‘Digging our own graves’: With the planet in
peril, leaders call for urgent action.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/11/01/world/cop26-climate-change-summit
With
humanity already struggling to cope with rising seas, more powerful storms,
deadly heat waves and rapidly changing ecosystems needed to sustain life, the
global climate summit in Glasgow opened on Monday with a series of speeches
that amounted to desperate pleas for action from nations large and small.
“Climate
change is already ravaging the world,” President Biden said in a speech at the
summit, known as COP26, on Monday afternoon. But even while global warming is
causing widespread economic damage and upending lives, he said this was also a
moment of opportunity to reshape the way humans live in better harmony with
nature.
“We are
standing at an inflection point in world history,” he said, calling the need
for action a “moral imperative.”
Underscoring
the urgency of the moment, with leaders of more than 120 countries gathered for
the summit, the United Nations secretary general, António Guterres, said that
the effects of a warming planet were being felt “from the ocean depths to the
mountaintops.”
“Sea level
rise has doubled from 30 years ago,” he said. Oceans are hotter than ever,
parts of the Amazon rain forest emit more carbon than they absorb, and in the
last decade about four billion people were affected by events related to the
changing climate.
“Enough of
burning and drilling and mining our way deeper,” Mr. Guterres said. “We are
digging our own graves.”
The
conference’s aim is to prevent the average global temperature from rising more
than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared with levels before the Industrial Revolution.
That is the threshold beyond which scientists say the dangers of global warming
— such as deadly heat waves, water shortages, crop failures and ecosystem
collapse — grow immensely.
But Mr.
Guterres said the idea that humanity is making enough progress was “an
illusion.” He called on countries not to return to the summit every year to
revisit their climate targets, but to take the opportunity to nudge one another
on “until keeping to 1.5 degrees is assured, until subsidies to fossil fuels
end, until there is a price on carbon and until coal is phased out.”
Many
countries will press against such specific measures, and the absence of leaders
from Russia and China from the meeting cast doubts on how united the world can
be in the struggle.
China, the
world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter, proposed a new emissions target that is
largely indistinguishable from one it made six years ago. The United States,
the largest historic emitter, has an ambitious emissions goal but has not been
able to pass legislation to achieve it. And Australia, India and Russia have
not made any new pledges to draw down climate pollution this decade.
Meanwhile,
only a few wealthy countries have allocated money to help poor and vulnerable
nations cope with the effects of climate disasters that those countries have
done little to cause.
Those two
factors make the likelihood of success at the conference, known as COP26,
uncertain.
Prime
Minister Boris Johnson of Britain kicked off the summit with an urgent call for
action, likening climate change to a bomb primed to explode, even as he
acknowledged the challenges ahead.
“The
tragedy is that this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real,” he said.
“Humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change. It is one minute
to midnight on that doomsday clock, and we need to act now.”
The prime
minister of Barbados, Mia Mottley, poked holes in the climate promises of some
countries that are based on technologies that don’t yet exist.
“This is at
best reckless,” she said, and “at worst dangerous.”
— Somini Sengupta, Lisa Friedman and Marc Santora
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