Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah. Climate Change. Blah, Blah, Blah, Blah.

The in-progress UN Climate Change Conference has attracted 130 world leaders to Glasgow, Scotland. As the host country, Britain says it is the last realistic chance to keep global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — the goal the world set in Paris six years ago.

The COP26, as it’s referred to in the media, is a source for announcements of programs, promises, and aspirations this week. 

If the past is any guide, most will be cast aside by the time COP27 rolls around.

The Paris Climate Agreement came out of COP21 aiming to address climate change and its negative impacts. The major emitting countries committed to reducing their pollution, and richer countries agreed to help poorer nations with economic and technical assistance to mitigate their output.

Studies evaluating those national pledges indicate the cumulative effect of their emissions reductions won’t be large enough to keep temperatures under the 1.5 Celsius goal for the end of this century.  As things stand now the targets that countries laid out are expected to limit future temperature rise to approximately 2.9 degrees Celsius. 

Many of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change researchers have a more pessimistic viewpoint. According to an article published in Nature, six in ten of those responding to a query expect the planet to warm at least 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit (3 degrees Celsius),

Former President Trump embarrassed the U.S. internationally by withdrawing from the agreement. Fortunately, the protocols for withdrawal kept him from making things much worse, even as his administration’s “deregulation” schemes threatened the health of citizens. President Biden has largely undone the damage.

The biggest stories coming out of this year’s summit are pledges about deforestation and reducing methane emissions.

From the Associated Press:

• The U.K. government said it has received commitments from leaders representing more than 85% of the world’s forests to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. Among them are several countries with massive forests, including Brazil, China, Colombia, Congo, Indonesia, Russia and the United States.

• More than $19 billion in public and private funds have been pledged toward the plan...

•   ...Signing the declaration is the easy part,” U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres said on Twitter. “It is essential that it is implemented now for people and planet.”

• Alison Hoare, a senior research fellow at political think tank Chatham House, said world leaders promised in 2014 to end deforestation by 2030, “but since then deforestation has accelerated across many countries.”

From New Scientist:

• The Global Methane Pledge announced at COP26 in Glasgow today commits signatories to reducing emissions 30 per cent by 2030, compared to 2020 levels. The US government also published a detailed blueprint of how it intends to meet the goal.

• While international climate summits usually focus mostly on carbon dioxide (CO2), the dominant driver of the 1.1°C of global warming that has occured since pre-industrial levels, the new initiative puts the spotlight on methane (CH4) leaking from oil and gas wells, pipelines and other fossil fuel infrastructure. Methane is responsible for about 30 per cent of global warming to date, and atmospheric concentrations of the gas have surged since 2007, sparking concern from scientists.

Bad News: Absent from the methane pledge are Australia, China, India and Russia, all among the biggest culprits.

The good news is that President Biden will be moving to aggressively curb methane emissions in the U.S.

From the New York Times:

• For the first time, the Environmental Protection Agency intends to limit the methane coming from roughly one million existing oil and gas rigs across the United States. The federal government previously had rules that aimed to prevent methane leaks from oil and gas wells built since 2015, but they were rescinded by the Trump administration. Mr. Biden intends to restore and strengthen them, aides said.

• According to the E.P.A., the regulation, once finalized, will reduce 41 million tons of methane emissions from 2023 to 2035, the equivalent of 920 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That is more than the amount of carbon dioxide emitted from all U.S. passenger cars and commercial aircraft in 2019, the agency said.

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On bipartisanship: The Republican approach to any proposal involving climate involves protecting the industries that are doing the most damage. There are variations on this theme, ranging from Rep. Louie Gohmert’s “a little warming is good for us” to… I’ll let him say it for himself:

https://twitter.com/therecount/status/1455548347104825344?s=20

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Here’s my bottom line on climate change.

Climate change is a manifestation of systemic problems. Regardless of the political labels used by nations, wealth and status are awarded to individuals and institutions complicit in upholding the “truth” that expansion/growth are progress. 

We are living through the beginning of a global disruption, one that threatens the foundations of the market economy.  I am not sure the nation-state construct will still exist at the end of it.

This does not necessarily mean chaos, although disorders of that sort are always present during periods of change. It does mean that it behoves us to start thinking about what a Plan B should be. Upheavals in society without some sort of goals ultimately lead to the old power structure reasserting itself.  

Goals for change must go beyond the concept of exposure to knowledge being the catalyst for an ever-growing number of people taking action until there is majority support for something to change. This is a model of political change built upon the belief that there is a deficit of knowledge: that if people were only informed, then change would happen. 

The reality is that people are informed. There is a clear majority of people throughout society who are concerned about climate change and want action taken on it—so it follows that instead of a deficit of knowledge, the problem is a deficit of power.

It may be that natural catastrophes will act as a catalyst for action; that assumes that the economic and political infrastructure survives the shock without enabling the rapid rise of authoritarianism.

I think there’s time; I hope there’s time. For Greta Thunberg’s sake.

• Climate activist Greta Thunberg joined protesters Monday at a demonstration outside the COP26 conference to call out world leaders for failing to meet their goals to address global warming.

• What they're saying: "No more blah blah blah," said Thunberg, whose solo climate strikes in 2018 gained international attention, said outside the summit. "No more whatever the f--k they're doing inside there."

• Driving the news: An open letter from Thunberg and fellow youth climate activists Vanessa Nakate, Dominika Lasota and Mitzi Tan drew over 1.2 million signatures as protests played out on Monday.

• "This is not a drill. It's code red for the Earth. Millions will suffer as our planet is devastated — a terrifying future that will be created, or avoided, by the decisions you make. You have the power to decide”

At COP26, UN Secretary-General António Guterres said he stood with the people in the streets for action against climate change.

"The climate action army — led by young people — is unstoppable," he said. "They are larger.  They are louder. And, I assure you, they are not going away."

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