Pirate's Cove

Wow, it didn’t take long for people to start talking about the new agreement failing

Nations reach climate change agreement in Glasgow but follow-through in doubt

Negotiators from nearly every country on Earth reached an agreement Saturday evening at the United Nations Climate Change Conference to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming and to assist developing nations coping with the effects of rising temperatures.

The final agreement, which came following contentious negotiations over issues like ending fossil fuel subsidies, the creation of a crisis response fund for developing nations and the insistence that nations return in a year with steeper targets for emissions reductions, arrived more than 24 hours after the conference officially ended. But it did not go as far as many in the scientific community have said is necessary to keep the world from exceeding 1.5 degrees Celsius rise over pre-industrial levels, which was the main goal of the conference itself.

What emerged from two weeks of meetings at COP26, as the conference is also known, was a series of compromises that left many of the representatives of nations already on the frontlines of climate change angered.

“We have 98 months to halve global emissions,” Aminath Shauna, environment minister of the Maldives, said as the final wording of the document was being hammered out on Saturday. “The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is a death sentence for us.”

Good grief, it’s like watching a horror movie where everyone is overly dramatic, eh? This happens every year around the COPs.

For the first time ever, a climate agreement includes language explicitly calling for the phaseout of a fossil fuel, coal. It also explicitly endorses the concept of “loss and damage,” meaning an expectation that rich countries like the U.S. and those comprising the European Union will provide some compensation for the damage wrought on poorer countries by climate change.

Ending fossil fuels, as pushed by people using a lot of them. And just passing around that sweet, sweet, strings-free climate cash from developed nations to nations that have been developing for 100 years but also stay crapholes.

But if Glasgow participants made progress in the fight against climate change, for many it was inadequate enough to be judged at least a partial failure. Climate policy experts note that the mid-century targets of reaching net-zero emissions are implausible if nations actually stick with their current plans to allow global emissions to actually rise in this decade, because transitioning economies entirely away from fossil fuels is a decades-long project.

They’re always going to see it as a failure unless they get everything they want, forgetting that this would negatively affect their own lives. They’re plenty cool with this messing with Other People’s lives, though.

“In a year marked by uncertainty and mistrust, COP26 affirmed the importance of collective global action to address the climate crisis,” Ani Dasgupta, president and CEO, World Resources Institute, said in a statement. “While we are not yet on track, the progress made over the last year and at the COP26 summit offers a strong foundation to build upon. The real test now is whether countries accelerate their efforts and translate their commitments into action.”

Good luck with that. You know India and China will not comply in the least. When Republicans retake the House and Senate, they will refuse to move Biden’s climate cult agenda forward. Just like after Paris in 2015, a lot of nations will talk big then do little to nothing.