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His clock might be slow. Building global consensus is challenging at the best of times, let alone the worst: During the pandemic era, countries became more fearful and insular, as vaccine hoarding, summary deportations, me-first politics and escalating global rivalries undermined international cooperation.
The preeminence of national self interest in the pandemic age has created good reason to fret about the climate summit’s outcome. A sense of deja vu pervades the Glasgow meeting, which, if you strip away the tartan and haggis, looks a lot like past climate summits in its basic friction: the developed versus developing world.
Poorer countries are insisting that wealthier ones help foot the bill for their transitions to greener economies and adaptation to climate change. The biggest difference now is that the bill is soaring, even as the planet warms at an alarming rate.
That the Global South must act is not in doubt. Including China, developing countries together produce the lion’s share of emissions and will chug out more as their economies expand and millions of their citizens rise out of poverty. But they are also playing economic catch-up with the United States and Europe, where factories have belched outsized pollution since the industrial revolution.
The world is already falling behind on pledges that were never enough to begin with. My colleagues reported that rich countries would probably not meet an earlier pledge to provide $100 billion annually in climate assistance for developing nations until 2023, and that amount that is already outdated. At a July climate meeting in London, the Wall Street Journal reported, South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy called on wealthier countries to pay more than $750 billion annually to help poorer nations shift away from fossil fuels and protect themselves from global warming. India’s climate-change plan alone will cost more than $2.5 trillion through 2030.
The G-20 summit in Rome over the weekend — a sort of appetizer to the main course in Glasgow — yielded what a host of observers characterized as half measures on climate goals. Leaders agreed, for instance, to stop international financing of coal, but stopped short of a key pledge to end its use in their home countries.
What climate activists and many leaders of developing countries consider to be lackluster progress hangs heavy over Glasgow. In a speech at the conference Monday, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley offered a blistering indictment of the developed world, suggesting its leaders have not learned the steep cost of national self-interest. “Have they not learned from the pandemic?” she asked. “Can there be peace and prosperity if one-third of the world literally prospers and the other two-thirds of the world live under siege and face calamitous threats to our well-being?”
A grand solution may depend on how much the developing world is willing to budge. Most Western countries see massive transfers to the tune of hundreds of billions a year for poorer nations as unrealistic. Private-sector investment may fill some of the gap. But a kumbaya moment to save the world will likely require an embrace of what Stewart M. Patrick, senior fellow in global governance at the Council on Foreign Relations, recently dubbed “planetary politics.”
“All governments, starting with Washington, must designate the survival of the biosphere as a core national interest and a central objective of national and international security — and organize and invest accordingly,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs.
There are steps in that direction. The White House, U.S. intelligence community and the Pentagon declared in recent reports that global warming would exacerbate long-standing threats to global security. Yet obstacles to change mount alongside risks.
The coronavirus era has not been a time of collective action. Masking and vaccine skepticism have complicated efforts to slow the pandemic, even as an all-out push for vaccines on the part of rich countries have left poor ones with few doses. While Americans line up for booster shots, only about 5.8 percent of Africa is fully vaccinated.
Some argue that kind of insularity was a natural response to a pandemic — and that the fight against global warning is fundamentally different.
“Fighting a pandemic by containing its spread, erecting barriers and restrictions, and protecting those inside from those outside makes a certain amount of inherent sense” wrote Stefan Lehne, visiting scholar at Carnegie Europe. “Mitigating global warming inherently transcends the scope of national action.”
Yet the vaccine gap persists, despite the fact that a pandemic lingering in Africa or Latin America is still against the global good — and could trigger renewed spikes in the well-inoculated developed world. In addition, the globe today is hued by deepening international rivalries, inward-looking policies and domestic polarization. The U.S.-China relationship is frosting over into a nascent cold war. The European Union is adapting to a new reality without Britain, while some member states like Poland chafe against the notion of regional rules taking precedence over domestic sovereignty. Even as Johnson hails the climate summit as an example of his nation being newly engaged internationally, Britain has slashed its foreign aid budget.
Many leaders — including those of Brazil, China, Mexico, Russia and Turkey — opted to skip the climate summit all together. In the pandemic era, avoiding travel is still the new normal. But phoning it in to save the Earth suggests a lack of commitment.
There is some reason for optimism. A new BBC World Service opinion poll showed surging support among respondents in 18 countries for governments to play a leadership role in addressing climate change, to 58 percent now compared with 43 percent in 2015. But less than 50 percent of those asked in countries including China, Japan, Russia, Australia, the Netherlands and Thailand said their nations should lead in setting ambitious targets as quickly as possible.
Even before the Glasgow summit began, a host of nations were showing their stripes. Leaked documents revealed an effort to lobby U.N. scientists to water down climate commitments. Cattle giants Argentina and Brazil brayed at goals to reduce meat consumption. Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia sought to play down the need to shift away from fossil fuels.
Agreements will likely be inked in Glasgow. But most experts believe we are unlikely to see a watershed moment. In six blistering words, Barbados’s prime minister summed up the exasperation of those who feel that the time for action has already passed.
“Simply put, when will leaders lead?” she said.
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