The World is watching COP 26

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - This is a condensed version of ‘The World is Watching COP 26,’ roughly 28 minutes of audio from a 54 minute Sierra Club BC production broadcast directly from Glasgow.

It was hosted by Anjali Appadurai (Climate Justice campaigner) and Flossie Baker (Lead Organizer at Sierra Club BC).

The full 58 minute Sierra Quadra video
This is Appadurai’s 11th year of watching the COP process, during which time she has watched it decline from a regime that was attempting to be legally binding to “a kind of pledge and review” process.

“Every country makes voluntary pledges about how much they are going to reduce their emissions, with a series of review built into that, until the present day COP in Glasgow – where we are seeing that half of those pledges were not met,” she said.

Appaduri calls this ‘the COP of announcements’ and alleges they do not match what is being negotiated behind closed doors.

“The responsibility for the amount of emissions that are in the atmosphere right now, disproportionately rests with the richest countries in the world, which also happen to be mostly the colonial states and also happened to be countries that are quite wealthy and more capable of dealing with the impacts of climate change,” she said. “Unfortunately what we’ve seen is that the countries that have the most responsibility, for the largest part of that burden are the ones that really don’t want to pay their fair share.

Canada was among the nations that promise to have net zero emissions by 2050.

Appaduri notes that these are “not real emissions reductions,’ as polluters are allowed to continue pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere providing they find green projects to offset their tally. So a Canadian fossil fuel project may be offset by funding a treeplanting project in a developing nation like Zambia. One of the tweets in Scotland called this “the new climate denialism.”

“The biggest polluters, both corporate and governmental, are the biggest champions for net zero,” said Appaduri.

She noted that one of the key solutions brought forward in Scotland revolved around technologies that do not (yet) exist. Critics call this “chasing the carbon unicorn.”

Flossie Baker pointed out that while the commitment to end deforestation by 2030 means a great deal in nations like the Congo, where this is actually happening, it is meaningless in British Columbia where old growth forests are being replaced by plantations of much younger trees.

At Glasgow, Prime Minister Trudeau promised, “”We’ll cap oil and gas sector emissions today and ensure they decrease tomorrow at a pace and scale needed to reach net-zero by 2050.”

“This sounds hopeful and it’s lacking any legally binding framework,” said Baker. “Without that, we fear that it just a nice sounding aspiration.”

Photo - screenshot from the SIerra Club BC video