Will Glasgow succeed?

This is the first of two articles I plan to write on the climate summit at Glasgow that brought together close to 200 heads of states and governments in a meeting about climate change. Among the world’s largest emitters of carbon, the United States was there, with its delegation led by President Joe Biden. The indication whether China would be represented by President Xi Jinping came late. However, on the eve of the summit Beijing made an important announcement that would have serious consequences for Pakistan. I will cover that a little later in this article.

That a summit on climate would be held in Glasgow was announced at the conclusion of the previous high-level meeting held at Paris in 2015 which followed those held in other places at regular intervals. In 1992, more than 150 countries at a meeting in Rio de Janeiro agreed to stabilise the emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases at a level that would “prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system”. Rio was followed up with meetings held in Kyoto in 1997, in Copenhagen in 2009 and in Paris in 2015. Of all these meetings, the one in Paris was the most successful as negotiators agreed on eliciting modest voluntary efforts to keep the average global temperatures from rising 1.5 degrees above preindustrial levels. The Paris meeting abandoned years of fruitless efforts to achieve legally enforceable targets.

The delegates, who went to Glasgow, had lived though a year of extraordinarily environmental upheavals experts believe were associated with global warming. These included huge floods in Europe, India, Nigeria and Uganda; catastrophic wildfires in California, Greece and Siberia; fatal heatwaves in the Pacific northwest; and droughts that seemed to be drying up rivers and reservoirs. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) issued what some experts called a deafening alarm. The gist of the report was that if the world had any hope of meeting the 1.5-degree threshold, it must radically transform its energy system in the next 12 years which would mean cutting greenhouse gas emissions nearly by half by 2030 and reducing them to zero by 2050. The IPPC came up with a new assessment of the global situation a few weeks before Glasgow. It was even grimmer than the one three years earlier. But Glasgow occurred when a number of positive developments had taken place. Among them was that Donald Trump no longer lived in the White House.

Trump not only pulled the United States out of the Paris Accord but also took several other actions to undermine the science of global climate change and encourage the production of fossil fuels. Biden who succeeded Trump has taken the United States through a complete turnaround. In taking several actions, he has matched the IPPC’s demands: promising a 50 per cent cut in emissions from 2005 levels by 2030 and net zero emissions by 2050. In the legislation that he has placed before Congress, he would aim to eliminate fossil fuel emissions from power plants by 2035.

Before heading for Glasgow, President Biden had his administration issue a report that painted a picture as grim as the one that was in a succession of reports by the IPPC. The report, the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE), reflects the consensus view of all the US intelligence agencies. It showed a deepening concern of the American security establishment that the changes produced by global warming could reshape the country’s strategic interests, offer new opportunities to rivals such as China, and increase instability in nuclear states such as North Korea and Pakistan. “We assess that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to U.S. security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond to the challenge,” the document states. It also concludes that while momentum to reduce global emissions of greenhouse gases is growing, “current policies and pledges are insufficient to meet the goals that were at the centre of the Paris Accord. The report was not hopeful about the results that might be achieved at Glasgow. “Most countries will face difficult economic choices and probably will count on technological breakthroughs to rapidly reduce their emissions later.” The NIE identified 11 countries — three of them in South Asia — that are likely to face severe global-warming problems. They are in alphabetical order: Afghanistan, Colombia, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, India, Iraq, Myanmar, North Korea, Nicaragua and Pakistan.

The report paid special attention to the displacement of people who would be subject to sometimes life-threatening problems posed by climate change. The report estimates that by 2050, up to 143 million people in Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia could move for climate-driven reasons. “Absent a robust strategy from the United States and Europe to address climate-related migration, People’s Republic of China, Russia and other states could seek to gain influence by providing direct support to impacted countries grappling with political unrest related to migration,” says the report. Of the 11 countries the report identified as potentially problematic, three are in Central America — the region from which hundreds of thousands people have already headed towards the border with the United States. Washington is struggling to find a way to deal with this pressure on its southern border.

The NIE report focused on the Chinese situation, looking at it from several different angles. The most important was a pronounced reduction in domestic production of greenhouse gases; it accounts for 30 per cent of global emissions, the largest single source. Beijing will also need to reduce the investment it is committed to make in several countries to ease their energy situations. Pakistan is one of these target-nations; the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor is building several coal-fired plants to help the country deal with severe energy shortages. In a speech delivered at the United Nations in late September, President Xi announced that his country would quickly phase out use of coal in industry and energy production both inside as well as outside. As one observer noted, “Now that Xi has formalised the end of coal, Beijing’s partners like Pakistan, Bangladesh and Indonesia are waiting to find out what will happen to unfinished projects. There are at least 40 planned coal-fired plants with Chinese financing or contractors in limbo, according to Global Energy Monitor (GEM)” an NGO that tracks global fossil fuels infrastructure. The mostly developing countries along China’s Belt and Road Initiative could account for two-thirds of global emissions by 2050, up from 26 per cent in 2019. According to Christine Shearer, programme director for coal art GEM, “we are talking about countries that are still building up power systems. They are asking, ‘If we want to go the route of just solar and wind, what are the examples?’ And there really aren’t any.”

Published in The Express Tribune, November 1^st, 2021.

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