Rayhan Ahmed Topader :
Global negotiations seeking to implement the Paris agreement have been captured by corporate interests and are being undermined by powerful forces that benefit from exacerbating climate change, according to a report released ahead of the second meeting of parties to the Paris agreement. The report, co-authored by Corporate Accountability, uncovers a litany of ways in which fossil fuel companies have gained high-level access to negotiations and manipulated outcomes. It also questions the role of the world’s biggest polluters in sponsoring the meetings in return for access to high-level events. The global partnership Climate Transparency, found 82% of energy in these countries still being provided by coal, oil and gas, a factor which has relied on an increase of about 50% in subsidies over the past 10 years to compete with increasingly cheap wind, solar and other renewable energy sources. The G20 nations spent $147bn (£114bn) on subsidies in 2016, although they pledged to phase them out more than 10 years ago. Governments have said they will change, but on current commitments the world is on course for a 3.2C rise in average global temperatures, more than double the lower Paris threshold of 1.5C, which scientists have said represents the last chance to save coral reefs, the Arctic ecosystem and the wellbeing of hundreds of millions of people at risk of increased drought, flooding and forest fires. The gap is still very big, said Jan Burck, one of the authors of the report. The G20 is not moving fast enough.
Britain has made the fastest transition, with a 7.7% decline in the use of fossil fuels between 2012 and 2015, but the report warned that this could stall in the years ahead because the government had cut support for feed-in tariffs, energy efficiency and zero-carbon homes. The authors said political pressures in the G20 countries, with more subsidies for fossil fuels, were working against effective climate action. There is a huge fight by the fossil fuel industry against cheap renewables. The old economy is well organised and they have put huge lobbying pressure on governments to spend tax money to subsidise the old world, Burck said. These political pressures are likely to intensify as governments are called upon to extend emissions cuts to the transport and agriculture sectors. The report said G20 emissions needed to start declining in the next two years and halve by 2030 if the world were to avoid more than 1.5C of warming, though not one country in the group had set a credible target to do this. Climate action is way off course in all but one of the world’s 20 biggest economies, according to a report that shows politicians are paying more heed to the fossil fuel industry than to advice from scientists Among the G20 nations 15 reported a rise in emissions last year, according to the most comprehensive stock-take to date of progress towards the goals of the Paris climate agreement. Comparing the goals and policies of different countries, the paper found that only India was on course to stay below the upper limit set by the Paris agreement of 2C,
While the worst offenders Russia, Saudi Arabia and Turkey would take the world beyond 4C China, the world’s biggest emitter, stabilised its releases of carbon for a couple of years by reducing dependency on coal, but this positive trend slipped last year. Indonesia, Brazil and Argentina have promised to cut deforestation but the destruction rate of forests shows no sign of reversing. Christiana Figueres, former executive secretary of the UN framework convention on climate change, said: Global emissions need to peak in 2020. The Brown-to-Green report provides us with an independent stock-take on where we stand now. This is valuable information for countries when they declare their contribution in 2020
The UN climate talks in Katowice, Poland, in December the COP24 conference will start a two-year process for governments to deliver on their commitments to reduce emissions. Although there are national leaders hostile to tackling climate change, such as in the US and Brazil, there is still hope they will be open to taking their share of the responsibility. The tragedy of the commons is a situation in which individual actors using a shared-resource system act in their own seeming self-interest and deplete the resource as a result. For example, consider a small fishery with a dozen fisherman each catching as many fish as he can. Soon the resource becomes over fished and every fisherman suffers the consequences. Only if they all agree to limit their catches to sustainable levels can the fishery remain a long-term stable resource for all of the fishermen. We’re in the same situation with climate change.
Every country can act in its own short-term self-interest and continue burning lots of seemingly cheap fossil fuels; the long-term result in that scenario would be a catastrophic destabilization of the global climate on which we all rely. Or every country can agree to take steps like increasing vehicle fuel efficiency standards that cumulatively will slow global warming and avoid the worst climate change impacts. Of course, being a short-sighted nationalist, Donald Trump is the only world leader to reject the Paris climate agreement. His administration is similarly making short-sighted arguments that coincidentally serve the best interests of the fossil fuel industry, while in this case producing the equivalent carbon emissions of adding 9 million more cars on the road. At least the Trump administration doesn’t deny basic climate science in this report, but worse yet, they’ve taken the nihilistic viewpoint that we’re screwed and nothing we do matters. Like the other stages, this is simply another form of climate denial meant to protect fossil fuel industry profits at everyone else’s peril.
Mobilizing climate finance from private sources will be key to addressing significant investment needs for both adaptation and mitigation. Public finance will continue to play a significant role, they write. Other means to achieve the goals of Paris outlined in the plan are to increase joint efforts to promote energy efficiency, scale up renewable energy, phase out inefficient fossil fuel subsidies and to align financial flows with the goals of the Paris Agreement.
Finally, G20 leaders expressed their support for the Marrakech Partnership for Global Climate Action and encouraged the further engagement of cities, regions, companies, investors and a multitude of non-state actors to support governments in implementing the Paris Agreement. And they encouraged these actors to register their actions through the NAZCA platform of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change.
