It’s been quite a weekend for the G20 member states’ delegations, many having jetted from their national capitals to Rome for the summit and then onwards to Scotland’s former industrial heartland.
As the globe’s diplomatic armadas landed in Glasgow for yet another two-week tussle to try to save the planet from, well, ourselves, the question on many people’s lips seems to be: “Will it be worth the carbon miles?”
The reality is revealed in the conference’s very name, the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework on Climate Change, shortened to COP26. This is, well, the 26th attempt at finally reaching a turning point on the climate crisis. Yet, is this really a case of 26th time’s a charm?
If the G20 can act as a bellwether of what’s to come, as was hinted by Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi during the summit, then the outcomes of COP26 will be just as nuanced as the outcomes of the G20.
At the end of the weekend-long summit, leaders paid no lack of lip service to climate. While they committed to “take further action this decade to formulate, implement, update and enhance, where necessary” their 2030 contributions and to stick by the 1.5 centigrade goal, they simultaneously failed to commit to concrete action.
The Group of Twenty, much like the Group of Seven, has no plan to end coal production and no plan to curb methane emissions.
Another similarity between G20 and the summit in Scotland is the lack of physical senior representation from two of the world’s most important stakeholders: gas rich Russia and coal happy China.
The result of the Paris conference was another six years of climate inaction
Despite China being the largest renewable energy market in the world, it is also directly responsible for 50 per cent of global emissions from coal.
As global, and Chinese, emissions continue to rise, Beijing stubbornly presses on with the construction of more coal-powered power plants.
The developing world is no model student. However, the fact remains that the only viable path to economic growth made available to the global south remains one based on burning fossil fuels.
If the Western world thinks it can cop out of its political duty to engage our strategic competitors in Beijing and Moscow on climate, its economic duty to finance the global south’s carbon-neutral development and its moral duty to lead the charge to decarbonisation, it could not be more grievously wrong. When it comes to the climate crisis, it truly is a case of failure not being an option. It is for this reason that the stakes are so high at the ongoing conference.
We are completely reliant on whatever the world’s delegations to the conference manage to muster during these fateful two weeks. Yet, many, including myself, remain cynical.
Will this be yet another case of ‘blah, blah, blah’, as Greta Thunberg and the multitude of climate activists behind her, seem to suggest? I, for one, surely hope not when, as alluded to before, failure is not an option.
The planet simply cannot afford another Paris, where, despite all the trumpets blown in 2015, the parties copped out of actually making the accords legally binding. The result of that conference was another six years of climate inaction.
Even if COP26 really does finally result in concrete, legally binding action to reduce carbon emissions, the global citizenry – us – have a civic duty to maintain pressure on our policymakers so as to ensure that they not only stick to the potential agreement but pressure their peers in the international arena to do the same.
As far as humanly possible, they need to ensure the rapid and socially just decarbonisation of their domestic economies. We’ve copped out long enough.
Nikos Chircop, secretary general of the Young European Federalists Malta