK!

The Glasgow climate pact, annotated

The New York Times did not lede with the conference story on it’s website Sunday morning, but it did carry a story about it.

NYT: Negotiators Strike a Climate Deal, but World Remains Far From Limiting Warming

“Diplomats from nearly 200 countries on Saturday struck a major agreement aimed at intensifying global efforts to fight climate change by calling on governments to return next year with stronger plans to curb their planet-warming emissions and urging wealthy nations to ‘at least double’ funding to protect poor nations from the hazards of a hotter planet,” the Times reports.

“The new deal will not, on its own, solve global warming, despite the urgent demands of many of the thousands of politicians, environmentalists and protesters who gathered at the Glasgow climate summit. Its success or failure will hinge on whether world leaders now follow through with new policies to cut greenhouse gas emissions. And the deal still leaves vulnerable countries far short of the funds they need to cope with increasing weather disasters.

“The talks underscored the complexity of trying to persuade scores of countries, each with its own economic interests and domestic politics, to act in unison for the greater good.

“But the agreement established a clear consensus that all nations must do much more, immediately, to prevent a harrowing rise in global temperatures. And it set up transparency rules to hold countries accountable for the progress they make or fail to make.”

Architects of the agreement hoped it would send a powerful signal to capitals and corporate boardrooms around the globe that more ambitious action on climate change is inevitable, the Times reports, which could in turn would empower civil society groups and lawmakers working to shift countries away from burning oil, gas and coal for energy in favor of cleaner sources like wind, solar and nuclear power.

“The train is moving and all countries need to get on board,” said Ani Dasgupta, president of the World Resources Institute. “If the world is going to beat back the climate crisis, no one can sit on the sidelines.”

Yet many others said the deal failed to meet the moment, in a year of deadly heat in Canada, devastating floods in Germany and New York, and raging wildfires in Siberia. At the start of the two-week summit, leaders, including President Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, framed the meeting as the world’s last, best chance to save the planet.

In the final hours of talks Saturday night, negotiators clashed over wording that would have called on countries to “phase out” coal power and government subsidies for oil and gas. Fossil fuels have never been explicitly mentioned in a global climate agreement before, even though they are the dominant cause of global warming. In the end, at the urging of India, which argued that fossil fuels were still needed for its development, “phase out” was changed to “phase down.”

Going into the summit, world leaders said their ultimate goal was to prevent Earth from heating more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to preindustrial levels. Past that threshold, scientists have warned, the risk of deadly heat waves, destructive storms, water scarcity and ecosystem collapse grows immensely. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius.

But even as countries vowed to step up their climate efforts both before and during the Glasgow summit, they are still falling far short, according to the Times.

The detailed plans that governments have made to curb fossil-fuel emissions and deforestation between now and 2030 would put the world on pace to warm by roughly 2.4 degrees Celsius this century, according to analysts at Climate Action Tracker, a research group.

“Countries still don’t seem to understand that we’re in an emergency situation and we need to cut emissions much faster this decade, or else any hope of staying at 1.5 degrees will be lost,” said Niklas Höhne, a German climatologist and founding partner of NewClimate Institute, which created the Climate Action Tracker.

A major focus of this year’s talks was how to push countries to do more. Under the last big climate deal, the Paris Agreement in 2015, governments weren’t formally scheduled to come back with new climate pledges until 2025, which many experts said was far too late for a major course correction.

The new agreement in Glasgow asks countries to come back by the end of next year with stronger pledges to cut emissions by 2030. Though the agreement states clearly that, on average, all nations will need to slash their carbon dioxide emissions nearly in half this decade to hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, it leaves unresolved the question of exactly how the burden of those cuts will be shared among nations.

It remains to be seen if countries will follow through; there are no sanctions or penalties if they fail to do so. Ahead of Glasgow, some governments like the United States and European Union did step up their climate pledges under the Paris Agreement. Yet others — like Australia, China, Brazil and Russia — barely improved on their short-term plans.

Money, meanwhile, remained a huge sticking point in the talks.

A number of swiftly industrializing countries, such as India and Indonesia, have said they would be willing to accelerate a shift away from coal power if they received financial help from richer countries. But so far, that help has been slow to arrive.

In spite of that and other sticking points, the Times reports: “The summit provided signs of growing momentum for climate action, albeit with caveats.”

“It’s meek, it’s weak and the 1.5 Celsius goal is only just alive, but a signal has been sent that the era of coal is ending,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, of the climate deal. “And that matters.”

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