The United States and China agreed on Wednesday to “enhance ambition” on climate change, issuing a joint statement in which both countries agreed to create strategies to reach net-zero emissions and that commits China, for the first time, to address emissions from methane.
Xie Zhenhua, China’s climate change envoy, announced the declaration in a news conference, saying the two countries had jointly issued a “Glasgow declaration” on “enhancing ambition” on climate change in this decade. Mr. Xie called the statement “important” and said the joint effort was “following the spirit and instructions of our two presidents.”
“We both see the challenge of climate change is existential and a severe one,” he said. “As two major powers in the world, China and the United States, we need to take our due responsibility and work together and work with others in the spirit of cooperation to address climate change.”
It was unclear on Wednesday if the announcement marked a step forward in terms of China’s emissions target. China has pledged to peak its emissions “before” 2030 but has not set a firm date, and U.S. officials have been pushing their counterparts to set a clear earlier date.
John Kerry, President Biden’s envoy for climate change, was expected to make a separate announcement about the joint statement later Wednesday, a State Department spokeswoman said.
China stopped short in the agreement of joining a global methane pledge that Mr. Biden announced last week, in which more than 100 countries have pledged to cut global methane 30 percent by 2030. But Mr. Xie said China would develop a “national plan” to cut methane. China’s current emissions target does not mention methane, the second most powerful greenhouse gas after carbon dioxide. Methane is the main component of natural gas and is also released into the atmosphere from landfills, livestock and thawing permafrost.
Speaking through an interpreter, Mr. Xie said, “There is more agreement between China and the U.S. than divergence.” With two days left to settle a global deal, he added, “We hope that this joint declaration can make a contribution to the success of COP26
American officials also have urged Chinese leaders to agree to limit global warming this century to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius compared to levels before the Industrial Revolution. That target would require nations to make steeper and more immediate cuts than agreed to under the accord reached in Paris in 2015.
Mr. Xie said the joint declaration reiterated the Paris goal of keeping global temperature rise “well below” a 2 degree Celsius rise and striving for 1.5 degrees.
“Both sides recognize that there is a gap between the current effort and the Paris agreement goals,” Mr. Xie said. He added that China and the U.S. have promised to work for an “ambitious and balanced” final outcome of the Glasgow summit.
Scientists have warned that advancing beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels risks calamities like deadly heat waves, water shortages and ecosystem collapse grows immensely. (The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius.)
Doing that requires a drastic change of China’s coal trajectory. Currently, China plans to develop 247 gigawatts of coal power domestically, nearly six times Germanyʼs entire coal-fired capacity.
Mr. Kerry met with Mr. Xie more than two dozen times in the months before the United Nations summit. The two also have met frequently in Glasgow, speaking along with other members of their teams in the windowless delegation offices.
The United Nations climate agency on Wednesday released a draft of an accord that urges countries to “revisit and strengthen” in the next year their plans for cutting planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions.
The draft also urges nations to “to accelerate the phasing out” of coal and to stop subsidizing oil and gas. And it asks them to set policies to stop adding greenhouse gases “by or around midcentury” to help keep global warming at relatively safe levels.
The document will be used as a template to strike a deal among nearly 200 countries as the two-week global climate summit in Glasgow nears its end Friday.
Still, a lack of firm deadlines and enforcement mechanisms in the document pointed to the hurdles ahead as negotiators try to reach a consensus at the summit known as COP26, where a primary goal is to agree on stronger action to keep the average global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), compared to preindustrial levels.
Beyond that threshold, scientists say, the likelihood significantly increases of deadly heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and species extinction. The planet has already warmed by 1.1 degrees Celsius.
David Waskow at the World Resources Institute, a Washington research organization, said that the draft lacked a “clear sense” that limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees is a global target.
Still, he called it a positive step that is “very much in line” with the commitments that vulnerable nations have been seeking from heavily polluting countries.
On Tuesday, United Nations researchers released a report that found that under countries’ current pledges to reduce emissions, the Earth is on track to warm by about 2.5 degrees Celsius (4.5 degrees Fahrenheit).
Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, whose nation is hosting the summit, urged world leaders and negotiators on Wednesday to seize the opportunity to craft an ambitious final agreement.
“We are firmly in the hard yards, the nuts and bolts of international climate diplomacy — and the negotiations are getting tough,” Mr. Johnson said. “With just a few days left there is still a huge amount to do.”
But he said solutions were within reach.
“We just need to reach out together and grasp it,” he said.
While the draft document issued on Wednesday calls for countries to phase out coal and end fossil fuel subsidies, it does not offer any firm timelines. And it calls upon rich countries to “urgently scale up their provision of climate finance” to help developing nations adapt to global warming, without setting targets or enforcement mechanisms.
Tensions have flared over what sorts of financial aid richer countries should give poorer ones to deal with the rising damage from heat waves, floods, droughts and storms. And while there is broad agreement that most nations aren’t cutting their greenhouse gas emissions quickly enough, there’s far less consensus about how to get deeper reductions.
By tradition, a final agreement requires every party to sign on.
If any one country objects, talks can deadlock. And each country brings its own set of often competing interests.
Small island states like the Maldives, facing an imminent threat from rising seas, want all countries to slash emissions as fast as possible. Oil producers like Saudi Arabia and Russia ae nit eager to rapidly phase out fossil fuels. And big developing countries like India are holding out for more help to shift to cleaner energy.
At least six major automakers — including Ford, Mercedes-Benz, General Motors and Volvo — and 30 national governments pledged on Wednesday to work toward phasing out sales of new gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040 worldwide, and by 2035 in “leading markets.”
But some of the world’s biggest car manufacturers, including Toyota, Volkswagen, and the Nissan-Renault alliance did not join the pledge, which is not legally binding. And the governments of the United States, China and Japan, three of the largest car markets, also abstained.
The announcement, made during the COP26 global climate talks in Glasgow, was hailed by climate advocates as yet another sign that the days of the internal combustion engine could soon be numbered. Electric vehicles continue to set new global sales records each year and major car companies have recently begun investing tens of billions of dollars to retool their factories and churn out new battery-powered cars and light trucks.
“Having these major players making these commitments, though we need to make sure that they follow through, is really significant,” said Margo Oge, a former senior U.S. air quality official who now advises both environmental groups and auto companies. “It really tells us that these companies, and their boards, accept that the future is electric.”
The automakers that signed the pledge accounted for roughly one-quarter of global sales in 2019.
Countries that joined the coalition included Britain, Canada, India, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, and Sweden. The addition of India was especially notable, since it is the world’s fourth-largest auto market and has not previously committed to eliminating emissions from its cars on a specific timeline.
California and Washington State also signed the pledge. Last year, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California signed an executive order saying that only new zero-emissions vehicles would be sold in the state by 2035, though regulators have not yet issued rules to make that happen. Washington had not previously made such a formal pledge.
With the summit moving into its final days in Glasgow, its host, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, pleaded with officials and negotiators on Wednesday to seize the opportunity to strike an ambitious agreement that would avert the worst effects of climate change.
“Here in Glasgow, the world has been closer than it has ever been to signaling the beginning of the end of anthropogenic climate change,” he said. “We just need to reach out together and grasp it.”
Mr. Johnson declined to single out countries that have yet to commit to a framework, saying, “I think everybody knows who needs to do what.” But he pleaded with world leaders to give their representatives more room to bargain and called on negotiators to “pull out all the stops.”
“Now is the time to get together and show the determination needed to power on through the blockages,” he said. He warned bluntly that if agreements driven by world leaders and negotiators failed, the world would find it “absolutely incomprehensible.”
Mr. Johnson’s comments on Wednesday were in line with his doomsday rhetoric earlier in the conference, when he likened the price of not reaching an agreement to how “a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it.”
Britain’s hosting of the summit has been blemished by scandals closer to home, with Conservative lawmakers accused of using their positions for financial gain. Mr. Johnson, a Conservative, avoided questions on Wednesday about the allegations, but he said that lawmakers who were not putting the interests of their constituents first “should face appropriate sanctions and punishment.”
Pete Buttigieg wants to retire the phrase “save the planet.”
Speaking in Glasgow at the United Nations climate change summit, Mr. Buttigieg, the transportation secretary, said that the conversation surrounding climate change should be refocused on whether the planet can sustain life. “What we’re trying to save is lives,” he said.
Mr. Buttigieg was joined by Katharine Hayhoe, an atmospheric scientist at Texas Tech University, who often speaks about how to effectively communicate the science of climate change.
“The planet will be orbiting the sun long after we are gone,” she said. “The planet does not need us. We’re the ones who need the planet.”
The discussion, which took place on the sidelines of global climate change negotiations, was part of high-level talks on Tuesday about ways to cut emissions from the transportation sector. Climate pollution from roads, rails, ships and airplanes account for about 24 percent of total global emissions and are rapidly rising.
Mr. Buttigieg said in an interview that he views a $1.2 trillion infrastructure package that the U.S. House and Senate recently passed through the lens of climate change. The transportation department will oversee hundreds of billions of dollars worth of improvements to roads, rails and bridges — work that could lead to a rise in emissions if green technologies are not sufficiently incorporated.
“We are paying a lot of attention to the climate implications of the choices we are making,” Mr. Buttigieg said, noting that in addition to road expansions the bill also provides funding for public transportation, bike lanes and new electric vehicle charging stations.
But the U.S. did not join countries in an international pledge to rapidly phase out gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles, Mr. Buttigieg said Tuesday, adding that the Biden administration is “focused on what we are doing at home.”
The pledge by six automakers and about 30 countries to phase out sales of new gasoline and diesel-powered vehicles by 2040 worldwide — and by 2035 in “leading markets” — would move at a faster pace than the Biden administration has called for.
Mr. Biden has signed an executive order aimed at ensuring that 50 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States are electric by 2030, a move made with the support of major automakers.
“Different countries obviously are taking different approaches,” Mr. Buttigieg said. “We have to do what’s right for the United States and also support international action. That’s the balance, I think, that we’re striking.”
Britain, Canada and India are among those that joined the pledge, along with California and Washington State.
Greta Thunberg and other young climate activists called on the United Nations on Wednesday to declare a state of emergency on climate change, using the U.N.’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic as a blueprint for action.
In a petition to António Guterres, the U.N. secretary general, the group argued that the organization had not marshaled its full institutional powers to confront climate change. They urged it to declare a “Level 3 emergency” — the U.N.’s highest designation — as it did for Covid-19.
That would allow the organization to deploy resources and staff to countries most susceptible to climate change disasters. And it would mean that the U.N. could help countries meet their emission reduction pledges, the petitioners said.
“Many of us — especially those from small island states and Indigenous communities — fear we will have become climate refugees,” the petition said, adding, “We have no time to wait.”
Addressing Mr. Guterres. they said, “We hope that in standing with us, you will use all your institutional powers to act with us.”
The 14 petitioners come from all over the world, including Nigeria, Brazil, Argentina, India, the United States, the Marshall Islands and Palau, where the activists say they have seen firsthand the affects of climate change, from rising sea levels and heat waves to wildfires and flooding.
The petition comes in the final days of the climate conference in Glasgow, known as COP26, where the United Nations is working on an accord that entreats nations to set more aggressive goals on cutting climate change emissions.
Activists like Ms. Thunberg, 18, have called the summit a failure akin to a “green wash campaign, a P.R. campaign,” for business leaders and lawmakers.
Many of the activists had previously filed a petition in 2019 to the United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child against Argentina, Brazil, France, Germany and Turkey, accusing them of violating child rights by not cutting emissions and perpetuating climate change. The committee dismissed the petition in 2021, though it recognized that countries had responsibilities to reduce emissions.
Two weeks ago, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, who has advanced some of the most ambitious climate policies in the United States, announced he would be leading a delegation to the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow. Four days later, his office abruptly announced he had changed his mind.
“Family obligations” was all his office would say, refusing to publicly elaborate in a decision that, times being what they are, unleashed a barrage of conspiracy theories. Was the governor having a bad reaction to the Covid-19 booster shot he had just gotten? Were any of his children — he has four ages 12 and under — infected again with the coronavirus? No and no, Capitol sources said.
Mr. Newsom’s allies noted that most parents would understand why a couple with four small children might not want to take an extended trip to Glasgow over Halloween. California environmentalists also suggested that he might not be so wrong to skip the annual climate conference, which many of them view as a jet-fuel-wasting spectacle.
In any case, the governor stayed home, working at his Capitol office, according to his spokeswoman, Erin Mellon. Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis, the former U.S. ambassador to Hungary, led the California delegation instead.
Nevertheless, as days passed with no public appearances, chatter persisted.
“I don’t know where Gavin Newsom is and won’t speculate,” one Republican assemblyman, Kevin Kiley, tweeted on Sunday. “But it’s pretty strange for the Governor to disappear for 11 days without explanation.”
“Where’s Gavin?” demanded Charlie Kirk, the head of the right-wing activist group Turning Point U.S.A.
“It’s funny how certain folks can’t handle truth,” Jennifer Siebel Newsom, the governor’s wife, shot back in a tweet that was subsequently deleted. “When someone cancels something, maybe they’re just in the office working; maybe in their free time they’re at home with their family, at their kids’ sports matches, or dining out with their wife. Please stop hating and get a life.”
By Monday, “Gavin Newsom” was trending on Twitter, even after Vogue posted a photo spread from the lavish San Francisco wedding of the heiress Ivy Getty, with a masked Mr. Newsom appearing in the background.
During a call with reporters, California senators at the Glasgow summit became increasingly frustrated with questions about the governor’s absence. “There is nobody in California who wanted to be at this conference more than Gavin Newsom,” Robert Hertzberg, a Democratic senator from Van Nuys, said on Monday. “But we’re all human beings, man, we’re all human beings — something clearly — he’s with his family. I don’t think it’s appropriate to further dig into it. I take him at face value.”
On Tuesday, Mr. Newsom reappeared at a public event in Monterey, Calif., and explained that he had skipped the summit because his recent schedule — including a hard-fought victory over a recall campaign — had taken a toll on his family.
Activists who traveled from across the world to Glasgow to take part in the global climate talks and protest on the sidelines have expressed disappointment at what they see as empty promises from world leaders.
Yet many also found a new unity in their ranks and a renewed sense of purpose as they came together to demand urgent action, further strengthening a global climate movement that has transcended borders.
For young activists in particular, who have led some of the most urgent calls for action, and who organized the largest climate demonstration in Glasgow, the two-week conference known as COP26 has provided a moment to push for climate justice while elevating some lesser heard voices.
On the Scene: Climate Protests
On the Scene: Climate Protests
The protests related to COP26, the United Nations climate summit, peaked on Friday and Saturday, drawing tens of thousands of people to Glasgow’s streets.
Here’s what I saw →
Evelyn Acham, a 30-year-old activist from Uganda, was attending her first United Nations climate conference. She said the protests provided an platform to communities on the front lines of the climate crisis who are least responsible for the emissions blamed for heating the planet.
“People need to learn something from what just happened,” she said of the marches in Glasgow. “We’re not leaving Glasgow the same, we are not leaving the world the same.”
Ms. Acham represents a group called Fridays for Future MAPA, which stands for Most Affected People and Areas, a branch of the climate advocacy group that grew out of Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg’s solo school strike that began in 2018. Ms. Acham hailed the opportunity for activists like her — who often face clampdowns on dissent in their home countries — to gather with counterparts from around the world.
Luisa Neubauer, a 25-year-old who founded the German branch of Fridays for Future, said that while “governments have been great at making promises and pledges and setting targets,” in previous conferences, they have not yet followed through.
Last year, Ms. Neubauer won a lawsuit against the German government, in which a judge ruled that the country’s climate protection measures were insufficient. She said that solidarity in the global climate movement is growing, and that the strong turnout for protests showed “what a human movement on the street can look like.”
“You see the faces of the climate crisis, you’ll see people that look like you and me who really care, who walked through the rain,” she said. “And we’re really saying this is the power and this is a people who are not letting go of their own future and of their own presents. And that’s beautiful.”
Many of the most prominent climate justice activists come from the Fridays for Future movement. President Barack Obama acknowledged the impact of these mostly young protesters in a speech to the conference on Monday. “They are forming a movement across borders to make the older generation that got us into this mess see that we all have an obligation to dig ourselves out of it,” he said.
As the conference draws to a close on Friday and negotiators from some 200 countries try to reach an agreement, activists said that they were seeking not just stronger targets for reducing harmful greenhouse gas emissions, but also an acknowledgment that the global response to climate change has long neglected the needs of developing nations.
We asked New York Times readers to submit questions to our journalists in Glasgow who are covering the COP26 climate talks. This year’s conference is seen as crucial for efforts to avert the worst consequences of climate change.
Here are a few of the questions from readers, and responses from our journalists:
Question: How do we know the average global temperature before the Industrial Revolution?
World leaders often talk about holding the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius (or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) above “preindustrial levels.” But, surprisingly, there’s some debate on how to define preindustrial.
Many studies use the period between 1850 and 1900 as a starting point to measure global warming, since records from thermometers started to become widespread then, and that was before fossil-fuel burning took off on a massive global scale. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says global surface temperatures were about 1.1 degrees Celsius higher over the past decade than they were between 1850 and 1900.
But the actual Industrial Revolution began well before then, so other scientists say we should use 1720 to 1800 as a baseline. Going back that far can be a little trickier: Some instrumental records do exist from places like Europe, but researchers also have to reconstruct global temperatures by using various proxies, like ice cores or tree rings, that provide evidence of how Earth’s climate changed over time.
Different baselines don’t seem to effect the big picture: Earth has gotten a lot hotter as industrialization took off and is on track to get hotter without big changes.
Question: Environmental goals are at the center of the talks, but why isn’t the conference focusing on educating people on how to make it in a “greener” economy?
You’re right, teaching about climate change and preparing young people to work in a low-carbon economy is not on the formal agenda at COP26. But it is being discussed. Last week, Britain’s secretary of education, Nadhim Zahawi, set out a plan for integrating climate change and sustainability into the classroom.
Outside the summit, young activists are discussing it too. Malala Yousafzai said last week that investing in girls’ education is critical so they have the skills to help lead the transitions to greener economies. She and Vanessa Nakate, a Ugandan climate activist, said that the effects of climate change have disproportionately disrupted the education of girls in developing countries, who are often the first to drop out of school to help their mothers recover crops or collect water during droughts or floods.
“Climate, gender equality and girls’ education are not separate issues,” Ms. Yousafzai said in a panel discussion at a Times event in Glasgow. “They are all interlinked.”
— Lisa Friedman and Jenny Gross
Question: What or who will enforce the pledges made at COP26?
The short answer is no one. The longer answer is slightly more complicated.
Under the 2015 Paris agreement, every nation agreed to craft its own plan for curbing greenhouse gas emissions and to regularly update those pledges. The agreement didn’t force anyone to set specific targets and there are no penalties for missing goals — the fear was that countries like China and the United States would never sign a treaty like that.
Instead, the agreement aims to work through global peer pressure, by requiring countries to be transparent about what they are planning to do and measuring their progress. There are some signs this is working: Since Paris, countries have enacted a bunch of new climate policies and increased cooperation on issues like funding clean energy around the world.
That said, countries still aren’t doing nearly enough to avoid severe temperature increases. And ultimately, it’s up to policymakers, civil society groups, activists and voters in each country to pressure governments to follow through on the promises they’ve made.
Around the world, governments and automakers are focused on selling newer, cleaner electric vehicles as a key solution to climate change. Yet it could take years, if not decades, before the technology has a drastic effect on greenhouse gas emissions.
One reason for that? It will take a long time for all the existing gasoline-powered vehicles on the road to reach the end of their life spans.
This “fleet turnover” can be slow, analysts said, because conventional gasoline-powered cars and trucks are becoming more reliable, breaking down less often and lasting longer on the road. The average light-duty vehicle operating in the United States today is 12 years old, according to IHS Markit, an economic forecasting firm. That’s up from 9.6 years old in 2002.
Today, Americans still buy roughly 17 million gasoline-burning vehicles each year. Each of those cars and light trucks can be expected to stick around for 10 or 20 years as they are sold and resold in used car markets. And even after that, the United States exports hundreds of thousands of older used cars annually to countries such as Mexico or Iraq, where the vehicles can last even longer with repeated repairs.
That is why experts say that cutting emissions from transportation, which accounts for nearly one-third of America’s greenhouse gas emissions, will be a difficult, painstaking task. Read more in this article:
The theme of Wednesday at the Glasgow climate summit is transportation. Around the world, governments and automakers are promoting electric vehicles as a key technology to curb oil use and fight climate change.
But as electric cars and trucks go mainstream, they have faced a persistent question: Are they really as green as advertised?
While experts broadly agree that plug-in vehicles are a more climate-friendly option than traditional one, they can still have their own environmental impacts, depending on how they’re charged up and manufactured.
Here’s a guide to some of the biggest worries — and how they might be addressed:
Electric vehicles are better for the climate than gas-powered cars, yet many Americans are still reluctant to buy them. One reason: The larger upfront cost.
But data published in January showed that despite the higher sticker price, electric cars may actually save drivers money in the long run.
A team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology calculated both the carbon dioxide emissions and full lifetime cost — including purchase price, maintenance and fuel — for nearly every new car model on the market.
They found that electric cars were easily more climate friendly than gas-burning ones. Over a lifetime, they were often cheaper, too.
Read the full article below:
Wealthy nations have promised to “pursue efforts” to keep global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, compared to preindustrial times. But meeting that goal means that all countries must commit to cutting emissions faster and deeper than they are already doing.
For every fraction of a degree of warming, scientists say, the world will experience more intense heat waves and drought, and more deadly floods and wildfires. Humans have already heated the planet by roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius, or 2 degrees Fahrenheit, since the 19th century.
Countries have less than 10 years to reduce emissions enough to keep the planet below 1.5 degrees of warming. So if leaders don’t commit to bold steps now, when so much global attention is focused on the Glasgow climate talks, many fear that the world will barrel toward dangerous levels of warming.
Read the article below to see how far the world has, and hasn’t, come.
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