Climate summit enters its final two days, the hardest of all

There are two days left in the international negotiations aimed at stemming catastrophic levels of global warming. Two days to iron out disputes over what goes into the final document that will come out of the annual United Nations summit and serve as a guide for the global fight against climate change.

Every country has to agree on every word in the text. If the negotiators huddled inside the huge conference centre here had windows to look out of, they might be reminded of the stakes. On the banks of the Clyde River, just behind the centre, is a 230-foot-long art installation made of 3,723 LED lights. “No New Worlds,” it reads.

Summit organisers have issued an initial draft of an agreement that calls on countries, by the end of 2022, to “revisit and strengthen” their plans for cutting greenhouse gas emissions and to “accelerate the phasing-out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels.”

If it stays in the final version, the language on coal and government fossil fuel subsidies would be a first for a U.N. climate agreement. But environmental groups said the rest of the document was too vague on crucial details.

Money is one of the big differences looming over the final negotiations. Rich countries have failed to deliver $100 billion a year by 2020, as promised, for poor and middle-income countries to shift their energy systems away from fossil fuels and adapt to the effects of climate change. This year, there’s a push to create another pot of money to compensate for the irreparable harms of climate change in countries that are least responsible for the problem, a fund for what’s known as “loss and damage” and one that rich countries have blocked for nearly 30 years.

On Thursday, Alok Sharma, the British lawmaker who is president of the summit, said that he was “concerned at the number of issues outstanding on finance items the day before we are due to conclude.”

There’s also disagreement over the call to end fossil fuel subsidies, rules on carbon markets, and whether countries should return every year with new climate targets instead of every five years.

Calls for tougher action from activists and nations are growing louder. Scientific consensus demands that countries around the world limit global average temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, between preindustrial times and the end of this century. Beyond that threshold, the risks of deadly heat waves, droughts, wildfires, floods and species extinction grow considerably.

At the moment, that goal is not within reach — nowhere close, in fact, according to the latest independent analysis by Climate Action Tracker.

Still, there was some promising news from the summit Wednesday evening, when the United States and China, the world’s two biggest polluters and its biggest rivals, announced an agreement to “enhance ambition” on climate change and do more to cut emissions this decade. China also committed for the first time to reduce methane, a potent greenhouse gas, and said it would “phase down” coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, starting in 2026.

But both pledges came without precise timetables — a reminder that at these climate talks, promises are easier than details.

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