At Climate Talks, "Total Disconnection" Between Reality And What Negotiators Accomplished
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“I’ve been attending these climate negotiations since they first started in 1991, but never have I seen the almost total disconnection we’ve seen here […] in Madrid between what the science requires and the people of the world demand, and what the climate negotiators are delivering,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has attended these talks for more than 25 years. The U.S., along with Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, has helped create a gridlock in this year’s negotiations. The vacuum left by the U.S. has led countries interested in maintaining the status quo — including Australia, a major coal exporter, and Brazil, led by a right-wing government promoting deforestation of the Amazon — to block stronger rules for a global carbon-emissions trading system that are supposed to go in effect next year.
Fundamentally, COP25 brings to a head a widening chasm between the richer, historic polluters that prefer to maintain the status quo and the poorer nations that suffer the most consequences despite contributing the least to the crisis. Jake Schmidt, international director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, laid the blame on “key polluting countries responsible for 80 percent of the world’s climate-wrecking emissions” that “stood mute, while smaller countries announced they’ll work to drive down harmful emissions in the coming year.”
Costa Rica’s environment and energy minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez called out the U.S., Brazil, and Australia for blocking a deal in the late hours, reports Climate Change News. “Some of the positions are totally unacceptable because they are inconsistent with the commitment and the spirit that we were able to agree upon [in Paris in 2015].”
The U.S. has worked to water down the latest draft of the agreement, which includes language that “invited” countries to “communicate by 2020 their mid and long-term climate plans. “In U.N. parlance, this is particularly weak; stronger language would have urged countries to update or strengthen their commitments. The U.S. said outright it won’t support the more ambitious call to action. “We don’t support such language and we would not think that it would lead to the balance of this text, but rather take us quite far in the other direction,” Kimberly Carnahan, a U.S. State Department official said this week, according to the Washington Post.
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https://grist.org/politics/the-u-n-climate-negotiations-are-over-and-they-were-a-disaster/
