Why the UN
climate action summit matters
With Trump
expected to skip the global meeting, the question will be: can the rest of the
world save itself from climate breakdown if the most powerful nation is pulling
in the opposite direction?
Mark
Hertsgaard
@markhertsgaard
Mon 16 Sep
2019 13.33 BSTLast modified on Mon 16 Sep 2019 14.18 BST
This story
originally appeared in the Nation. It is republished here as part of the
Guardian’s partnership with Covering Climate Now, a global collaboration of
more than 250 news outlets to strengthen coverage of the climate story.
As world
leaders converge on New York City for the United Nations climate action Summit
on 23 September, they enter what may be the most consequential week in climate
politics since Donald Trump’s surprise election as president of the United
States in 2016. Trump, of course, announced soon after taking office that he
was withdrawing the US from the Paris Agreement, the landmark treaty signed at
the last big UN climate summit in 2015. António Guterres, the UN secretary
general, convened this week’s summit precisely because the US and most other
countries remain far from honoring their Paris pledges to reduce heat-trapping
emissions enough to prevent catastrophic climate disruption.
The events
of the coming days – including a global climate strike on 20 September by the
activists whose protests in the past year have pushed the term “climate
emergency” into news reports around the world – may help answer a question that
has loomed over humanity since Trump’s election: can the rest of the world save
itself from climate breakdown if the richest, most powerful nation on earth is
pulling in the opposite direction?
Adopted in
December 2015, the Paris Agreement stands as the strongest achievement of
climate diplomacy since governments first debated the issue at the UN “Earth
Summit” in 1992. In a shock to climate insiders, the agreement not only
committed signatory governments to limit temperature rise to the relatively
less dangerous level of 2 degrees Celsius. It also obliged governments to keep
temperature rise “well below” 2C and, in a major victory for the most
vulnerable countries, to strive for 1.5C. That half-degree may not sound like
much, but it spells the difference between life and death for low-lying coastal
nations such as Bangladesh and island states such as the Maldives – two of many
places that, science says, would literally disappear beneath the waves with
more than 1.5C of warming.
The
announced US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement was big news but also widely
misunderstood news. Despite Trump’s bluster, the US withdrawal still has not
happened. Precisely to guard against such capriciousness, the negotiators in
Paris stipulated that every signatory was legally bound to remain in the
agreement until four years after the treaty took effect, which would only
happen after countries responsible for 55% of global greenhouse gas emissions
ratified it. Thus, the Paris Agreement did not take effect until 4 November
2016. That means the US cannot leave until 4 November 2020 – which, not by
accident, is one day after the US 2020 presidential election. If Trump loses
that election, his successor almost certainly would move to keep the US in the
Paris Agreement.
Trump is
not expected to attend this week’s summit; the US delegation will instead be
led by Andrew Wheeler, a former coal company lobbyist who is now the
administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency. In keeping with Trump’s
denial of climate science and his administration’s dismantling of environmental
regulations and accelerating of fossil fuel development, Wheeler testified to
the US Senate last January that he would not call climate change “the greatest
crisis” facing humanity.
Which
highlights a question that may shape whether this summit turns out to be a
success, a failure, or something in between. What role will the US play? Will
it be a spoiler, actively seeking to disrupt progress? Will it be a braggart
who, as Wheeler boasted (inaccurately) in that testimony, represents “the gold
standard for environmental progress”? Or will it be more like the addled uncle
at the family reunion whose babblings provoke eye-rolls and are ignored?
A 3-5C temperature rise could ‘destroy
civilization’
“Don’t bring
a speech, bring a plan!” For months now, that’s what Secretary General Guterres
has been telling heads of state and government. Instead of the endless
blah-blah-blah heard at most UN meetings, Guterres wants this summit to be more
like “show-and-tell”, a meeting where governments share concrete and replicable
examples of how they are cutting emissions and boosting resilience to the
climate impacts already unfolding. As such, the summit aims to address a
glaring deficiency of the Paris Agreement. In part, because the agreement made
emissions cuts voluntary, global emissions have continued to increase since
2015. On current trends, the earth is heading towards 3-5C of temperature rise
– enough, scientists warn, to destroy civilization as we know it.
“The Secretary
General has very clearly demanded that all participants identify very concrete
measures that can be implemented immediately,” Luis Alfonso de Alba, Guterres’s
special envoy for the summit, said in an interview with Covering Climate Now, a
collaboration of 250 news outlets around the world to strengthen coverage of
the climate story. “What we need is for all actors to put in practice their
commitments [and to] recognize that whatever they had in mind before, they need
to do much more – because climate change is running faster than we are, the
situation is much more serious than we thought.”
Asked how
the world can meet the “well below 2C” target when the current US government is
doing all it can to increase global warming, Alba, a career diplomat from
Mexico, steered clear of criticizing the Trump administration. “We need higher
political will not only in one country but in a number of them,” he said,
before adding that, “We’re very much impressed by what states, cities and
businesses are doing in the US to move into renewables … We are quite confident
that the US will contribute to solutions, even if the decision to withdraw by
the current administration is maintained.”
Indeed,
then-governor Jerry Brown announced at a climate summit last September that he
signed an executive order committing California, the world’s fifth-biggest
economy, to achieve zero carbon emissions by 2045. This summer, New York state,
whose economic output is roughly equivalent to Russia’s, passed a law requiring
the state to achieve 100% carbon-free electricity by 2040. The Under2
Coalition, a group of more than 220 state and local governments around the
world representing 43% of the global economy, is likewise committed to keeping
temperature rise well below 2C.
The climb
remains very steep, however. Scientists with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change declared last October in their landmark Special Report on Global
Warming of 1.5C that humanity had to slash emissions by 45% by 2030, on the way
to net-zero by 2050, to hit the 1.5C target. Failure to do so would condemn
many millions of people, particularly in poor and vulnerable countries, to
destitution and death and make irreversible global warming more likely. Such
dramatic emissions reductions, the scientists added, would require the
transformation of the global energy, agricultural, transportation and other
sectors at a speed and scale without precedent in human history.
China, the
other climate superpower along with the US, will therefore have to do better as
well. China won plaudits in the lead-up to the Paris summit in 2015 by closing
many of its coal-fired power plants. But coal burning in China has recently
crept back up, and Beijing has also financed construction of coal plants in
other countries, particularly in support of its massive “Belt and Road”
initiative to construct ports, railways and other infrastructure across Asia to
the Middle East, Africa and Europe. Alba commends China for promising to go
beyond the emissions reductions it pledged in Paris, but he adds, “We are
asking them to do much more and in particular to green the Belt and Road initiative.
It’s quite important because of the scale of that initiative that they do not
support coal plants but instead renewable energy.”
New era of
climate activism offers hope
When
Secretary General Guterres gavels the summit’s plenary session to order next
Monday, the 12-year deadline outlined by the IPCC scientists will have shrunk
closer to 11. Meanwhile, the burning of the Amazon, Hurricane Dorian’s
devastation of the Bahamas, this summer’s heatwaves across much of the northern
hemisphere, and countless less-heralded disasters illustrate that climate
disruption is no longer a worrisome future specter but a punishing current
reality.
Alba
nevertheless draws hope from the heightened public concern and activism against
the climate threat. “Compared to 10 years ago, the level of public involvement
is very different,” Alba said, “and that’s to a large extent because the news
media is talking about it more and young activists are demanding action.”
In the
United States, activists with the Sunrise Movement and other groups have
protested against Democratic and Republican politicians alike and demanded that
the government implement a Green New Deal. Championed by Representative
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the progressive congresswoman from New York, and
modeled on the New Deal jobs and investment programs President Franklin
Roosevelt implemented to pull the US out of the Great Depression in the 1930s,
the Green New Deal calls for the government to kickstart the transformations of
energy and other sectors the IPCC says are needed. Such a massive investment
program will also, the activists say, create millions of jobs and reduce
economic inequality. Central to the plan is “climate justice”, the notion that
poor and non-white individuals and communities have suffered worst from climate
change and therefore should get precedence for the jobs and opportunities
flowing from a Green New Deal.
Activist
pressure has helped make the Green New Deal the de facto position of the
Democratic party in the US, while also spreading the idea overseas. Each of the
leading Democratic candidates in the race to replace Trump has endorsed one
version or another of a Green New Deal. Bernie Sanders proposes a particularly
robust program that will, he promises, “end unemployment” by creating 20m new
jobs and also help developing nations dump fossil fuels in favor of renewables.
Guterres
has gone out of his way to boost the visibility of the climate youth, most
notably Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who is the best-known face of the
climate movement. Thunberg’s “School Strike For Climate”, begun a year ago in
her home town of Stockholm, spread like wildfire around the world, inspiring
hundreds of thousands of students to skip classes and take to the streets to
demand that governments, in Thunberg’s words, “act like the house is on fire –
because it is”. Guterres has invited Thunberg to keynote a special one-day
youth climate summit on 21 September and also to address world leaders at the
plenary session on 23 September.
Alba
recognizes that the public is sometimes skeptical of UN conferences, and he
acknowledges that the UN “does not have the means to enforce” the commitments made
by governments in the Paris Agreement. Instead, he puts his faith, again, in
the ability of public pressure to compel governments to do the right thing. “As
in many other parts of international law,” he says, “the enforcement rests in
the follow-up and the ‘name and shame’ role of civil society – to expose that a
country is not complying with what they’ve committed to. The media plays an
important role there, and so do activists.”
Meanwhile,
Alba’s own teenage son has given him advice on how to make the case for action:
don’t talk so much about the future that youth will inherit but rather about
the climate disasters happening now. “He had a point,” says Alba. “This is an
emergency we need to deal with today, not tomorrow. Talking about 2030 and 2050
is important because science gives us those dates for achieving certain
objectives, but there’s the danger that it tells people that we have time to
make these changes. And that is a mistake.”
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