Mission possible
What crazy times we live in.
Without an international legislative body with the power to make every country meet specific climate targets, there's no mechanism to make nations stick to their goals. But we must stop global warming, together, anyway.
Who could have come up with such a doomed system?
With so many conflicting national interests, how are we ever going to get there?
We need sweeping change, but all we really have today is incrementalism.
At COP26, with 25,000 people talking about how to solve climate change, negotiating, telling stories, promoting solutions and making demands––COP26 provided our team of journalists with more education, new relationships and a some hope for what the world might be able to do, if certain miracles occur.
The miracle of coming together as human beings across nations to solve a shared challenge.
Everything good about us as a species, our amazing brilliance, and everything terrible, our utter destructiveness, throws this into question.
It has been a year in which the infrastructures we depend on have been stretched to a near breaking point.
Looking forward to 2022, societal structures seem precarious. And yet, the opportunities for progress abound, the voices of brilliant young leaders grow louder and stronger and, at COP, even former climate deniers sounded as if they had seen the light.
"We can phase out the use of cars with hydrocarbon internal combustion engines – by 2035 – we can do that and we in the U.K. are ending new sales by 2030," said British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
"If we fail they will not forgive us. They will know that Glasgow was the historic turning point when history failed to turn. They will judge us with bitterness and with a resentment that eclipses any of the climate activists of today, and they will be right."
Which part of our collective unconscious will prevail? Which impulses will guide us?
Australia's Prime Minister Scott Morrison, who famously brought a lump of coal to Parliament in 2017 to extoll its virtues, sounded like a climate activist. He spoke about moving off fossil fuels to clean energy.
"Australia is investing over $20 billion over the next decade to drive the transition, leveraging private sector investment to reach $80 billion in total," he said, noting that Australia has the highest rates of rooftop solar power in the world.
Some dismissed all of this as 'green PR.' Others found it hopeful.
It was Barbados President Mia Mottley who delivered the most moving, and, perhaps, the most important speech of the two-week conference.
"We do not want that dreaded death sentence, and we have come here today to say, 'Try harder. Try harder.' For those who have eyes to see, for those who have ears to listen and for those who have a heart to feel — 1.5 (degrees) is what we need to survive."
President Mottley made us feel that we must try harder in our work as journalists.
That whatever we have done until now is not enough.
That we must listen even more carefully to those most affected, that we must go even harder after the corporate corruption and greed that keeps fossil fuels flowing, all while keeping our sights set on a possible future in which those fighting for climate justice and safety, our better angels, prevail.
"For many developing countries climate change is a very big crisis looming before them, one that threatens their very existence," Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi said, making a bold promise to triple renewable energy use in his country by 2030 and reach net zero by 2070.
Canada at work
Prime Minister Justin Trudeau pledged to put a hard cap on emissions from the oil and gas sector, and pledged to slash methane emissions from Canada's oil and gas industry by 75 per cent by 2030.
"We are in a climate crisis. We need to urgently reduce emissions in every sector of the economy, everywhere in the world," Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson said during the announcement on Nov. 4. "Canada's signature is significant. We are one of the world's largest energy producers."
Environment and Climate Minister Steven Guilbeault noted the importance of governments coming together with civil society and business to solve the climate crisis. Governments alone can't afford to solve the climate crisis alone, he told Canada's National Observer, during a break in the last day of the negotiations–– and he expected to be up all night negotiating. He stressed the importance of private capital in financing the shift to a safe climate.
During the second week of the talks, Canada vowed to set aside 80 per cent of the $5.3 billion it’s pledged to climate investments in the next five years for projects that promote gender equality and former environment and climate minister Catherine McKenna, brought a new project focused on women to COP.
We can do this!
With at least 503 fossil fuel lobbyists, affiliated with some of the world's biggest polluting oil and gas giants, COP26 was teeming with corporate influence, according to Global Witness. But for perspective, there were 25,000 people at COP.
Over 100 fossil fuel companies were represented but their CEOs were banned for the first time from attending.On the other hand, there are 10,000 or so young people on the street, led by Greta Thunberg, demanding climate action now. And there's a surge in demands for oil and gas to be named as a climate culprit in the treaty itself, creating a serious challenge for those oil industry lobbyists.
Canada's Tzeporah Berman embodied the enormous challenge to the oil industry at COP. Her project, the Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, made a big splash. With 17 cities and sub-national governments including Los Angeles, Barcelona and Sydney, and nearly 133,000 individuals signed onto the treaty, including Nobel Peace Prize winner Muhammad Yunus and former Irish president Mary Robinson, the treaty has captured the imagination of climate power players looking for effective ways to rapidly stop new development of fossil fuel projects.
Speaking at The New York Times Climate Hub, Berman said, despite technological breakthroughs in renewable energy, the world has remained slow to transition from fossil fuels.
She said she sees many signs that the transition away from fossil fuels is well underway.
“Social change isn’t linear. It happens at tipping point moments, and I think we’re seeing that…. We’re seeing more climate policies being introduced in the last two years than in the last 20 years. And we’re seeing this at COP,” she said. “We’re starting to have a conversation around fossil fuels…. Ten COPs in, it’s been an uphill climb just to talk about how we need to constrain fossil fuel production and I think that’s starting to happen. We’re seeing trillions of dollars in divestment."
"You can actually make more money now when you divest from fossil fuels.”
After a successful TED talk at Countdown to COP, Berman's ideas are reaching more people and gaining more traction.
Meanwhile, Bill McKibben warned that governments and industry are moving too slowly. Specifically he said, the oft-mentioned goal of achieving 'net zero' by 2050 is dangerously distant.
"Here’s the most important F-word — fast. Speed is the only thing that matters at this point," he said.
"Every time someone says 2050, ask yourselves, how many CEOs between now and 2050? How many prime ministers…? Too many for that number to make any difference at all. Even 2030 is quite a ways off. What are you doing for us right now?"