It could be argued with some justification that the twenty-seventh United Nations’ Conference of Parties, or COP27, in the Egyptian resort town of Sharm Al-Sheikh represents an even greater failure than the last climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, one year ago.
More than forty billion tons of CO2 have been emitted into the atmosphere since then. Emissions are still on the rise, and 636 fossil fuel lobbyists inundated the conference hallways this time, 25 percent more than in Glasgow, where 503 showed up. It is once again the largest delegation at the COP.
The summit in Egypt was sponsored by Coca-Cola, the biggest producer of plastic waste. The negotiations also once again centered not on finding solutions, but about not falling behind what was already agreed upon in Glasgow in 2021, and Paris in 2015. Meanwhile, the regime in Cairo used repressive means to restrict civil society mobilization outside of the meetings. The environmental activist Abd el-Fattah went on a hunger strike in prison in protest, which almost cost him his life.
We heard once again a lot of talks, promises, and announcements. But as Greta Thunberg reminds us: “[T]he people in power don’t need conferences, treaties, or agreements to start taking real climate action. They can start today.”
United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres highlighted the urgency of acting in his introductory remarks at the conference: “We are on the highway to climate hell” and again at the end of the summit: “Our planet is still in the emergency room.”
Certainly, one decision was praised as a “historic breakthrough:” For the first time, states agreed to set up a “loss and damage” fund to assist vulnerable countries devastated by extreme weather. The United States delegation had tried to block this during the negotiations, then worked to water down the proposal. The European Union helped to put pressure on China by demanding that it also contribute to the fund, which was seen by many as an attempt to divide developing countries. This is why there is only a vague mention of a fund in the final text. The details—who, what, when—were left up for determination.
There were some other encouraging developments: $20 billion in public and private money is now reportedly mobilized to get Indonesia off coal. Brazil’s new President Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva promised at the conference to better protect the Amazon rainforest. In addition, the absence of a “red wave” in the U.S. midterm elections was greeted with relief—even though the Republicans won a majority in the House of Representatives and can thus torpedo climate action.
Even so, these steps in the right direction are arguably pulling the wool over our eyes. In view of the closing window for action, they may actually mean we are passing the problem on to the next generation and putting up with climate collapse.
Moreover, most countries have broken the promises they made in Glasgow to tighten their climate targets. If one looks at the voluntary commitments offered by the countries at COP27 (the so called “Nationally Determined Contributions” or NDCs), the world is on a course that will cause global heating to increase by 3 degrees Celsius before the end of this century—unless drastic changes are made in the next few years. If this does not happen, we will soon be, as climate researcher Kevin Anderson says, “living on a different planet.”
In order to keep global warming somewhat in check, i.e., not to exceed the upper limit temperature increase of 2 degrees Celsius, industrialized countries would have to immediately reduce emissions by 10 to 15 percent each year and completely decarbonize by 2035, and developing countries would need to do so by the turn of the century. To accomplish this, developing nations will need at least a trillion dollars every year in support from rich nations starting in 2030, according to a U.N. calculation. Additionally, the countries will need to raise another trillion dollars domestically.
We are still miles away from these kinds of commitments. Developed nations’ promised hundred billion dollars annually by 2020 to help poor countries decarbonize and adapt to climate change has so far failed to materialize; now the target has been pushed to 2023. The United States’ fair share of the annual total would be $39.9 billion, but so far it has provided only $7.6 billion. President Joe Biden announced last year that the country will mobilize $11.4 billion annually for climate finance starting in 2024.
Other countries, such as Germany, France, and Japan, provide at least their fair share, but mostly give loans, which the developing countries of course must pay back. Moreover, just a small fraction of these funds represent “new and additional” contributions beyond what was already committed for development aid.
Meanwhile, in the United States, CO2 emissions have risen by an above-average rate of 1.5 percent this year. In China, emissions actually decreased by 0.9 percent, while the European Union has managed to cut emissions by 0.8 percent. But even these latter two cases are not good news. If EU member states were to continue emitting at their current rate, it would take them more than a hundred years to bring emissions to zero.
The more the crisis escalates and the window for climate action closes, the more the COPs lose touch with reality, creating illusions and spreading false hopes.
To take just the most obvious example, the leaders of the major industrialized nations continue to declare that they will not exceed the 1.5 degrees Celsius cap as agreed on in the Paris agreement. At the same time, calculations show that the emissions budget for this increase will be spent in just nine years if they remain stagnant, and many researchers doubt that the target can still be met.
Moreover, it is the same developed states that are announcing a “dash for gas” and investments in new gas and oil fields. If these are implemented, it will lock the world into fossil infrastructures for decades to come.
Twenty-seven COPs have taken place so far, but emissions are now around 60 percent higher than in the beginning of negotiations. The 2015 Paris Agreement was hailed as “historic,” but climate scientists, activists, and environmentalists, especially from the Global South, pointed out at the time that the climate targets were completely inadequate and that there was a huge, dangerous gap in climate finance. Pablo Solón, a former Bolivian ambassador to the United Nations, called the agreement “a death sentence for many people.”
But these voices were pushed aside in public, and the critics were discredited as notorious complainers. A lot of media coverage has helped greenwash what the industrialized nations have been announcing at climate summits without looking behind the numbers and explaining what is needed.
The question is: how can we use the negotiating framework to set and meet the necessary targets? The history of climate diplomacy clearly shows that this cannot be achieved if major powers keep blocking necessary action.
One study by twenty-three researchers found that an influential “Davos cluster” of top politicians, corporate leaders and opinion makers has so far prevented drastic climate action, and will continue to do everything possible to sabotage the process. The authors argue that only a shift in power toward citizens and pressure from below can force governments to act according to their rhetoric. As long as fossil fuel lobbies continue to set the course, the COPs will continue to fail.
In Egypt, the COP27 Coalition, led by African and Arab organizations, has called for rapid emissions reductions to zero (not net zero) from rich countries, repayment of climate debt to developing countries—which one study puts at more than $31 trillion—and no more "false solutions” like carbon markets. Climate was a key issue in many U.S. midterm races and could become increasingly decisive for elections—a new trend resulting from effective climate campaigning. Younger generations especially tend to vote for candidates who put real climate action on the agenda. All over the world, people are striking, resisting, engaging in civil disobedience, and lobbying to shift course away from climate collapse.
Whether a real step toward exiting the “highway to hell” will be taken at the next COP which will be held in the United Arab Emirates—the country that had the largest number of delegates at COP27, some of them with strong links to the fossil fuel industry—depends on how these struggles play out.