Radio Habana Cuba
Greta Thunberg leads protests in Italy ahead of COP26.
The United Nations has assembled world leaders to try to tackle the climate crisis for the twenty-sixth time. Meanwhile, the United States is producing more oil and natural gas than ever; the amount of greenhouse gases (GHGs) in the atmosphere and global temperatures are both still rising; and we are experiencing the extreme weather and climate chaos that scientists have warned us about for forty years—which will only get worse without serious climate action.
So far, the planet has warmed 1.2° Celsius (2.2° F) since pre-industrial times. We already have the technology we need to convert our energy systems to clean, renewable energy, and doing so would create millions of jobs for people across the world.
“We accuse world leaders of failure, and with a daring vision of hope, we demand the impossible. We will sing and dance and lock arms against despair and remind the world there is so much worth rebelling for.”
The greatest obstacle to action that we face is our dysfunctional, neoliberal political and economic system and its control by plutocratic and corporate interests. The climate crisis has exposed this system’s structural inability to act in the real interests of humanity, even when our very future hangs in the balance.
Can COP26, currently being held in Glasgow, Scotland, be different?
A succession of United Nations and civil society reports in the lead up to COP26 have been sounding what U.N. Secretary General António Guterres has called a “thundering wake-up call” and a “code red for humanity.” In Guterres’s opening speech at COP26 on November 1, he said that “we are digging our own graves” by failing to solve this crisis.
Yet governments are still focusing on long-term goals like reaching “Net Zero” by 2050, 2060, or even 2070—so far in the future that they can keep postponing the radical steps needed to limit global warming to 1.5° Celsius. The United States has set a shorter term target of reducing its emissions by 50 percent from their peak 2005 level by 2030. But the nation’s present policies would only lead to a 17 to 25 percent reduction by then.
The Clean Energy Performance Program (CEPP), which was part of the Build Back Better Act, could account for much of that gap by paying electric utilities to increase reliance on renewables by 4 percent each year, and penalizing utilities that don’t. But on the eve of COP26, President Joe Biden dropped CEPP from the bill under pressure from Senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema and their fossil-fuel industry puppet masters.
Meanwhile, the U.S. military, the largest institutional emitter of GHGs on Earth, was exempted from any constraints whatsoever under the Paris Agreement. Peace activists in Glasgow are demanding COP26 fix this huge black hole in global climate policy by including the U.S. war machine’s GHG emissions, and those of other militaries, in national emissions reporting and reductions.
China now officially emits more CO2 than the United States. But a large part of China’s emissions are driven by the rest of the world’s consumption of Chinese products, and its largest customer is the United States.
An MIT study in 2014 estimated that exports account for 22 percent of China’s carbon emissions. On a per capita consumption basis, Americans still account for three times the greenhouse gas emissions of our Chinese neighbors and double the emissions of Europeans.
Wealthy countries have also fallen short on the commitment they made in Copenhagen in 2009 to help other countries tackle climate change by providing financial aid that would grow to $100 billion per year by 2020. They have provided increasing amounts, reaching $79 billion in 2019, but the failure to deliver the full amount that was promised has eroded trust between rich and poor countries. A committee headed by Canada and Germany at COP26 is charged with resolving the shortfall and restoring trust.
People are rising up against the corrupt neoliberal political and economic system in countries all over the world. Its savage impacts affect their lives in different ways, but the climate crisis is a danger to humanity that requires a universal, global response.
One inspiring civil society group on the streets in Glasgow during COP26 is Extinction Rebellion, which proclaims, “We accuse world leaders of failure, and with a daring vision of hope, we demand the impossible. We will sing and dance and lock arms against despair and remind the world there is so much worth rebelling for.”
Extinction Rebellion and other climate groups at COP26 are calling for Net Zero by 2025—not 2050—as the only way to meet the 1.5° goal agreed to in Paris.
Greenpeace is calling for an immediate global moratorium on new fossil fuel projects and a quick phaseout of coal-burning power plants. Even the new coalition government in Germany, which includes the Green Party and has more ambitious goals than other large wealthy countries, has only moved up the final deadline on Germany’s coal phaseout from 2038 to 2030.
The Indigenous Environmental Network is bringing Indigenous people from the Global South to Glasgow to tell their stories at the conference. They are calling on the Northern industrialized countries to declare a climate emergency, to keep fossil fuels in the ground, and to end fossil fuels subsidies globally.
Friends of the Earth has just published a new report titled Nature-Based Solutions: A Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing as a focus for its work at COP26. It exposes a new trend in corporate greenwashing involving industrial-scale tree plantations in poor countries, which corporations plan to claim as “offsets” for continued fossil fuel production.
The government of the United Kingdom, which is hosting the conference in Glasgow, has endorsed this scheme. Friends of the Earth highlights the effect of these massive land-grabs on local and Indigenous communities, calling them “a dangerous deception and distraction from the real solutions to the climate crisis.”
Activist groups are simultaneously organizing around the world to put pressure on governments in their own countries. Hundreds of climate activists and Indigenous people have been arrested in protests at the White House, and five young Sunrise Movement activists began a hunger strike in Washington, D.C., on October 19.
U.S. climate groups also support the Green New Deal, H.Res.332, that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, has introduced in Congress, which specifically calls for policies to keep global warming below 1.5° Celsius, and currently has 103 cosponsors. The bill sets ambitious targets for 2030, but only calls for Net Zero by 2050.
Like Greta Thunberg’s yearlong School Strike for Climate, the climate movement in the streets of Glasgow is informed by the recognition that the science is clear and the solutions to the climate crisis are readily available. It is only political will that is lacking. This will be supplied by people from all walks of life through creative, dramatic action and mass mobilization. Citizens around the globe must demand the political and economic transformation we so desperately need.
The usually mild-mannered U.N. Secretary General Guterres made it clear that “street heat” will be key to saving humanity.
“The climate action army—led by young people—is unstoppable,” he told world leaders in Glasgow. “They are larger. They are louder. And, I assure you, they are not going away.”