The Madrid Summit ends with a timid agreement after flirting with failure

The Madrid Climate Summit closed yesterday with a call to urgently accelerate and expand countries’ emission reduction plans from next year. It is a simple political statement that involves a small step forward. A timid advance that is far away, however, from what science and Western society demand. It was probably the most that could be achieved in a context in which the withdrawal of the United States drags the other major emitters, such as China and India, into inaction and leaves the European Union isolated in the green leadership.

Perhaps one of the greatest achievements of the summit was, paradoxically, what has not been approved: the creation of a carbon emissions market that could have become a sieve through which large emitters easily bought their right to exceed their CO2 ceilings. Neither the environmental organizations wanted it nor Europe was willing to accept it under the conditions proposed by Brazil, India and Australia. It was the last pending fringe of the rules of application of the Paris Agreement that could no longer be approved in Katowice and that Madrid has decided to leave it for the 2020 appointment in Glasgow.

The signs that didn’t come

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said he was “disappointed.” He expected the greats to give at least signs that they were going to change course.” The international community missed an important opportunity to show greater ambition,” he acknowledged but called for not giving up.

The Spanish Minister for the Ecological Transition, Teresa Ribera, who unblocked at the last minute the negotiations blocked by the inoperative Chilean presidency, acknowledged having been left with “a bittersweet taste in her mouth” at the end of the meeting. Sour because he would have “liked to hear much more serious commitments from the big economies.”

China and India have warned that they do not need to expand the ambition of their plans and do not want to revise it until 2023, although the final document invites them to do so in a generic way. The United States has not even intervened in the debate on future commitments something that no longer concerns it, but it has torpedoed the financing issues in which it has participated and may still affect it.

For Ribera, however, positive factors weigh more, such as that “call to climate action” or the fact that the declaration mentions the need to follow the guidelines of science. In his opinion, the agreement paves the way for the entry into force of the Paris Agreement next year, which is when countries should begin to portray themselves. That will be the moment of truth.

There would be talk of a very different situation if the summit had not been held or had not reached any agreement as feared during the 45 hours of extension of the negotiations that broke all records.

Pressure, pressure, pressure

When Spain offered to host the summit in the face of Chile’s social crisis, both these two countries and the European Union set themselves the main objective of pressuring the rest of the large economies that account for more than 70% of CO2 emissions to expand their climate ambition.

The strategy was to turn the Ifema site into a sounding board for the growing social demand, launch the new green plans of the European Union and overwhelm the international community with new scientific evidence. All this has happened, with Greta Thunberg as the most representative image.

But the pressure has been exerted but with little results. Not even Japan, also in the spotlight for its return to coal, has announced new commitments. “It is a bit naïve to think that Greta or the social movements of the West are going to have an impact on a dictatorship like China or in India that we ask to abandon coal when 200 million people do not get electricity,” reflected an observer these days.

Source: The Newspaper