Trust Is Hard to Find at the U.N. Climate Summit in Glasgow

As the second week of the COP26 United Nations global climate talks began in Glasgow on Monday, the Washington Post published a truly remarkable piece of reporting that will surely demoralize the hardworking people gathered in the convention hall trying to hammer out an agreement. A team led by the Post’s veteran climate analyst Chris Mooney went through the emissions data proffered by countries at the summit, and found that they were in many cases wildly wrong. Malaysia, for instance, claimed that its forests are sucking up so much carbon that its net emissions are smaller than tiny Belgium’s—even though most researchers are convinced that clearing peatlands for palm-oil plantations, as Malaysia has been doing, is the very definition of a carbon bomb. The Central African Republic reported that its land absorbs 1.8 billion tons of carbon a year; the Post termed it “an immense and improbable amount that would effectively offset the annual emissions of Russia.” The worst-case scenario: the emissions data could be off by twenty-three per cent over all, or roughly the equivalent of China’s emissions.

That’s the kind of thing that can undercut whatever confidence the U.N. negotiators are trying to build. Barack Obama spoke at the conference on Monday, telling young people (many of whom are complaining that they can’t get inside the hall) that “you’ve grown up watching many of the adults who are in positions to do something about it either act like the problem doesn’t exist or refuse to make the hard decisions necessary to address it.” But, just three years ago, Obama was in Houston, telling a very different crowd, at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, “I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy.” He then said that oil and gas production “went up every year I was President,” adding, “Suddenly, America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas—that was me, people.” Indeed, although the United States cut carbon emissions during Obama’s years in office, it happened mainly because of his aggressive backing of natural-gas fracking—and the increased methane emissions that came with the switch may have left the nation warming the planet just as much as before. (Methane features prominently in the Post’s analysis.)

Meanwhile, in a press release issued last week, the government of the United Kingdom, which is hosting the summit, initially claimed that a hundred and ninety nations and organizations represented there had joined in a breakthrough pledge to phase out coal and stop investing in new coal-power projects. But, as Agence France-Presse’s Patrick Galey pointed out, by the time the list of nations was published, only twenty-three had announced new plans to abstain from coal, and ten of them don’t even burn coal. Together, he found, the twenty-three nations account for just thirteen per cent of the world’s coal use. China, Russia, the United States, and Australia aren’t on the list. As the headline to an article by Galey politely put it, a “chasm” has opened between “COP26 words and climate action.”

And, if you think that climate watchers don’t trust governments, you can imagine how they feel about the big financial institutions that are also playing a starring role at the conference. Last week, the C.E.O. of Bank of America, Brian Moynihan, was airily assuring the Wall Street Journal that the transition to renewable energy won’t be too hard. “If there’s a revenue stream, then the funding is infinite,” he said. But, according to a report on Monday from the London Times, a consortium of financial institutions, including Bank of America, has been doing its best behind the scenes to slow down implementation plans for the Net-Zero Banking Alliance, which was launched earlier this year and has already come under fire, because its members are free to keep lending to fossil-fuel companies. The mistrust is so deep that each new initiative gets written off by activists as soon as it’s announced. As the Stanford energy expert Jeffrey Ball wrote in an Op-Ed for the Times on Tuesday, “The deep-pocketed players must be pressed to put their money where their mouths are—and, crucially, to disclose enough information about their spending that outsiders can assess the legitimacy and effectiveness of their efforts.” (By now, of course, almost no one trusts the fossil-fuel industry, as companies have been deceiving the public about climate change since the nineteen-eighties, but that doesn’t mean its power is broken: according to Global Witness, the hydrocarbon players are represented by five hundred lobbyists at the conference—a larger delegation than any country brought.)

Any rapid progress on climate change depends on countries having confidence in one another, because the risk that some will try to “free ride”—letting others do the work while they stay the course and still reap the benefit of a cooler world—has been there from the start. Purity is obviously impossible in politics. (Even now, Senator Joe Manchin, of West Virginia, is reportedly close to getting yet more subsidies for coal-power plants into the Build Back Better bill—and, according to Mother Jones, trying to decide on the best moment to present his first book proposal.) But the level of impurity is currently so high that the negotiating process is on the edge of breaking down—even as the falling cost of solar and wind energy means that the job of rewiring the planet is actually far easier than it appeared six years ago, at the Paris climate summit. Fatih Birol, the head of the International Energy Agency, claimed that new pledges at Glasgow put the world on a path toward a temperature rise of 1.8 degrees Celsius—which would be great progress, but, as he put it, that progress will be possible only if all the pledges are “fully achieved.”

It’s not clear who exactly is supposed to level this mountain of bad faith. Greta Thunberg, the eighteen-year-old Swedish climate campaigner, may be the most honest broker left, and, though she wasn’t formally invited to speak in the hall, her voice has been loud on the streets of Glasgow. “That is not leadership—this is leadership,” she said last week, gesturing to her fellow youth activists. The rise of illiberal leaders around the world means that too many governments are beyond their reach: India’s equivalent of Thunberg, Disha Ravi, an activist in her early twenties, was arrested earlier this year, and, in China, Ou Hongyi, who is also just eighteen, has been called in for questioning by the police. But the big pools of capital—the great banks of New York and London, the giant pension funds of the West—are within the reach of young activists, so retail branches and brokerage houses may make for more promising targets than governments. It seems likely that, as the Glasgow summit concludes, that’s where they will turn their attention in a last-ditch effort to hold someone actually accountable for wrecking the planet.