COP26 - an analysis

Winter solstice time will soon be here and very little is growing in the garden right now.  Next year I hope to write about growing my toxic plants through a full year, but for now, as I can't write about gardening, here are some thoughts on last month's COP26 summit.  As you no doubt know, this was the 26th conference on climate change, and although it made tiny steps in the right direction, it was widely recognised to be as much a failure as the previous 25 COP conferences.  In order to appreciate the magnitude of the failure, let's compare what needs to be done with what was actually agreed.

What needs to be done is simple to say, although hard to do.  We need to stop burning fossil fuels.  That means exactly what it says.  It doesn't mean we keep burning them but try to mitigate it by planting trees, burying carbon underground, burning fossil fuels more efficiently, or paying other countries to burn less so we can burn more.  It means actually stop burning them.  We should have done this 26 years ago with the first COP conference, we didn't, that makes our job today much harder, but it's better to start late than never.

There are several things which logically follow from this.  If we stop burning fossil fuels we will have less energy at our disposal, because renewable energy currently makes up only a small fraction of our total energy use.  We need energy for manufacturing, building, transport, lighting, heating and cooling.  We use it to power agricultural machinery like irrigation pumps, combine harvesters and food distribution trucks.  So we need to do less of all those things.  We need to grow more food closer to home, and it needs to be produced once again by human and animal labour, not machines.  We need to produce and consume less.  We need to make do and mend things, instead of expecting to buy a new smartphone every couple of years.  We need to live closer to where we work so we don't need to commute.  We need to not expect to live in the desert and compensate for this by running air conditioners - Las Vegas comes to mind.  We need to live in small, well insulated homes which are easy to heat and cool, not McMansions.  More of us need to live in moderate climates where there is less need for heating and cooling.  

We need to stop transporting people and things by air, which is one of the biggest and most wasteful users of fossil fuels.  It is also an unnecessary luxury.  Heavier-than air powered flying machines are a recent invention - the Wright brothers made their first flight in 1903.  Before that nobody flew, and we managed perfectly well because because flying is not essential to life.  My grandfather was born in 1894, and he could remember the days before aeroplanes existed.  We can, and will, manage without flying again in the future.   

Any fossil fuels which we pump or dig out of the ground from now on need to be put to constructive use building renewable energy infrastructure like wind turbines, wave generators and solar panels, not wasted on frivolities like daily commuting or foreign holidays. 

Because we will be manufacturing, traveling and consuming less, we need to accept that a three or four day working week may become the norm, because there probably won't be the amount of work which currently needs to be done.  The rest of the week may not be pure leisure time, as more of it may be taken up with local food production, but there should still be time left over for reading, playing with the children or learning to play a musical instrument.

If food production and land availability are reduced worldwide due to a combination of climate change, sea level rise and fossil fuel shortage, we are likely to see increasing waves of migrants seeking a better life (or any life) elsewhere.  Most of this migration, or attempted migration, will be from poor countries to rich countries, as it is now, but worse. We need to think carefully about how many people this planet is capable of supporting, and whether we should take more active steps to reduce the global population before conflict and famine reduce it for us.  This is of course a taboo subject due to multiple political, cultural, historical and religious reasons.

All of that may sound like pie-in-the-sky Utopia, but remember - if we don't do this voluntarily, reality will eventually force us to do it.  There is a finite supply of fossil fuels, no more will be created during the lifetime of our species, and when we have burnt them all we will be forced to live without them whether we want to or not.  This planet has a finite carrying capacity for humans and we may well already have exceeded it.

So, measured against what we need to do, what did COP26 achieve, or not achieve?  You can best assess this by reading the actual text of what was agreed rather than relying on the mainstream media reports.  Let's start with the main agreement, hammered out in the last hours of the conference.  You can find the full text of it here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/interactive/2021/glasgow-climate-pact-full-text-cop26/

helpfully annotated by the Washington Post.

First off, even if all the countries do what they have pledged to do, this won't keep global warming below the target of 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels.  We would still be on track for a 2.4 degree temperature rise by 2030.

Secondly, many of the "pledges" made are so vague as to be meaningless.  We all know that at the last minute, China and India changed the wording relating to coal from "phase out" to "phase down" so the final agreed text refers to "accelerating efforts towards the phase-down of unabated coal power".  What does that mean, anyway?  How long are they expecting the "acceleration" to take, and if they use "abated" rather than "unabated" coal power, does that make everything all right so they can keep on burning it?

And thirdly, after previous COP conferences, most pledges were not kept.  We can probably expect the same again this time. 

But let's also look at what wasn't mentioned.  There is no mention of natural gas (methane) or oil in the agreement.  Reducing air transportation was not mentioned; on the contrary, in a subsidiary document agreed earlier in the conference, "the international aviation industry and the number of global air passengers and volume of cargo is expected to increase significantly over the next 30 years" (International Aviation Climate Ambition Coalition).  Curbing economic growth in developed countries wasn't mentioned; on the contrary, another subsidiary agreement states that "A rapid global transition to zero emission vehicles (ZEV) ... will offer huge opportunities for jobs and growth."  (Zero Emission Vehicles Transition Council: 2022 Action Plan).  In fact, there is no such thing as a zero-emission vehicle: all vehicles, however they are powered, require a huge expenditure of energy during their manufacture.

There was, of course, no mention of population reduction: see above.

Many small, vulnerable and under-developed countries attended the conference to plead for financial assistance to help them to adapt to the climate change and sea level rise which are already inevitable.  They think it only fair that this assistance should come from from the rich, developed countries which caused the climate change in the first place.  There are multiple mentions in the agreement about this financial assistance, and multiple exhortations to provide it, but again, most of the financial pledges made at previous COP conferences were not kept.

There are also multiple mentions of "technology development and transfer for the implementation of mitigation and adaptation action, including accelerating, encouraging and enabling innovation" which basically means tackling climate change with technologies which we haven't invented yet.  Human beings are very inventive, and I'm sure we will continue to invent ingenious things.  However, we are not miracle workers, and I am sceptical about whether we can invent enough things which work well, have minimal side effects and can be scaled up to the level required in the time available to make a difference.  We should also remember, with appropriate humility, all the things in previous years which we expected to invent but didn't.  Flying cars, nuclear fusion and Moon colonies, anyone?

So at the end of the day, I think the COP26 conference was a damp squib.  There were many well intentioned people there who can see the peril we are in, and many desperate people who can see their impoverished countries disappearing under water and just want a lifeline.  However, they were outvoted and outmanoeuvred by the fossil fuel lobbyists, industrial manufacturers and countries with expansionist ambitions.  And I don't really expect things to be much different next time around at COP27.  As Greta Thunberg said: "Blah, blah, blah".

Slaynt vie, bea veayn, beeal fliugh as baase ayns Mannin