Is there anything new to be said about #COP26? Perhaps not, but in this thread I hope to start putting the outcomes in context, rather than just focusing on whether the text got better or worse ... 1/23
2/23 So to start, remembering that climate is a chronic problem that cannot be solved, and must be managed, justice is central to progress. Climate justice is multidimensional - at COP26 it featured mainly in discussion of emissions pledges, climate finance and loss and damage...
3/23 On 'loss and damage', which means compensation or reparations for the harms that climate change causes, the rich world failed badly, agreeing only to 'a dialogue' on the subject ... despite being responsible for the vast majority of accumulated greenhouse gases.
4/23 On climate finance, money to support mitigation and adaptation in poor and vulnerable countries - the recent record of the richest nations is terrible: they spent less than half as much on climate finance as on border protection tni.org/en/publication… ...
5/23 And COP26 didn't see much improvement - more promises to provide more money (to meet the 2020 target by 2022), and particularly for adaptation, but no clarity on how much will be grants, rather than loans, and how much new money rather than repackaged from prior commitments.
6/23 What of emissions pledges? Here justice implies that the rich world, and biggest cumulative emitters should cut more and earlier, but instead countries like India are being pressured to hit #netzero on the same timescale as the UK and USA ...
7/23 And overall, emissions pledges in the formal structure of NDCs only give a 50% chance of keeping temperature rises withing 2.4degC. In this respect the agreement to revisit NDCs already next year is a strong positive outcome...
8/23 But there are increasing dangers that the pledges and promises hide increasing risks of failure as countries include more promises of future uncertain 'carbon removals' through forestry and 'negative emission techniques' ...
9/23 These risks are masked in 'net' targets. But the need for clearly separate removal and emission reduction targets is not even being discussed ... partly because it would expose the flaws at the heart of carbon trading (on which more below) ... carbonbrief.org/guest-post-the…
10/23 A robust way to ensure maximum decarbonisation, and least risk that promises of future removals will undermine progress, would be to commit to the phasing out of fossil fuels ... fossilfueltreaty.org
11/23 So how did COP26 fare on this issue? For the first time ever fossil fuels were named as the problem, but so surrounded with weasel words and caveats that even the UN Secretary General expressed concern ... news.un.org/en/story/2021/…
12/23 Only 'unabated coal' is targeted for merely a 'phasedown' (other fossil fuels escaped even this weak goal), and can even continue to be subsidized, as only 'inefficient' subsidies are to be phased out. Let's unpack a bit here ...
13/23 'Unabated' is code for coal power without carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology. In theory this might cut emissions by up to 90%, although in practice the few demonstration plants have failed to reach even these levels.
14/23 'Phasedown' appears to mean reduce in steps, with no commitment to elimination. And in this context it's hard to parse 'inefficient'. At best it implies keeping subsidies which provide relatively large social or health benefits (eg helping poor people heat their homes)...
15/23 but it isn't clear that it couldn't be used to justify those which 'efficiently' sustain fossil fuel extraction (tax breaks for exploration) or even consumption (eg tax-breaks for airlines).
16/23 And the inclusion of reference to a 'need for support for a just transition' is critical for the workers involved in fossil fuel industries, but is sadly vague enough to be abused to argue for paying compensation to the industries & their financiers for lost future income.
17/23 In passing, the side deal on methane is probably positive, but we need to beware how easily promises to cut methane emissions could be used to obscure slower action on CO2 by using inappropriate comparison metrics.
18/23 Climate justice concerns also underpin the ongoing arguments about 'the Paris Rulebook' and 'Article 6' on carbon offsetting. Here I fear a fundamentally unfair and risky mechanism has been approved, regardless of apparently improved safeguards.
19/23 If there are to be approved international carbon markets, then of course it is better if they avoid double-counting, and have rules to maximise integrity and minimize social harm.
20/23 But in a #netzero world there is no room for mechanisms that allow one party to go on emitting because another party has cut their emissions instead. But the Article 6 deal continues to allow - indeed promotes - such avoidance offsets in official and voluntary markets.
21/23 With 100s of millions of tonnes of virtually worthless credits from the Kyoto regime, and continued loopholes on forest and nature-based removals, this is both a financial traders' charter and a recipe for land-grabbing.
22/23 In conclusion, there has been progress, but overly reliant on promises of future action - in this case based on imaginary carbon sucking technologies and magic carbon markets ... (fortunately not yet solar geoengineering) carbonbrief.org/guest-post-a-b…
23/23 ... so we remain caught in a hamster wheel, with the rich world still unwilling to take responsibility for the harms it has created, and thus doubling down on market based solutions reliant on unsustainable and unjust commodification of both carbon and nature.
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