Don't get too bummed out about COP26

Hey y’all, just a quick thing today (as I work on my follow-up to
Friday’s post).


I was on Pod Save America last week:


One of the things I talked about is the COP26 climate summit in
Glasgow, Scotland, which wrapped up last week with a final
agreement that … say it with me … represented real progress but
fell short of what’s needed. Just like all the other COP
agreements.


I had a pretty deflationary take on the whole thing on the pod.
Given the melodramatic rhetoric around COP26 — the same rhetoric
that attends every international climate summit — I thought I’d
briefly explain why I don’t think COP26 is worth getting down
about.


By way of background, remember that there were effectively two
climate events at the COP, as there always are. One was the COP
itself, the business of the United Nations Framework Convention
on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The other was a kind of climate
festival-cum-trade-show, featuring governments, nonprofits, and
private-sector actors announcing all kinds of new campaigns and
initiatives alongside the UNFCCC process — and protestors
marching outside.


First event first.


The Paris Agreement continues to play out


The actual business of COP26 mostly involved negotiators from
various countries in cramped conference rooms hashing out
technical details of elements of the Paris Agreement — about
monitoring and verification, about who is contributing how much
to the climate fund for poorer countries, about how often
countries will report new targets, and so forth.


None of that stuff was particularly dramatic; it was all the
usual incremental, too-slow movement forward. There was some
drama at the last minute when India — which had started COP26
with a bang, promising to hit net-zero emissions by 2070 —
demanded that a provision on a global coal “phase-out” be
rewritten to say “phase-down.” (This was disappointing, but keep
in mind this is the first time fossil fuels have been
specifically mentioned in a COP agreement at all.)


Much was made of this and other shortcomings of the final
agreement, but there’s a weird kind of disconnect around this
commentary. What people seem to forget is that the UNFCCC has no
real power to enforce anything and there isn’t the unity needed
among participating countries to create a binding target with
real consequences.


This was the origin of the Paris Agreement: the realization that
the best the UNFCCC could do is structure and publicize voluntary
national goals and commitments. The idea was to do with
transparency and peer pressure what decades of adversarial
negotiations couldn’t: steadily increase ambition.


A shorter way of saying this is that a COP agreement can’t make a
country do anything. Whether and how fast India phases out coal
has nothing at all to do with what its diplomat says in Glasgow
and everything to do with domestic Indian politics, which have
their own logic and are only faintly affected by international
politics.


The utility of the Paris process is that every few years it
provides the equivalent of a giant camera flash, revealing where
everyone stands. That is useful. International transparency and
peer pressure can sometimes move national governments. But it is
a mistake to invest any particular hopes for change in the UNFCCC
process — it can’t really do anything. It can only illuminate
what is being done.


What is being done


The good news is, we’re making progress. A decade ago, we were on
track for 4° to 6° Celsius average warming by the end of the
century, which would have been species-threatening.


As this report from Climate Action Tracker shows, thanks to
actions taken by national governments since then, we have “bent
the curve” on climate change, as it were, and brought the average
expected warming down to 2.7°C.


That would still be devastating. But we’re not going to stop
there. Progress is only accelerating. If every country that has
submitted a 2030 carbon target in the Paris process — an NDC, or
nationally determined contribution — hits that target, average
warming will be 2.4°C.


If all short- and long-term targets submitted thus far are
achieved, it’s down to 2.1°C. In CAT’s “optimistic scenario” — in
which all targets announced by anyone anywhere are met — the
average is 1.8°C.


As the CAT report emphasizes, that’s still short of the Paris
goal. There’s still a credibility gap between what countries say
they want to achieve and what they are willing to offer. There’s
certainly no reason for complacency.


But the trajectory is in the right direction. There’s still
plenty of reason to fear where we are currently headed, but at
the same time, there’s no reason to think that five years from
now, at the next major Paris “stocktake,” we’ll still be headed
there.


We’re bending the curve and lots of forces and institutions are
lining up behind the effort. Speaking of which …


Climate Woodstock


Alongside every official COP is a kind of international festival
where everyone who’s doing anything on climate goes to talk about
it. Bi- and multi-lateral coalitions, states, cities, nonprofits,
corporations — everyone gravitates to the moment when media
attention will be most intense.


There was a bit of a sour taste at the festival this year, given
that fossil fuels were abundantly represented and the poorest and
most vulnerable were, thanks to Covid, unusually
under-represented.


Nonetheless, amidst the unsavory optics came all kinds of
heartening news. There was a global treaty on methane, brokered
by the US and the UK, which has been signed by more than 100
countries. A group of renewable energy players created the 24/7
Carbon-free Energy Compact in partnership with Sustainable Energy
for All and UN Energy (see my explainer on 24/7 clean energy).


A group of governments and private funders pledged to spend a
total of $1.7 billion on Indigenous peoples and local communities
(IPLCs) protecting local biodiversity. Over 100 countries pledged
to stop deforestation by 2030.


A group of philanthropic and development organizations and
governments called the Global Energy Alliance for People and
Planet (GEAPP) pledged $10.5 billion toward helping emerging
economies transition from fossil fuels. Similarly, the Glasgow
Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) pledged over $130
trillion of private capital to the energy transition.


And so on. What this shows is an immense amount of will in the
world to address this problem, struggling to organize. There’s so
much going on.


Another thing I said on Pod Save America is that national
governments are often going to be in the caboose of this train —
civic groups, the private sector, and subnational governments are
leading the way. That’s distributed all over the world, less easy
to see and sum up, but it shows that the caution and
intransigence of national governments are not the whole story.


COP26 was a snapshot of a world — agonizingly slowly but with
gathering speed — moving to address a crisis. There’s no reason
for anyone to stop pushing, but there’s also nothing wrong with
acknowledging and celebrating the progress that’s been achieved
by all the pushing so far.


Things are moving!


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