Countries haven't offered enough cuts to emissions to stop humanity destroying its life support system, and until they do that little else matters, writes Rod Oram
One outcome of the UN climate negotiations in Glasgow matters above all others: the nations of the world failed to commit to cuts in emissions deep enough, fast enough to keep the Earth more or less habitable for humanity.
However, this COP did achieve two big things previous ones had not, although each comes with a major caveat. Unanimous agreement on the goal of 1.5C; but not yet agreement on the speed needed to get there. Most business leaders are now deeply engaged on climate; but civil society is not yet fully represented at the table.
The Glasgow Climate Pact was also peppered with some other success. Subsequent columns will discuss the key ones for New Zealand.
But all of those gains are second order issues, or less. If we don’t commit to solving the primary challenge of drastic emission reductions by 2030 all the secondary solutions, as vital as they are, won’t be enough to save us.
Simple physics explains why the future of humanity hangs on fast, deep emissions cuts. We’ve known about it for well over a century. Joseph Tyndall in Ireland established the science in the 1850s and Svante Arrhenius refined it in Sweden in 1896.
Yet, we’ve kept pouring greenhouse gases into the atmosphere in fast-increasing volumes, causing considerable damage to the planet.
But now, though, we are very close to hitting the point of no return. If the temperature rises more than 1.5C we will trigger tipping points in the climate and other Earth systems. They will feed back on each other in a cascade of deeply adverse impacts on nature, on which we depend. Simply, humanity is destroying its life-support system.
Science tells us we can only emit a very small additional volume of greenhouse gases before the temperature breaches the 1.5C threshold. It’s 440 billion tonnes globally from 2020, which means now less than eight years of emissions at our still rising rate.
When the 26th annual UN climate negotiations began in Glasgow on October 31, we faced a 2.7C world, based on the deeply inadequate emission reduction pledges by the nations of the world.
In two weeks of intense negotiations, political leaders only managed to whittle it down to 2.4C. But that was based on the premise that all operational and announced climate policies would actually deliver the emission reductions the politicians were promising.
If governments figure out how to devise more policies and programmes to deliver their climate pledges in full, and if other non-national government commitments made in Glasgow are realised, COP26, theoretically, would get us to a 1.9C world. Better but still deficient.
New Zealand’s latest pledge of a 50 percent net reduction in emissions by 2030, delivered many months late just before COP26 started, looks good at first glance. But it ranks us high among nations on the scale of fudges and empty promises, as Carbon Action Tracker’s analysis shows. It estimates our actual cuts in domestic emissions could be as little as 25 percent.
Around the world, governments are failing their citizens on climate for many reasons. But here are two of the big, unrelenting forces they deny or ignore.
- Nature’s in charge: Its forces are determining our climate future. Politicians still believe, though, they’re running the show. For example, our Government tells us after decades of failing to stop emissions rising, another six months to come up with a broad Emissions Reduction Plan won’t matter. It’s best practice to align with the annual budget round, it said. But the truth is our Government can’t bring itself – or doesn’t have the political and civil service capacity - to make the myriad, complex, politically difficult decisions it has to for plausible, inter-connected climate policies.
It’s a common failing of governments around the world. The UK, for example, has the longest and best track record of parliamentary, governmental and societal responses to the climate crisis. It dates back to 2008 when Parliament passed with all-party support the country’s climate legislation. Yet, the Johnson Government’s development of the UK’s long-term strategy to achieve net zero by 2050 was long delayed until the week before the UK, as President of COP26, opened proceedings.
One of a number of causes was internecine warfare between the Treasury and the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy. The former is headed by Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, an ex-Goldman Sachs neoliberal still pursuing small government. The culture of the latter department is to engage with businesses to devise policies, programmes and financial help to tackle complex problems such as climate.
Nature would give us more time – but only on one condition: humanity makes deep, fast cuts in emissions this decade. That’s anthropocentric, of course. Nature doesn’t know we exist. It only responds to the conditions we throw at it. It’s all about the physics – if we take some of the pressure off climate change, we get a bit more time to solve the crisis.
- Money is moving much faster than politics: The Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, for example, was one of COP26’s highlights. Its institutional investor members say they want to deploy US$130 trillion of capital in climate solutions. That will dramatically accelerate development and deployment of climate compatible technologies.
But money and technology, however abundant, won’t solve all our climate problems. The reason is simple. The climate crisis is far more than a technological crisis. It’s a whole-of-society crisis. Contributing causes include inequalities in health, education, wellbeing, gender, race and political power among other necessities for healthy, empowered lives that can rise to our climate challenges.
If we don’t address those social failures as integral parts of tackling the climate crisis, the current political culture and system will fail. Then governmental responses to climate will only become more dysfunctional; and money flows will falter.
Revolutions happen. But even the beneficial ones take time to establish an effective new order. The climate crisis doesn’t give us time for that. We have to markedly improve existing political and economic systems.
Here are three ways governments can turn from limiters to enablers, so we can solve the whole-of-society climate crisis:
- Everybody counts: That’s true of all communities in a society, and in the community of nations too. If everyone is represented at the table, and their representatives are empowered, then all people can benefit fully from climate commitments and progress. Citizen assemblies, with members selected from a true cross-section of society, are one example of new ways to involve all communities in climate responses.
Conflict between the empowered and the impoverished is even more extreme at the global level. High income countries have long exploited developing ones. For example, we have cheap consumer goods thanks to their low wages. That’s a wretched bargain.
It’s far worse with climate. Cheap and abundant fossil fuels were one way high-income countries became wealthy. Now we have to purge fossil fuels from our lives to help solve the climate crisis, high income countries have a moral duty to fully support developing countries adopt clean energy to help with their development.
But for decades, high income societies have paid only lip-service to that. Their behaviour towards developing countries in Glasgow was their most despicable at any COP to date. They still refused to pay the pathetically small sum of US$100 billion a year they collectively promised developing countries at COP15 in 2009; and they continued to stall the devising of the far bigger funding mechanism intended to replace it.
Yet the money’s available. Governments learnt during the Global Financial Crisis and the pandemic that they can create all the money they want to support their own economies and citizens. Denying a fraction of those apparently limitless sums to developing countries is immoral. It’s also stupid. The longer it takes developing countries to decarbonise, the worse the climate crisis will get.
- Working better together: COP26’s delegates came from a wide range of cultures, societies and status. Many of the ones I met blended three crucial characteristics: they were steely-eyed about the severity of the climate crisis and the scarce time left to solve it; they were creative, compelling and undaunted in their pursuit of remedies; they co-operated with whoever they could in political, civil society and business delegations.
I also heard some examples of young political members of country delegations who tried in negotiations to work around the entrenched positions of their typically older, more senior colleagues.
Big breakthroughs will take much more of such courage. I believe, though, such young people will ultimately triumph. Securing the future of their generation is far greater a motivation for them than is their older colleagues’ defence of their past.
- If we help nature, nature will help us. If we make fast, deep cuts in emissions – at least 50 percent globally by 2030 – the escalating climate crisis will slow slightly. That would give us a precious few more years to secure our pathways to net zero by 2050.
But we must not fool ourselves that offsets such as carbon sequestration and other types of carbon credits are a substitute for real reductions in emissions. We must use offsets to help us reduce the severely excess levels of greenhouse gases we’ve already pumped into the atmosphere. If we use them to excuse our new emissions, we are delaying the climate crisis not solving it.
Sequestration and other forms of nature-based solutions are our most valuable allies in our climate fight. Yes, they store carbon but far more importantly they give us the greater benefits of restored biodiversity, ecosystem health and resilience of Earth systems. They help rebuild our life support system. In contrast, virtually every human-devised clean technology can at best only achieve neutral climate impact. They don’t actively restore Earth systems.
The many ways we use and abuse nature are causing the co-crises of climate breakdown and ecosystem collapse. They are inter-dependent in both their causes and remedies. So the right solutions to one can deliver restorative benefits to the other.
The best way to achieve such symbiotic solutions is to stop paying nature (via people who own trees) for absorbing our excessive carbon emissions; and start paying nature (via people who own any natural domain) for all the ecosystem benefits its restoration gives us.
Such a reprioritisation would enhance nature, preserve most sequestration capacity for removing existing greenhouse gases rather than new emissions, fast-forward actual cuts in all sources of emissions including agriculture, and development of the technology we need to achieve them.
The Glasgow Climate Pact offered progress in some broad and tentative steps on the likes of deforestation, land use and farming. But this new approach, led by the UN which is trying to achieve synergy between its two conventions on climate and biodiversity, is vastly complex and will take huge science, inspiration and determination to bring to fruition, hopefully within the next decade.
New Zealand should be at the forefront of this vital work. We have rich, unique and abundant natural resources on land and at sea. Yet we have abused and degraded them as badly as many countries have. Worse, these twinned climate and biodiversity opportunities rank low in our responses to the co-crises.
Yet we are better equipped than many countries to respond to those crises because we are a small, diverse, cohesive and distinctive society endowed with, and responsible for, a great natural taonga.
We’re beginning to understand that, particularly as more New Zealanders appreciate Te Ao Māori, the indigenous understanding of the natural world which ensures humans are in a right, symbiotic relationship with nature. Notably, the voice of such indigenous knowledge is growing in strength and impact at COPs and was a welcome development at Glasgow.
Thank you for reading my reports from Glasgow. It was a privilege to be there, and I learnt a lot which will serve me well in my continuing coverage of climate issues. Above all, I'm very grateful for the generous reader donations which made the trip possible.
