COP26 live updates: Success? Failure? Negotiators try to work out a deal.
3 yıl önce
GLASGOW, Scotland — Success or failure of the COP26 is in the hands of world leaders and their negotiating teams. They are trying to hammer out a deal to avert catastrophic climate change, as the two-week global summit nears its end.
Here’s what to know
The summit is due to end on Friday, and COP President Alok Sharma has said he wants to stick to that. But these summits often continue past their deadlines. British Prime Minister said on Wednesday, “I don’t see why we shouldn’t go into extra time, if we have to.”Whether the deal keeps mention of coal and fossil fuels is among the remaining fights.Costa Rica and Denmark are rallying countries to join their Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, dedicated to the phaseout of oil and gas production.The general theme of the day is cities and built environments.
Why has it been so hard to get fossil fuels mentioned in U.N. climate deals?
The preliminary draft COP26 agreement on how nations will collaborate to curb climate change, released Wednesday, explicitly mentions reducing fossil fuel consumption — unlike previous global climate accords. Whether that language stays in the final document remains to be seen.
The change might seem unremarkable: The consumption of nonrenewable resources is central to the discussion about how to respond to climate change, after all. But in the context of consensus-seeking climate diplomacy, the new language is groundbreaking. Over two decades of climate talk, collective calls to phase out fossil fuels have been rare.
“It’s what me and some colleagues like to jokingly call the ‘f-word,’ ” Ploy Pattanun Achakulwisut, a scientist at the Stockholm Environment Institute, told The Washington Post.
Given the outsize role fossil fuels play in greenhouse emissions, she said, the omission of “coal,” “oil” and “gas” from the Paris agreement was “mind-boggling.”
Cities are hotbeds of climate action, places of possibility where density can help people lead less carbon-intense lives. But there can also be intense vulnerability from the rising waters, hotter temperatures and more extreme weather associated with climate change.
Buildings themselves are also major emitters, responsible for nearly 40 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the United States, tied to how they are heated and cooled, and to the appliances inside them.
Many U.S. cities are still willfully blind to the climate risks they face, said Harriet Tregoning, a former top official in the Obama-era Department of Housing and Urban Development. But they hold tremendous potential, she said.
The density of cities is both their burden and their boon.
An emotional Mary Robinson, the former president of Ireland, called out Saudi Arabia at a United Nations climate forum this week for playing “dirty games” in allegedly taking out crucial language from the text that will emerge from the meetings.
Speaking on the sidelines of the COP26 summit in Glasgow, Scotland, Robinson’s voice wavered as she described her disappointment at a perceived lack of urgency among world leaders to slow the rise in Earth’s temperature, even as the often destructive impact of climate change becomes increasingly apparent. It is rare for international leaders, even when retired, to criticize their counterparts so directly.
“We are literally talking about having a safe future … You can’t negotiate with science. You can’t talk about a glass being half full. We have to get it down,” she told Britain’s Sky News.
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