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--:-- Noelle King: Welcome to Today Explained. I'm Noelle King.
--:-- Noelle King: The United Nations has gathered the world together 27 times to try to figure out what to do about climate change. In a good year, things do get done at the Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP. But as we close out 2022, one thing we can say for certain, it has not been a particularly good year.
--:-- Noelle King: Climate change isn't the only issue on everyone's mind. We're facing an era of global inflation, conflict, really high energy prices, and possibly going into a recession. So a lot of people were really not just focused on climate change at the meeting. And it was really hard to get everybody focused on this one thing at one time.
--:-- Noelle King: So what got done? The answer is not nothing. Coming up on Today Explained, low expectations, but mixed results.
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--:-- Noelle King: It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Representatives from almost 200 countries turned up in Egypt for the UN's 27th worldwide meeting on climate change. Now, that in itself is an achievement. Consider Ukraine and Russia fighting a devastating war. They each sent representatives to this meeting, although every single country present refused to go to Russia's roundtable discussions.
--:-- Noelle King: Umair Orfan is a science reporter at Vox, and he was at two previous COPs, 25 and 26. This year, he monitored from home.
--:-- Noelle King: The main agenda item at this COP was this idea of compensating poorer countries facing the effects of climate change now. And this is under a provision known as loss and damage. That's developed nations finding ways to compensate and assist developing nations following decades of environmental damage.
--:-- Noelle King: This has been something that's been extraordinarily contentious in previous COPs and has been punted on for years. And finally, they got, in principle, an agreement to actually create a fund that would help countries facing the effects of climate change now pay for some of the damages.
--:-- Noelle King: Which countries agreed to what exactly? Island countries have been talking about building a loss and damage fund for decades. Climate change and sea level rise are deadly, an existential threat to Tuvalu and low-lying atoll countries. They're saying that they're literally seeing sea levels rise and eroding the shorelines of their country.
--:-- Noelle King: And that means that they're facing damages from climate change now, even though their greenhouse gas emissions have been tiny relative to some of the wealthier countries. The countries with the highest emissions, China, the U.S., India among them, are most responsible for the rapid sea level rise that threatens the Maldives.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, the United States has been the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases, and they've been able to become an extraordinarily wealthy country with those burning of fossil fuels, similarly with the European Union and many other Western countries as well.
--:-- Noelle King: And so the argument is that the countries that have burned the most fossil fuels and benefited the most financially have an obligation to help the countries that have contributed the least to the problem but stand to suffer the most.
--:-- Noelle King: The establishment of a fund is not about dispensing charity. It is a down payment and an investment in climate justice. The issue is that wealthy countries have long resisted this idea because they think it opens the door to liability.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, the word compensation has all kind of loaded implications. And so the wealthy countries, they prefer to, if they have to give money, to do it out of the goodness of their hearts, basically arguing that it's being done on a charitable or on a voluntary basis rather than any kind of treaty or contractual obligation, which is obviously much weaker and gives them a lot more wiggle room to maybe not put up the money that they may have committed to in the past.
--:-- Noelle King: And so by getting together finally at this meeting, you know, after punting on this issue for so many years and having this being the main agenda item, countries led by the European Union and many island countries finally met at the table and agreed in principle that there should be a loss in damage fund.
--:-- Noelle King: So just getting that principal agreement was a huge step forward. But of course, there's huge details that have to be filled in, namely how much money goes in, who's paying in, and who gets paid from that fund. And those are issues that are going to have to be resolved possibly at the next COP.
--:-- Noelle King: How many countries signed on? Well, this was passed as a resolution for the entire meeting. And so just about everybody had to agree to it. Like the COP process is a consensus-based process. So that's why everything is so tedious.
--:-- Noelle King: You have to get oil producers like Saudi Arabia and island countries like the Marshall Islands all to agree on the same thing. And that's why every word, every turn of phrase has to be litigated.
--:-- Noelle King: A show of unity from nations big and small to address a global crisis. There are about 198 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And so that's just about every country in the world.
--:-- Noelle King: And they're there in varying capacities. It gets a little bit complicated because they have a number of agreements and not every country's party to every one of them The United States notably is not a party to the Kyoto Protocol which was one of the big elements of some of these climate change actions
--:-- Noelle King: And so there were some really awkward moments where they were discussing some elements of the Kyoto Protocol at this COP and the U.S. was not allowed to weigh in because they didn't officially sign it. In fact, it was voted down in Congress unanimously.
--:-- Noelle King: So it's a little bit strange. You have these agreements where not everybody is party to them. But essentially, in principle, there is this agreement that just about every country in the world has to contribute in some fashion to dealing with climate change.
--:-- Noelle King: And so as far as like who's going to pay into this, I mean, again, this is going to be the big issue that they're going to have to resolve at the next COP. One of the big issues within this is the role of China.
--:-- Noelle King: China as a large country that's also developing in some respects, but is also the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, the world's single largest economy. Are they on the contributor side or are they on the recipient side?
--:-- Noelle King: You know, this year China saw some really massive climate disasters. They saw huge heat waves and wildfires as well. The heat is causing widespread power shortages, closing down factories and sparking wildfires that are terrorizing villages.
--:-- Noelle King: And the question then is, you know, are they considered a donor country because of their wealth or should they be considered a recipient country because they're also facing the effects of climate change pretty severely right now?
--:-- Noelle King: Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Brown, told reporters at COP, we all know that the People's Republic of China, India, they're major polluters, and the polluter must pay.
--:-- Noelle King: And China, of course, is a major player in these international negotiations, and that's just going to be a really difficult thing to hash out.
--:-- Noelle King: Is the language in these resolutions like the one that 190-plus countries signed? Is it deliberately left vague in order to kick the ball down the field a bit more for another year?
--:-- Noelle King: That ultimately ends up being what happens, yes. The language in these agreements can be a little vague, a little hand-wavy, and often this vibe of go along to get along.
--:-- Noelle King: As delegates filed out in Egypt, many were left exasperated as they lamented how progress on finance had come at the expense of progress on dealing with the very cause of the climate crisis, emissions reductions and weaning the world of fossil fuels.
--:-- Noelle King: I mean, imagine getting a dozen people to agree on a pizza topping that you're going to be ordering for a party, right? Just trying to get a consensus with like a dozen people, let alone 190 plus countries, all of whom have different economic, social, and financial situations and trying to come to some sort of consensus agreement.
--:-- Noelle King: And so just the fact that you have to get everybody on board with this means that, yeah, you're going to get something fairly tepid.
--:-- Noelle King: Some wording in the deal is seen as too weak. Low emissions energy, unabated coal, less prominence given to the climate goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, all seen as leaving the door open to fossil fuels.
--:-- Noelle King: On this agreement, for instance, they had to struggle just to get fossil fuels mentioned at all. So on one hand, they're talking about dealing with the effects of climate change, but still struggling to have stronger language on dealing with the causes, you know, burning coal, oil, and natural gas due to the emissions of greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet.
--:-- Noelle King: And so they had to have this sort of bracketing language around it saying that they want to reduce the unmitigated or the unabated emissions of greenhouse gases rather than just greenhouse gases and fossil fuels on their own, basically leaving wiggle room for things like carbon capture technology or maybe cleaner forms of fossil fuels as many oil countries and many countries that depend on fossil fuels still want to use.
--:-- Noelle King: So yeah, it does look like it's a very weak agreement, especially given the fact that we've been at this for years and the fact that, you know, the window for addressing climate change is slamming shut.
--:-- Noelle King: But at the same time, there really isn't a better process. We haven't really come up with a better way to do this. There is no other forum that really gets just about every country of the world at the table.
--:-- Noelle King: So it isn't good enough, but it is still the best we got. Is there a good estimate of how much it would cost in dollars to address all of the stuff that accompanies climate change?
--:-- Noelle King: There's huge ranges. Like one estimate said that climate damages in developing countries would cost somewhere between $300 billion a year to $500 billion a year by 2030. Some of those estimates go up into the trillions of dollars, but it's hard to get much more specific than that.
--:-- Noelle King: Okay, so it's one thing semi-done. Were there any other achievements? One of the things that they made a lot of progress on is this thing called the Global Methane Pledge.
--:-- Noelle King: This is sort of a side deal at COP27, and it's not something that every country in the world signed on to. But basically, it's targeting methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. It's about 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide.
--:-- Noelle King: And one of the advantages of targeting methane is that a lot of it comes from point sources, meaning it comes from things like gas wells, things like farms, things like waste dumps.
--:-- Noelle King: And so while it is a very potent gas, you only have to secure a handful of locations in order to limit its leakage. And by getting most of the world's methane emitters on board, you can actually make a substantial dent in global greenhouse gas emissions and avert a good chunk of warming.
--:-- Noelle King: There were a handful of other side agreements as well. The other big announcement that came during COP27 was that a bunch of countries pooled about $20 billion specifically to help Indonesia transition toward clean energy and get off of coal.
--:-- Noelle King: Indonesia is one of the most populated countries in the world. It's in Southeast Asia. It's also one of the largest coal-using countries in the world. And so this sort of bilateral deal between like the European Union, the U.S. and Indonesia shows sort of a model going forward for how you can target some of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters and give them a very strong incentive to decarbonize their economies.
--:-- Noelle King: We saw a similar deal at a much smaller scale with South Africa last year, about an $8.5 billion deal to help them finance their transition toward clean energy as well. And so potentially in the future, we could see more of these one-off deals going forward with other countries to help them transition.
--:-- Noelle King: Did the United States make any promises worth talking about? Yeah, they made a bunch of promises. I mean, President Joe Biden went to the summit himself.
--:-- Noelle King: The United States of America will meet our emissions targets by 2030. He promised that one that the United States is going to uphold its climate commitments The United States has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 50 to 52 below 2005 levels by 2030
--:-- Noelle King: So that you know less than eight years away from now And also promised hundreds of millions of dollars for different kinds of one-off partnerships. So funding for global adaptation to climate change, for disaster response across Africa, for clean energy investment support in Egypt, and just a bunch of other projects and basically telling the world that the U.S. is back in the game and that they are trying to do their part to prevent climate hell, as Joe Biden said.
--:-- Noelle King: Does Biden need Congress to approve the things that he promised? Well, yes, that's the rub. We've already seen that Biden has struggled to get the money he wants to use for international climate activity from Congress.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, he promised that the U.S. would drastically ramp up its contributions towards international climate finance, close to $11 billion. But Congress this year has only appropriated about $1 billion for that.
--:-- Noelle King: So we're roughly at about 10 percent of where we committed to being. And so pushing even more money and promising even more money to other countries is going to be more difficult in the next couple of years because, well, he has to convince the Republican House to help pass these budgets that will help the U.S. finance these international climate initiatives.
--:-- Noelle King: On a scale of 1 to 10, how productive was COP27 compared to COP26, COP25, COP24, COP23, COP18, COP1? Sorry.
--:-- Noelle King: Well, it's a little bit hard to make a direct one-to-one comparison between the cops because each cop has sort of a different set of parameters that they're operating under.
--:-- Noelle King: So the cop where Paris was signed cop 21 that was basically where they were really looking to establish a global climate treaty and a framework for doing that and then at cop 26 about five years after that that was supposed to be the first main check-in point after Paris the idea under the paris agreement was that you know every country would set their own benchmarks and we knew that those benchmarks would be inadequate but that countries would ramp them up over time.
--:-- Noelle King: So the expectations were a little bit different going into COP27. But the one big agenda item that they were looking for, the loss and damage fund was actually resolved. But again, at the same time, you know, with each COP where these are meetings where we have every country in the room, it's an opportunity to try to like push countries to do more.
--:-- Noelle King: And every opportunity we don't seize to get closer to our targets is a huge missed opportunity and, you know, time continues passing. Next year, we're going to have even less time to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement.
--:-- Noelle King: You know, one of the sub targets in that agreement is to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Back in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the world would have to basically cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half relative to where they are now by 2030 if they want to stay below 1.5
--:-- Noelle King: See, at this COP, they reaffirmed that they actually want to do that, that they think that this is still a realistic target. But the window for hitting that target is narrower than it's ever been.
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--:-- Noelle King: Emissions peaking before 2025, as the science tells us, is necessary. Not in this text. Clear follow-through on the phase-down of coal. Not in this text. A clear commitment to phase out all fossil fuels. Not in this text.
--:-- Noelle King: And the energy text weakened in the final minutes.
--:-- Noelle King: Let's talk about what didn't get done at COP27. What was the biggest disappointment in Egypt?
--:-- Umair Orfan: I think one of the big disappointments was that there was less aggressive action on the causes of climate change.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Just trying to get people to acknowledge that fossil fuels are a problem and that we should be using less of them is really tricky.
--:-- Umair Orfan: One, from the oil producing countries and from many of the fossil fuel exporters, you countries like Saudi Arabia, but also many countries in Central Africa and many countries in Latin America that are fuel exporters, they count on fuel as part of their economies, a big chunk of how they feed their countries and keep their economies going.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And they were more resistant to language that specifically had fossil fuels in their crosshairs. And so a lot of activists were very disappointed that there wasn't stronger language to say that we need to actually end the use of fossil fuels over time.
--:-- Umair Orfan: The fossil fuel producing countries want some wiggle room to have technologies like carbon capture or to, you know, come up with some technology in the future to remove CO2 from the air to sort of balance out their emissions.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Basically, just leaving a loophole open for them to continue exploiting and using these fuels.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And another factor this year is also, of course, the energy crisis that many countries are facing.
--:-- Umair Orfan: You know, after Russia Russia invaded Ukraine and the subsequent disruption to particularly natural gas to Europe, a lot of countries in Europe started increasing their use of fossil fuels Germany parliament on Friday agreed to reactivate retired coal power plants to generate electricity
--:-- Umair Orfan: This would decrease their reliance on precarious Russian supplies but would potentially bring the country further from its climate goals
--:-- Umair Orfan: And so you had a situation where wealthy countries are actually increasing their fossil fuel consumption. And that's made it a lot more difficult for people to say that they need to get rid of fossil fuels because they're using more of them right now.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And so that was a pretty big disappointment, I think, for a lot of countries who were on the front lines of climate change and wanted more definite commitments.
--:-- Umair Orfan: How did it manifest that the countries that are fossil fuel providers and exporters, how did it manifest that they said we don't want to get into it on fossil fuels?
--:-- Umair Orfan: Did they turn down some language? Did they refuse to sign on to something? And did anyone confront them and be like, you guys, we all know it?
--:-- Umair Orfan: I mean, behind closed doors, these meetings can get very testy.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And that is kind of how it manifests, you know, for specifically like in the initial drafts of this agreement, like any mention of fossil fuels at all was scrubbed out by some of these oil producing countries.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And they finally allowed that language in, provided it was only bracketed as things like unabated fossil fuels, with the caveat that basically assuming that, you know, burning fossil fuels completely recklessly, which sort of implies that there is a responsible way to be able to burn fossil fuels into the future.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Again, this is a consensus-based process. Everybody has to kind of stick to it. So yes, one country, a handful of countries can form blocks and hold up the process.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And we've seen that happen in the past before, you know, not just the countries in the Middle East that are oil producers, but also Russia. You know, Russia is still at the table here and so is Ukraine.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And they're still trying to, you know, hammer out agreements here even while they're, you know, waging war against each other in the real world.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And so this is going to be one of those issues where they have a very hard time coming to an agreement.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And yeah, like up to the last minute, the meeting was supposed to end on a Friday and they didn't get an agreement well until early Sunday morning Egypt time.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And that was because, you know, they were lobbying over the minutia of this deal, just specifically a lot of the language around fossil fuels, just exactly how aggressive they wanted to be and just how much they wanted to put pressure on fossil fuel producers and consumers to phase it out completely.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Did COP27 leave you and other science journalists with any sense that we have any hope of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius?
--:-- Umair Orfan: I hesitate to make any kinds of predictions about the future, but I do think that the window for 1.5C is pretty much closed at this point.
--:-- Umair Orfan: I mean, we're talking about cutting global emissions in half by 2030. That's less than eight years from now. That's not a long time away.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Think back to where you were eight years ago and imagine a drastic cut in greenhouse gas emissions beginning then. It's not a lot of time.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And even 2050 is not that far away. You know, 2050 is closer to us than 1980. It's closer to us than 1990.
--:-- Umair Orfan: But it's a world that we will all be around to see. Most of us, most of the people here, most of the people listening, we're going to be around in that.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Like this isn't just the world of our future. This is the world that many of us are going to retire into.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And it does mean that our actions now play a role. And so while some of the most ambitious goals may be out of reach, it's not as though climate change is completely out of our hands either.
--:-- Umair Orfan: So maybe 1.5 is going to be extraordinarily difficult to hit, but maybe we can still stay below 2.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And one thing that's kind of implied here is that as long as greenhouse gas emissions go up, the planet is going to continue to warm.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And so what that means is that eventually we do need to zero out our emissions.
--:-- Umair Orfan: And anything that we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have a benefit, which is the converse of the idea that as long as the planet continues warming, we'll see more damages.
--:-- Umair Orfan: So every increment of warming is worse than the last, but everything that we do to avert warming nets us benefits.
--:-- Umair Orfan: So all of that is to say our actions still do matter and that whatever actions we take now to mitigate the problem, even if they're not enough to meet our targets, we'll still have benefits that were down to us and to future generations.
--:-- Noelle King: Let me ask you, Leslie, COP28, what's going to be on the agenda? Do they forward project and let you know?
--:-- Umair Orfan: At COP28 in Dubai next year, they're going to pick up from where COP27 left off.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Funding the loss and damage mechanism is going to be a big deal and getting the $100 billion for the International Climate Finance program shored up.
--:-- Umair Orfan: That's going to be a big effort there as well. And then mostly also just more language, probably more nudging, more pressure on fossil fuel producers to have stronger language on phasing out fossil fuels.
--:-- Umair Orfan: You know, one of the big contentious issues here has always been the words phase out versus phase down. Phase down implies reduction, but phase out means eliminating entirely.
--:-- Umair Orfan: Phase out is a much stronger word, and it's something that a lot of environmental activists want to see in the text.
--:-- Noelle King: Our show today was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Matthew Collette, who also helped with fact-checking, more fact-checking by Laura Bullard, and engineering by Paul Robert Mouncey.
--:-- Noelle King: I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. Thank you.
