The UN takes a timid step without completing the path against the climate emergency

The Climate Action Summit organized by the UN has concluded with a modest and ambivalent outcome. There are no new political agreements, simply because the conference – which brought together dozens of heads of state – did not have this objective. The milestones needed to complete the path against the climate emergency and achieve a greenhouse gas-neutral economy by 2050 are still missing.

However, the UN has gained undoubted credit in its search for a great social alliance (young people, cities, innovative companies…), the strategy followed to demand that governments truly assume the ecological crisis.

The swords remain aloft between those seeking to strengthen the Paris Agreement and lobbies that resist favoring the energy transition and climate justice.

Neither the Secretary General of the UN, Antonio Guterres, nor anyone expected that a pact would come out of this meeting. “The result has been positive,” Guterres said.

The great platform

The conference was designed with the aim of organizing a large platform for the exchange of experiences, projects and initiatives (the best references) as a way to force more or less recalcitrant governments to present new plans to improve their contributions signed in the Paris Agreement of 2015.

The balance of the interventions of the government representatives leaves a bittersweet taste.

A total of 77 countries have made a commitment to ensure that by 2050 the planet achieves a net balance of emissions; that is, a decarbonized economy (where the generation of gases is balanced with their absorption in sinks, such as forests, or other technologies that mitigate or neutralize them).

But let’s not forget that 2050 marks a strategic, long-term goal and that what is at stake now and here is fundamentally to place a closer milestone, an intermediate point to make that horizon credible: to achieve a reduction in emissions of 45% by 2030, a necessary preliminary step to follow the right path by mid-century (and stop the runaway and dangerous increase in temperatures).

And at this point, the progress is very modest.

Shortly before the start of the summit, it was reported that specifically 75 nations, which represent 37% of global greenhouse gas emissions – largely developing countries – plan to increase their ambition in their next national climate action plans. That is, only a little more than a third of the additional effort needed has been gathered before the review of the new contributions of the governments at the Glasgow summit (December 2020). In it, countries must show new cards (to update the Paris Agreement).

An influential figure

The small achievements have been achieved in large part thanks to the successful mobilization of students around the planet, a phenomenon propelled by the countless organizations born in the shadow of the figure of Greta Thunberg, the young Swedish activist, who has not only endorsed her leadership, but has turned the movement for climate justice (between generations, between regions, between social strata…) in a current with transformative force (at least, on the emerging value scale).

Greta Thunberg, only 16 years old, consolidates her aura of symbolic force of extraordinary power. His views on Donald Trump confirm and betray that his figure comes to replace the absence of leadership in climate action; that the portrait of this teenage activist symbol of a premature generational consciousness is a relevant actor on the world stage.

The new generations knock on the door of the UN. More evidence? Thunberg’s campaign against air flights (Stay on the Ground, Shame on Fly), which account for 2.5% of CO2 emissions (and which will double to reach 8.2 billion tons of CO2 by 2037), has also provoked a “stage fright” at the new conference of companies (ICAO) that is being held these days in Montreal.

More than emotionality

Usually, the annual UN climate conferences usually incorporate young people (representatives of various regions of the planet), whose interventions give a note of realism and emotion to the drama of the climatic ravages.

But on this occasion, the routine scenery was broken with a monumental anger of the freckled teenager to the politicians, whom she accused of “treason” and of failing the young people.

The tsunami of students overwhelmed all the forecasts in the street these days and has turned Greta into the great battering ram of the UN to demand that the great powers increase their policies of climate action.

Thunberg has also fought climate denialism on America’s own playing field. and has extirpated it among its young population.

She alone checked Trump.

Perhaps, for this reason, the American president appeared unexpectedly at the UN headquarters, before leaving quickly and running; it seemed that he came to counterprogram the conference, but by denying that it was a snub, he induces us to think of a behavior typical of those who explore a territory that they feel occupied.

The risk of mythology

The biggest risk now is that Thunberg’s popularity feeds a mythology with feet of clay or that she ends up being a revered, youthful and cornered Nobel Prize for weariness, once the biological cycle of any media phenomenon has been completed. The evidence of warming and its impacts on the planet feeds science with knowledge robust and solid enough to have a prominent role on its own; in the future, public debate and political negotiation will continue on the impulses of climate science. With or without the presence of new Gretas.

Innovative companies

A significant achievement is that a total of 87 large companies (with an asset valuation of $2.3 trillion) are taking steps to synchronize and align their businesses with the recommendations of scientists, who claim to limit the worst impacts of climate change; and among them are three Spanish women (Ibedrola, Acciona and Telefónica). They are the realization that certain companies have decided to take the step and enter the energy transition, something that runs into serious resistance.

The example of these companies is the best news at a time when many corporations (especially the banks that finance projects to develop new coal plants) trust everything to a washing of image, according to complaints from some of the large NGOs.

The so-called Alliance 2050 (countries, regions, cities, companies…) thus expresses its “intention” to try to collectively reduce emissions by at least 45% by 2030 and prepare national strategies to achieve carbon neutrality by mid-century. Among the signatories are Spain, Catalonia or the cities of Madrid and Barcelona.

Meanwhile, Germany, for example, recalled that it will increase its funds for global climate protection from 2,000 to 4,000 million euros. His plans, however, delay until 2038 the closure of coal-fired power plants, something repeatedly demanded by Antonio Guterres.

The role of Spain

Spain and Peru, together with other bodies and agencies, have created the Coalition of Social and Political Promoters that drags 45 countries to achieve gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls as an essential component of actions to combat climate change.

Pedro Sánchez reiterates the Spanish commitment to climate action while the Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, has continued during her interventions asking for finances that turn their backs on reserves and energy assets that are a risk to the business economic balance itself

Nevertheless, the world would need to increase its efforts three to five times to contain climate change, curb the increase in warming to a maximum of 1.5 ºC (compared to pre-industrial levels) and prevent damage such as those already perceived in many regions of the planet (heat waves, thaws, rise in the level of the margin, more intense hurricanes, greater recurrence of extreme weather events). This is also shown by these last 5 years with clear signs of warming. according to a report by the World Meteorological Organization.

Source: The Vanguard