COP26 live updates: Crunch time for climate negotiators; Obama to speak

Even if the world stops burning fossil fuels tomorrow, even if countries spend trillions of dollars adapting, the catastrophic consequences of warming are already here. Homes will be lost. Farmland will be damaged. Lives and livelihoods will be destroyed. Many of the countries that contributed the least to climate change will suffer the most.

For decades, the world has given mostly lip service to these unavoidable and unequal impacts, collectively known as “loss and damage.” But improvements in climate science have increasingly made it possible to pinpoint the role of climate change in causing disasters. At COP26, representatives from hard-hit areas are demanding compensation for harms they can now directly link to wealthy countries’ emissions.

Wealthy countries have so far resisted any measures that would hold them accountable for harm experienced by more vulnerable nations.

Activists haven’t even been able to make loss and damage a “permanent agenda item” — something that nations agree to address at every U.N. summit. It remains to be seen whether they can force a meaningful discussion on the topic at Glasgow.

In an upcoming speech to COP26 in Glasgow on Monday, former president Barack Obama plans to note his legacy on climate change, encourage young people to be hopeful in the face of cynicism and despair, and criticize both the administration of Donald Trump and absent nations such as China and Russia.

“Back in the United States, some of our progress stalled when my successor decided to unilaterally pull out of the Paris agreement in his first year in office — I wasn’t real happy about that,” Obama will say, according to a copy of his prepared remarks. “And yet, the determination of state and local governments, along with the regulations and investment my administration had already put in place, allowed our country to keep moving forward.”

Obama, referring to himself as a “private citizen,” will observe that the United States “still obviously has a lot of work to do,” but will praise President Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill — passed Friday by the U.S. House of Representatives — and express confidence that the “Build Back Better” bill will follow in the coming weeks and “devote over half a trillion dollars to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by over a billion metric tons by the end of the decade.”

Obama will address young people directly, encouraging them to “stay angry” and active but to avoid tactics that inconvenience or alienate those who need persuading on the issue of climate change. He will also namecheck countries to urge a united front.

“It was particularly discouraging to see the leaders of two of the world’s largest emitters, China and Russia, decline to even attend the proceedings, and their national plans reflect what appears to be a dangerous absence of urgency — a willingness to maintain the status quo — on the part of both those countries,” Obama will say. “That’s a shame. We need advanced economies like the U.S. and Europe leading on this issue. But we also need China and India, Russia and Indonesia, South Africa and Brazil. We can’t afford anyone on the sidelines.”

The former president plans to be at COP26 Monday and Tuesday, meeting with young leaders and coalitions of nations.

COP26 delegates linked to the fossil fuel industry represent a larger group than any single country at the climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland.

Almost 40,000 delegates registered for COP26 in Glasgow, making it the biggest COP in history. And while Brazil sent 479 delegates to Glasgow, the largest team of negotiators at the summit, the fossil fuel industry as a whole sent more, according to one watchdog group.

The advocacy group Global Witness, and others, analyzed a provisional delegate list published by the United Nations and found that 503 people linked to the fossil fuel industry have been accredited for COP26.

This is a larger group than the combined total of delegates from Puerto Rico, Myanmar, Haiti, the Philippines, Mozambique, the Bahamas, Bangladesh and Pakistan, the regions countries worst impacted by climate change, the group said.

Murray Worthy, gas campaign leader at Global Witness, said the “presence of hundreds of those being paid to push the toxic interests of polluting fossil fuel companies will only increase the skepticism of climate activists who see these talks as more evidence of global leaders’ dithering and delaying.”

The group’s analysis of the attendees found that some of the delegates with links to fossil fuel interests were part of official country designations from Canada, Russia and Brazil.

The researchers found that over 100 fossil fuel companies were represented at COP, including Shell, Gazprom and BP, and 30 trade associations and membership organizations.

Some of those identified as fossil fuel lobbyists reject claims that their presence is obstructing talks, arguing that they are working on finding market-based ways to reduce emissions.

The United States sent 165 delegates, including former president Barack Obama, who was attending events on Monday.

Although COP26 will not reach the overarching goal to meet the most ambitious Paris goal — to “keep 1.5 alive,” as many leaders and protesters alike have said — there are signs that the global warming curve is beginning to bend in a positive direction.

On Thursday, the Paris-based International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that new national emissions reduction pledges, combined with other commitments made last week, could give humanity an even chance of limiting warming to 1.8 degrees Celsius (3.2 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to preindustrial levels.

That level of temperature rise would still have catastrophic consequences, scientists say. But it is the first time global climate commitments have put the Paris target of holding warming “well below 2 degrees Celsius” within humanity’s reach.

That is, if the world actually follows through.

That’s what the second week of the U.N. climate conference must be about, said Corinne Le Quéré, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia. Whatever agreement negotiators reach will determine whether the IEA analysis represents a realistic scenario for the future, or just another fantasy about what could have been.

“Really, it’s about the level of detail they’re able to put behind the promises,” Le Quéré said. “It’s going to be, I’m afraid, a bit more boring.”

“But this what the COPs are really about,” she added, “sorting out the details.”

Beyond blanket assessments about whether COP26 is succeeding or failing lie thorny issues that have tripped up negotiators at these talks for years — and that they will have to overcome to shape an agreement all nations are willing to embrace.

The Paris accord set key thresholds of warming that world leaders agreed not to cross, most importantly the 1.5 Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) target. It also created a voluntary framework to translate those lofty goals into practical policies.

But the framework still has unfinished parts. The Paris agreement said country reports on climate must be more transparent. It established a detailed but incomplete set of rules to make sure that carbon markets function fairly. And it promised that rich nations pony up at least $100 billion annually in financing to help poorer countries cope with catastrophic impacts and build greener economies — a pledge that has not yet been fully met.

Firm language around financial support was missing from a list of priorities the COP presidency sent out to negotiators Sunday. Developing nations have long called on their wealthy counterparts to compensate hard-hit communities for what’s known as “loss and damage” — the lives, livelihoods, homes and infrastructure irreversibly harmed by climate effects. Yet the priorities document contains minimal references to the issue, and richer countries could block efforts to include it in the final agreement.

The delegates debating in private conference rooms along the River Clyde know their decisions will be scrutinized by the activists who have descended on Glasgow in recent days, as well as people around the world who have seen their lives and livelihoods upended as the planet warms.

The parallel universe that exists inside and outside of the climate summit has been well documented. Inside: Pronouncements and assurances that true progress is being made, that the world is inching toward a less-dark future. Outside: Accusations that leaders are again failing to act and are offering empty promises.

COP President Alok Sharma has noted how merely months ago, pledges to reach “net zero” in coming decades existed for only about 30 percent of the global economy. Today, that number is close to 90 percent. “By any measure, that is progress,” he said.

And yet on the same day, protesters marched through the streets of Glasgow carrying posters with activist Greta Thunberg’s three-word summary of the proceedings: “Blah, blah, blah.”

“As the negotiators huddle in smaller groups trying to thrash out agreement on technical issues and specific words, so the world outside the negotiating rooms will become more and more frustrated if they fear an agreement that doesn’t represent the urgency young people feel and match the anxiety that climate policy experts feel,” Rachel Kyte, dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University, said in an email. “The next week will be tense, but has to be productive.”

Across the world, many countries undercount their greenhouse gas emissions in their reports to the United Nations, a Washington Post investigation has found. An examination of 196 country reports reveals a giant gap between what nations declare their emissions to be versus the greenhouse gases they are sending into the atmosphere. The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions — big enough to move the needle on how much the Earth will warm.

The plan to save the world from the worst of climate change is built on data. But the data the world is relying on is inaccurate.

At the low end, the gap is larger than the yearly emissions of the United States. At the high end, it approaches the emissions of China and comprises 23 percent of humanity’s total contribution to the planet’s warming, The Post found.

The presidents and prime ministers have come and gone. Prince William, by all accounts, has left the building. The streets — which only days ago echoed with the chants of protesters, marching by the tens of thousands through a cold November rain to demand climate action — are now far quieter.

In coming days, negotiators from nearly 200 countries will haggle over every word in every line of an agreement that could shape how nations report progress on cutting greenhouse gas emissions, how global carbon markets function, and how the rich countries of the world deliver on promises to help more vulnerable nations.

Delegates face familiar but vexing problems about how the world can agree on policies to deal with widespread deforestation, climbing temperatures, rising seas and other dimensions of climate change. Central to all that is the allocation of hundreds of billions of dollars.

COP26 President Alok Sharma, striving to make Glasgow a success, urged delegates that it was “the time to shift the mode of work” and enter “a more political, high-level phase of the conference.”