COP26 Continues: An Update on the UN Climate Change Conference

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Brian Lehrer: It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. Today and tomorrow are the last two days of the COP26 Climate Summit in Glasgow, Scotland. Here's what they have to do. There are two days left in the summit. 200 countries are participating. Every country has to agree to every word of a final conference document. The central goal is to agree to policies that will limit warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 to avoid the catastrophic events that scientists say would occur if it gets hotter than that.

The hard part, obviously, it's to get all the countries with all their competing interests and unequal amounts of power and unequal amounts of risk to wind up on the same page, and with commitments they will actually act on, not just vague promises that sound good but don't do anything and far future goals. One cause for pessimism, the past promise for richer countries to give $100 billion a year to poor countries to subsidize their conversion to renewable energy was not met despite the richer countries' ability to pay.

One cause for optimism, yesterday, the US and China, the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, agreed on language promising a joint reduction during this decade, but that agreement too is short on specifics. What can we expect? What should we watch for? What's at stake as 200 countries seek a unified set of promises in the next two days? With us now live from Glasgow is Mark Hertsgaard, environment correspondent for The Nation. Mark, thanks for coming on today. Thanks for all your reporting. Welcome back to WNYC.

Mark Hertsgaard: Always good to be here. Thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: You're good at talking about the stakes. Let's start there before we get into the end game play-by-play. The goal is limit warming to 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit by the year 2050, as compared to the baseline temperature when industrial warming really began. Why 2.7 degrees? Why 2050? Remind everybody of those basics.

Mark Hertsgaard: Sure. Of course, here, Brian, they don't call it 2.7. They use the Celsius scale so it's 1.5, which leads to the phrase that the COP26 president, Alok Sharma, of the British government has been using that the goal of this summit must be to, "Keep 1.5 alive." That's important, the 1.5 or, if you prefer, 2.7 Fahrenheit temperature goal, because this is one of the main things that's happened since the Paris Agreement was signed six years ago is that the science has really gotten much more clear about what 1.5 would mean as opposed to even just 2 degrees Celsius.

There was the big-- People will remember that in August, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, basically the world's scientific body on this question, issued a report that talked about what would happen at 1.5 and if we went beyond 1.5. I'll give just one quick data point there, which is that we are now at 1.1 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, and we are having the kinds of wildfires that scorched my home state of California this year and Greece, and many, many places around the world.

We're now having those roughly five times more often than we did historically. If the temperatures rise 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels so basically double where we've gone so far, we won't be experiencing those five times more often. We'll be experiencing them 14 times more often. That's just one example of why scientists are now adamant and indeed, most of the governments here now accept that we absolutely have to get as close to 1.5 degrees as possible.

Brian Lehrer: This promise that was not kept from a previous conference that richer countries would give poor countries $100 billion a year to help subsidize conversion to renewable energy, that seems like an easy one because it's just money. It's not shutting down your whole fossil fuel industry and replacing all that energy and all those jobs or other complicated things like that. It's just richer countries donating money to poor countries. Who failed to keep that promise and by how much?

Mark Hertsgaard: You would think, I think you're making an excellent point there that that should be the low-hanging fruit here. That the United States and the countries here in Europe, $100 billion is almost a rounding error in their national budgets. The United States, for example, spends roughly seven times that every year on our military alone. Who fell short? Pretty much everybody.

The numbers that the rich countries themselves claim is that, oh, we gave $79 billion a year so we're close. In fact, an analysis by the anti-poverty NGO Oxfam looked at the same data and found that, no, you're actually giving $20 to $22 billion a year, because most of the rest of that money is not aid, it's grants or loans that have to be paid back. Pretty much everyone has fallen short on that.

One final point there is that all of the science and, I should say, the social science experts, pretty much everyone agrees that $100 billion is a very, very small portion of what it will really take for the world's poor countries to not only shift into cleaner energy forms, as you mentioned, but that money is also supposed to help them adapt through the rising seas, through the heat waves, and all of the other impacts that are already happening so grievously now around the world, and that are locked in for some time to come.

Brian Lehrer: Why would so much money be needed for the conversion to renewables portion of that? Environmentalists say, we always hear this in this country, conversion to renewable should create as many jobs as it costs and shouldn't be more expensive than fossil fuels. Why the need for subsidies?

Mark Hertsgaard: Good question. The basic thing is that most of these countries, look at India as an example, they have a very robust and ambitious plan to build out renewable energy, precisely because it tends to be cheaper, but it is more expensive upfront. That's where they need the loans or the grants is to put those panels in place and to build those wind turbines in the first place and install them. Over time because the sun doesn't charge you for its energy and the wind doesn't charge you for its energy, those operating costs are next to zero, but there isn't a high upfront cost, and that is why that $100 billion and more is so desperately needed.

Brian Lehrer: Back to COP26, and, listeners, we'll open up the phones in a minute, but I want to get through this piece of it first with Mark Hertsgaard, environment correspondent for The Nation. The agreement reached yesterday between the US and China that's making headlines. They are, of course, the two biggest climate polluters. As you read it, Mark, how real is it and how fake is it in terms of actual commitments to act during this decade?

Mark Hertsgaard: Brian, I'm sitting here in the press room at COP26 in Glasgow, and I can just tell you the last night, this place emptied out rapidly when the rumor went through, oh, the US and China are having back-to-back press conferences. That is clearly been the biggest news of the day in the last 24 hours. I think that it's important what those two countries said as a matter of atmospherics. As you know, there's been a lot of attention on many, many issues between Beijing and Washington, and this was a way for both sides to say, "Okay, we may not agree on trade, we may not agree on intellectual property and a lot of other questions, but on this question of climate, we are agreed."

That said, the announcements, and it's not an agreement, it's an announcement, they were very, very vague on specifics. It's like a lot of the things that have been said here by governments at Glasgow, they sound good and one hopes that they will be actually implemented, but there's not a lot of specifics yet on how they will do that. I will just say though that it is very, very promising if both the US and China can deal with methane, that is probably the second most important greenhouse gas that's never been part of these negotiations in the past so that is important.

The big question of course is coal, and that was another announcement earlier in the summit where many countries said, "Oh, we're going to no longer use coal," but the four biggest coal countries in the world, US, China, Australia, and India, they did not join that agreement. You have to really look and see the difference between an announcement, and an agreement, and then what kind of implementation is a given agreement going to have.

Brian Lehrer: The difference between an announcement and an agreement. That's how much we have to parse these kinds of things. Listeners, we can take your questions for one of the world's leading climate journalists, Mark Hertsgaard, environment correspondent for The Nation with us live, as he just said, from the COP26 Climate Summit press room in Glasgow or Glasgow. That might be the biggest debate among our listeners, Mark. Do you say Glasgow or do you say Glasgow like Moscow or Moscow?

Mark Hertsgaard: I'll tell you, Brian.

Brian Lehrer: Yes.

Mark Hertsgaard: Here the locals call it Glasgow.

Brian Lehrer: We're going to say Glasgow though not with a fake accent. Who has a question for Mark Hertsgaard? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or you can tweet a question @BrianLehrer. Let me take you deeper or ask you to take us deeper into this draft that the conference organizers released yesterday of a closing conference statement that all 200 countries would have to agree to.

A New York Times review of it today says the most meaningful part is a promise in the text to, "Accelerate the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels," by the end of next year. I think that's the part you were just referring to. Take us deeper into that. Can you parse that language for what it commits the US to specifically in 2022?

Mark Hertsgaard: Sure. I would say that's one of two very important things in that text. Let me emphasize this. This is a draft text that negotiators are haggling over as we speak and so this is by no means a done deal. Bear in mind that that is, first of all, very important, really unprecedented for any of these negotiations going back to the 1990s to talk about ending a fossil fuel. In fact, this is the first time that the words fossil fuels have ever been included in one of these agreements. The Paris Agreement does not mention fossil fuels, which is pretty ridiculous when you think that fossil fuels are the main reason for climate change.

Notice that they talk about ending coal, but only phasing out the subsidies for other fossil fuels. It is a big shift, but there's still a distinction between coal, which is indeed in the United States, coal is basically already a dying industry. Solar and wind because they're so much cheaper are grabbing all of the market share. Where coal still matters enormously though is in China, India, and other emerging economies that have these incumbent, rather, energy systems that are reliant on coal. That's going to be a very difficult pill for China and India and those emerging economies to swallow in terms of keeping that in the text.

Then as far as phasing out fossil fuel subsidies, the world right now is spending about $350 billion a year subsidizing fossil fuels. The United Nations Secretary-General, António Guterres, has called this, this is not the exact word to use, madness, but he said-- This is an exact quote. He said, "We are digging our own graves," by subsidizing the very fossil fuels that are overheating the planet

Brian Lehrer: That is going to make a lot of listeners' heads explode if they haven't thought about this recently. Yes, at one time there were fossil fuel subsidies in this country, but today our tax dollars are going to subsidize coal companies and oil companies, natural gas companies because they can't make enough money on their own.

Mark Hertsgaard: Nancy Pelosi, the speaker of the House, was here yesterday and at a press conference, she said, "Look, I Nancy Pelosi have tried to get rid of these subsidies for as long as I've been in Congress." She pointed out that the oil and gas companies make about $1 trillion a year in revenue. She said, "They don't need any more subsidies." I think it is quite astonishing to many people if they learn just how much tax money is going into that. I want to just emphasize, at $350 billion, that's global. In the US federal government is about $24 billion a year in subsidies to oil and gas.

Brian Lehrer: Politically, Mark, if that phrase, accelerate the phasing out of coal, stays in the final version of the agreement or the announcement or whatever they call it coming out of COP26, politically in the US, how much power does Joe Manchin from the cold state of West Virginia as an individual have to block the phasing out of coal, or how much can the administration do it without Congress? Do you know how that works?

Mark Hertsgaard: Sure. First, emphasize the fact that whatever comes out of Glasgow, it's not a legally binding treaty by US law. The Paris Agreement is a voluntary agreement. All of the negotiations here, as you said in your introduction, all of these countries have to agree, but it's not binding so it's voluntary. This is an exercise in trying to build political consensus and frankly, social shaming of people who are lagging behind. Turning to the US position with Manchin, Joe Manchin has never been this famous in his life.

It's been odd to me to see how the press coverage focuses on him and leaves out the fact that the only reason his views matter on this is because there's a 50-seat Republican lockstep opposition in the United States Senate to any action on climate change, and yet there's very little attention paid in the media discussion of that. As a result, those Republican senators basically pay no political price for essentially voting to incinerate the planet. To answer your question, Manchin has a lot of influence over whether Joe Biden's climate legislation will pass, but whatever comes out of here in Glasgow, it's not binding law by US standards.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take a phone call. Gail in Sunnyside, Queens, you're on WNYC with Mark Hertsgaard, The Nation's environment correspondent live at COP26. Hi, Gail.

Gail: Yes. Hi, good morning and thank you both. I was having a conversation the other day with some friends and it was pointed out that due to the mudslides, the torrential rains in China, that quite a lot of where they get their coal from has been stopped. Therefore, electricity over there is being rationed out. Do you have any comment on that?

Mark Hertsgaard: Sure. One of the things that's happened all around the world, not just in China is that there are energy shortages now. Here in Europe, those shortages pertain mainly to natural gas, and because of those shortages, prices are going up, factories are struggling and unemployment dangers arise so governments are scrambling. It's not been pointed out only once here, the irony that President Joe Biden on the one hand is talking about Build Back Better. He came here to Glasgow last week and talked about the US climate leadership, but at the same time, Mr. Biden is asking the OPEC countries to open the spigots and put more oil onto the world market in order to deal with these short-term problems.

That's the same situation in China. That's why China has not agreed to this announcement last week of limiting coal, at least not in the short term. That's one of the real challenges here at these talks is that the entire world economy, 80% of it runs on fossil fuels so you can't shut off the fossil fuels overnight, or you would literally kill people, close hospitals, food would not get into the grocery stores, et cetera. We have to have a phased transition. That's what the language in this text is talking about, phasing out coal. That's really the question, but in the short-term, governments respond to high prices, and consumers reacting to that.

Brian Lehrer: Let's try Rosie in Queens, you're on WNYC with Mark Hertsgaard. Hi, Rosie.

Rosie: Hi, good morning. Thank you for taking my call. I had a question regarding major group participate at COP26 and specific comparing the participation of the Indigenous people's delegation to that of business and industry, and how business and industry, from an Indigenous perspective, is the major destroyer of the forest, of water, of mother Earth, and how they get to be seated at the negotiating table with all their money and influences in comparison to the Indigenous nations that protect Earth, and how even the scientific community and the environmental organizations that have huge budgets take priority over the keepers and the protectors of the natural laws.

Mark Hertsgaard: Thank you. This is a theme that has gotten much more attention at this COP than others that I've been at. I've been covering COPs since 1992 at the Earth Summit that sET in motion these negotiations that are culminating here today in Glasgow. If you're a member of the press, you can access Indigenous people but there is no question that the Indigenous nations had enormous difficulties just getting to Glasgow because of the COVID restrictions, and because of the high prices for the hotels and other things here.

That has been pointed out not just by those Indigenous leaders who did manage to get here, but also by a lot of the global environmental NGOs who've been standing in solidarity with them and saying, "These are the people we should be you listening to." Indeed, that's also what the science shows, by the way. The peer-reviewed science shows that if you look at the countries or, I should say, the regions around the world where deforestation has actually been contained or stopped, most of the time those regions are controlled by Indigenous people. The logging industries that you mentioned, ma'am, have not been allowed to get in there.

That's a huge theme. The governments here are aware of that, but business has a lot of money and a lot of political influence. I would say though that it's not that the business interests are sitting there in the negotiating rooms. That's true in a couple of cases, but for the most part, it's governments. As we know from the United States, the oil and gas industry has enormous power over the people who get elected in the first place.

Brian Lehrer: Let me ask you, Mark, and Rosie, you can weigh in on this too if you want. Is there any tension within Indigenous communities around the world between wanting to protect their people and their lands from the ruinous effects of increased global warming versus wanting to be able to develop some of those lands? I've heard conversations about this regarding the Amazon wanting to develop some of those lands in ways that may be environmentally destructive from a climate standpoint, but that they feel they might have a right to do after the industrial West and North have developed so fast over the last 100 years.

Mark Hertsgaard: Rosie, did you want to comment on that or should I go ahead? I guess I'll go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: I guess so.

Mark Hertsgaard: I'm sorry, there's a bit of a delay here in the line so I wanted not to sound like I'm talking over somebody. Yes, Brian, there is that tension. I have not heard that in relation to Indigenous people in the Amazon, but rather it is not an uncommon thing there in the United States. There are certain Indigenous American Indian tribes who are in quite strong conflict inside the tribes and with neighboring tribes, do we allow mining?

There's an incident like this out in California near the Salton Sea, which is an area just to the east of Los Angeles that underneath of it has a lot of minerals that could be useful, ironically, in building energy storage batteries that would be very important for rolling out solar and wind to 100% target that we need for climate protection. Some of those tribes want to do that. Others are saying, "No, no, no, that is not how we protect mother Earth and we have to be strict about that." These are contentious issues. It's not black and white most of this stuff.

Brian Lehrer: Hillary in Manhattan, you're on WNYC with Mark Hertsgaard at COP26. Hi, Hillary.

Hillary: Oh, hi. I am so curious to hear about how West Virginia has done a lot of transition away from coal. I never hear the good stories, the positive stories. Maybe your guest could share some light on that. I have heard they have established lots of new jobs for people in industries to substitute for coal. There isn't half as much coal mining going on there anymore.

Brian Lehrer: Familiar with this, Mark?

Mark Hertsgaard: That is correct. Yes. The situation for coal in West Virginia, it's very ironic that Joe Manchin is described as a coal state senator because the cool industry is all but dead in West Virginia. It employs very few people now as it does across the country. There's far more jobs in alternative energy. We at covering climate now, which is the media collaboration, The Nation magazine, and WNYC, and The Guardian, and Columbia Journalism Review formed two years ago, we did a story on West Virginia a couple of months ago.

If you talk to people there on the ground, we sent a reporter there, and many West Virginians say, "What is Manchin thinking? He's not listening to us because we've had enough of coal and we see that the future lies elsewhere and that coal is a dead end." That said, where West Virginia is shifting is towards natural gas. They do have a lot of natural gas under the ground.

That's the next big battleground there is will West Virginia go natural gas, fracking of natural gas, i.e, fracking of methane, or will they turn towards the renewables? There is a lot of motion on the ground in West Virginia, people who want that, but so far, the old incumbent coal industry and their political enablers like Senator Manchin still have the upper hand.

Brian Lehrer: Mark, you wrote an article in The Nation that dropped yesterday. Tell me if this headline is earnest or sarcastic. The headline was Who Is the World’s Greatest Climate Champion?

Mark Hertsgaard: You got to read the subhead, Brian. The subhead is the United States, of course, according to the United States. The point of that piece was that-- Nancy Pelosi and the Democratic congressional delegation was here the other day, and they spent an entire half-hour press conference basically congratulating themselves for US climate leadership so much that there was only room for two reporters questions at the end of the half-hour. I couldn't help her point out that, in fact, arguably the United States has been the single biggest obstacle to progress at these climate talks, not just here at Glasgow.

In fact, they're not the biggest obstacle here at Glasgow, but going back to the start of these talks way back to the '90s. Donald Trump pulling us out of the Paris Agreement is only the most obvious example. Even under President Barack Obama when we signed the Paris Agreement, the entire reason that the Paris Agreement is not a treaty by international law, by US law is because John Kerry, President Obama's secretary of state, and his counterparts in the other country governments, they all knew perfectly well that the Republicans in the United States Senate would never approve an actual binding treaty that required limiting global temperature rise well below two degree C.

They deliberately wrote the agreement as only an agreement rather than a treaty so that it could take effect in the United States. I could give you more examples going into the past. The US has been an obstacle to progress at these talks for many, many years.

Brian Lehrer: As we go into our last three minutes here, and as COP26 goes into its last 24, 48 hours, The New York Times identifies four key sticking points as they negotiate a final version. Emissions cuts, paying the bill, we've talked about both of those. Reparations, that's a new ask for damage already done by climate change to poorer countries, and carbon offsets. Would you just talk for a second about carbon offsets because that sounds like a good thing, but I think I've heard it be described as controversial recently? What are carbon offsets and are they different from actual reductions in carbon emissions?

Mark Hertsgaard: Carbon offsets are indeed very controversial. They're one of the huge taking points here. Most of the activists are extremely against them. A carbon offset is basically-- Here's an easy example. A company or a country wants to say that we are reducing our carbon emissions, but we're still burning coal or we're still burning oil. If we plant trees, which obviously suck carbon dioxide out of the air through photosynthesis, if we plant trees, those trees offset the emissions that come out of the coal fire tower plant. The problem with carbon offsets is that first of all, they dodge the central question, which is that we have got to cut emissions, we've got to stop burning the coal.

We need to do both. We need to plant trees, we need to grow trees, we need to stop cutting down trees, but we also need to stop coal, gas, oil, et cetera. That's the main argument against it. The is that oftentimes, people who say that they're offsetting, they're counting the same tree that another company is counting. "Oh, we saved that tree. No, we saved that tree," and so you get a vastly overstated effect of a given action.

Carbon offsets, governments want them because it makes it easier to reach the targets, but here's the thing, the atmosphere doesn't care about what's politically easy. The atmosphere cares about physics, and physics is telling us that we've got to do both. We need to get lots more trees standing, but we've also got to stop the CO2 that's coming out of the power plants, and we've got to stop the methane that's coming out of the wetlands, and the waste dumps, and the industrial cattle operations.

Brian Lehrer: Hey, Mark, 30 seconds. We did a couple of segments this week in our coverage on the show that centered the protesters out at COP26. Such a presence this time. Do you think they're being heard in the buildings in a way that's actually having effects on the outcome?

Mark Hertsgaard: I do. I would not have said that 10 years ago like at the Copenhagen Summit. It's not just the protesters who were right outside, I covered the protest here on Saturday. It's also the fact that two years ago, Greta Thunberg put literally millions of people into the streets around the world protesting, these young people. The government leaders here repeatedly are referencing not just Greta and those young people, but the fact that the conversation in the society has changed around this. They know that the public is now aroused about this and the public wants action, and I think that is driving them. We'll find out in the next 48 hours whether it's driving them or not.

Brian Lehrer: Mark Hertsgaard, environment correspondent for The Nation at COP26. Thank you so much for giving us all this time today. Good luck there.

Mark Hertsgaard: Very good to be with you, Brian. Thanks again.

 

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