The Madrid summit widens the gap between social pressure and the lack of new climate goals

The climate summit is highlighting the widening gap between social pressure and the lack of a more ambitious response from governments to combat the climate crisis. For now, there is no sign that most governments will want to present new targets to reduce gas emissions beyond the promises made in Paris in 2015.

The European Commission, through its new president Ursula von der Layen, has expressed its willingness to want to raise the bar and raise the CO2 cut from 40% to 50% by 2030 (always compared to 1990). But now European governments need to accept it.

And we will have to see if this invitation moves the other countries of the world from their starting positions.

After all, the EU contributes only 10% of global emissions that contribute to warming.

The gap has even “widened,” says Jennifer Morgan, director of Greenpeace International, for whom the paralysis is worrisome.

Laurence Tubiana, director of the European Climate Foundation – and former advisor to the French government for the Paris Agreement – that Europe must take clear steps, because this is the way to provoke emerging countries, such as China, India, Indonesia or South Africa to move from their boxes.

Europe, on the verge of “taking a big step forward”

The big step forward will be taken by the EU at the Council on 12 and 13, when the approval of a proposal is expected to set it as a formal objective to achieve climate neutrality by 2050.

That is, it poses the challenge of achieving zero emissions by that date (balance by which the gases emitted are neutralized with forests or other sinks).

It is the step that scientists are asking for to contain the increase in temperatures and prevent them from exceeding the level of danger.

The great strategic hope is called the European Green New Deal

“This movement is going to give a lot of energy to the whole process, because not only does it put a figure as a target, but it is a very important economic and political objective,” says Laurence Tubina. Europe would complete all this with a new and hopeful instrument: a Green New Deal, a set of economic initiatives yet to be established but which mark this new path and points out the kind of investments and eligible initiatives that should be making their way to make a clean and decarbonised economy a reality. The European Investment Bank has already defined which investments would be suitable for moving away from the fuel era.

“Europe is creating a good policy framework, focusing ideas so that everyone is going in the same direction. The future means a profound transformation; and that is marked by the Paris agreement and its implementation in that direction,” says Tubiana.

No further movement between the major economies

Barring surprises, now unthinkable, no major gas-emitting country is going to make announcements that increase its targets on gas cuts in Madrid. Naturally, the United States, which has officially begun the process of withdrawing from the climate pact (which must conclude on November 4, 2020), will not.

But neither would China, India or Japan.

However, Tubiana argues that it would be necessary and desirable for China to also consider achieving climate neutrality by 2050 and, even, India would also be in a position to do so. If a country takes on the challenge of achieving zero emissions in 30 years, the immediate effect would be that all the machinery (political, administrative, financial…) would be put in place to achieve emissions cuts, which is what they demand from social organizations.

Eliminating fossil fuel subsidies: this is repeated over and over again by the Secretary-General of the United Nations

United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said at the opening of the conference a week ago that “we expect deep movement from the G20 countries, which account for three-quarters of global emissions.”

It thus challenged the 200 signatory countries of the Paris agreement to stop subsidizing fossil energies (this week the field that still remains to be covered in the maritime transport sector has been known) to face the decarbonization of energy and transport sectors.

National contributions on gas cuts should not be submitted or updated until 2020

However, the Paris agreement, with which 195 countries agreed to stop the rise in temperatures below 2ºC, foresees that the commitments of the states will be reviewed in 2020.

That is, their national contributions – which include gas reductions at different levels and voluntary in each country – will not have to be updated until next year, so most of the new expectations will be delayed until next year’s Glasgow conference (COP26).

“The big event is COP26, but we can’t wait another day,” young activist Greta Thunberg said last Friday at the Casa Encendida in Madrid, shortly before participating in the massive demonstration she led. “We have been on strike for a year and nothing has changed,” he said.

The climate justice movement and Greta Thunberg, the great weapon of pressure on governments, does not want to wait a year, but to act now

The presence of Thunberg – and his entire climate justice movement – at the conference, where he actively participates, is the strongest weapon of societal pressure influencing the negotiation.

A few days before the end of the Madrid conference, indeed, the signs “are not good”, according to Alden Meyer, representative of the Union for Concerned Scientists. For this veteran observer of climate negotiations for years, “if China, India or Japan decide to move it will be on dates close to COP 26”, and not before, as he explained to AFP.

Nor is greater involvement expected from Brazil, “whose government will not change next year,” according to Laurence Tubiana.

Thus, all expectations of progress are whether the EU, at its next summit on 12 and 13, adopts the goal of climate neutrality by 2050, something on which there is still no unanimity, since countries such as Poland or the Czech Republic, heavily dependent on coal could put serious objections.

Nearly 70 countries are already committed to raising their emissions reduction ambitions by 2020, but they are only 8% of the gases

Meanwhile, nearly 70 countries are already committed to raising their emissions reduction ambitions by 2020. At the Madrid meeting, it is possible that this alliance could welcome new countries; but now the sum total of all of them only represents 8% of the world’s gases. The problem is that in this alliance there are none of the big emitting foci.

In this context, the commitment of the private sector will be key. A group of more than 600 institutional investors called on Monday to move out of high dependence on coal.

Negotiations are progressing at a “slow” pace on some key issues, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), which has urged ministers to give a “significant” boost if they want a “minimally acceptable” outcome to emerge from the summit.

According to this organization, the latest draft that the negotiators have shared was hopeful, but it does not include “neither the ambition nor the urgency” demanded by science or the necessary actions to address the climate emergency.

Peru’s Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who presided over COP20, says he has never seen a gap in action “so big”

Former Peruvian Minister Manuel Pulgar-Vidal, who chaired COP20 and now leads WWF’s international climate programme, said “never before” has such a large action gap been seen “between people around the world and the people who sit in the negotiating room.”

However, he hoped that the ministers – who are beginning to meet today – will contribute to reaching a pact.

Laurence Tubiana argues that a possible agreement this Friday should meet three fundamental requirements; and the first of these would be “to ensure that there is full recognition of the diagnosis that the scientists of the Un Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have already made”, specified in the last three reports that give the alert on the climate crisis. Achieving this starting premise is not easy, as demonstrated by the fact that at the conference in Katowice (Poland) last year some countries, especially Arabia, made arrangements to reflect this finding. “Secondly, a formulation of collective ambition is required; and thirdly, we must capitalize on all the transformation effort that comes from the hand of the world of cities or the world of investments”.

European Climate Foundation

Laurence Tubiana sees it as essential that the Madrid agreement makes a full recognition of the diagnosis of the scientists

For regions and countries on the front lines of impacts (and suffering from devastating climate disruptions) all this is far from enough. “Some influential parties have stalled efforts to respond to the climate emergency,” Janine Felson, a representative of the group of 44 island states, said on Twitter.

“We have seen setbacks from developed countries,” said Sonam P. Wangdi, who chairs the group of least developed countries, referring to the “loss and damage” mechanism, an instrument to help nations most damaged by warming but not yet effective.

With the current level of commitments from governments, the thermometers could rise 3.2ºC, so the countries of the South demand that negotiations on the financing of the “damage losses” that they already suffer be accelerated.

According to a report by the International Institute for Environment and Development, rural families in Bangladesh exceed $2 billion a year to repair the damage caused by cyclones and other extreme weather events.

With little progress on the carbon markets front

Nor is there progress in the creation of the carbon market, “that great planetary Excel” that would enthrone around the world a trade or exchange of rights and credits of CO2 emissions between countries and in which the private sector would be entered.

The fear of double accounting of the reductions in gases obtained (which are imputed at the same time, twice, by the country that buys them and the one that sells them), the risk that this will lead to a zero-sum game without effectiveness and the conviction that all this can distract the efforts to make real reductions in each country with internal measures (transport, building, change of energy model…) are some of its innumerable weak points.

Experts see it preferable that there is no agreement on the creation of the carbon market than that “there is a bad agreement”

The definition of these rules of operation of carbon markets is the last pending issue that remains to implement and apply in all its extremes the Paris agreement, but this does not worry much in Europe.

“In carbon markets, very strict operating rules are needed; and if we can’t have them this year, it will be next,” says Laurence Tubiana reflecting the EU’s low interest in this market. “This is not going to condition the success of the Madrid conference.”

“A bad outcome at this point would be worse than lacking it,” says Kelly Levin of the World Resources Institute.

Source: The Vanguard