As #COP26 heads into its second week....

November 8, 2021 12:14 PM

Environmental journalist Patrick Galey has been exposing the puff-and-fluff of #COP26 headlines: Of the 23 countries that made NEW commitments to phase out coal... TEN of them Don't. Even. Use. Coal. #COP26. Climate analyst Ketan Joshi reminds us that the harm of climate change is caused by **cumulative** greenhouse gases. So: a very slow path to zero by 2050 does much more absolute harm than a very fast one. In other words, "Net-zero pledges delay the action that needs to happen."

COP26 has an equity crisis.
Covering Climate Now's advice on #COP26.

posted by spamandkimchi (8 comments total)

[CW: copious profanity, doom] "The Government™ has made an ad about Net Zero by 2050 and it’s surprisingly honest and informative." Other adverts by the same organisation include the COP26 Climate Summit by the Australien Government, and Carbon Capture & Storage [previously], also by the Australien Government.
posted by Wordshore at 12:22 PM on November 8, 2021 [4 favorites]

Holly Jean Buck has also written on the problems with net zero, with a recent excerpt from her book here.

While we're on the subject, in the Financial Times, Isabella Weber and Daniela Gabor have written about concerns over the use of a carbon tax as economic shock therapy.
posted by mittens at 12:50 PM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

Just fact-checking the first country in his fact-checked list... Egypt's Hamarawein plant started construction around 2018. Would be the largest coal power plant in the world. Was "indefinitely postponed" in April 2020 for economic reasons. (Ie, solar is cheaper than coal.) Belt & Road funded initiative BTW.

So maybe it's accurate to say Egypt uses no coal (for power), but maybe it's also significant that they have now made a firm (??) commitment not to finish building the thing. I suppose maybe a journalist added Egypt to a list on that basis.
posted by joeyh at 1:00 PM on November 8, 2021 [1 favorite]

11/7/2021: Countries’ climate pledges built on flawed data, Post investigation finds:

The gap ranges from at least 8.5 billion to as high as 13.3 billion tons a year of underreported emissions...

At the low end, the gap is larger than the yearly emissions of the United States. At the high end, it approaches the emissions of China and comprises 23 percent of humanity’s total contribution to the planet’s warming, The Post found.

posted by lazaruslong at 1:26 PM on November 8, 2021 [2 favorites]

So maybe it's accurate to say Egypt uses no coal (for power), but maybe it's also significant that they have now made a firm (??) commitment not to finish building the thing. I suppose maybe a journalist added Egypt to a list on that basis.

Looking deeper into this stuff will show a lot of good along with the bad. For example this.
posted by ocschwar at 1:30 PM on November 8, 2021

Not #COPOUT26?
posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:13 PM on November 8, 2021

From last night's trolley-problem FPP deletion, I'm not sure where we are drawing lines for how to talk about this, but I thought I'd drop two articles here, companion pieces in the LRB discussing Andreas Malm's recent work: Adam Tooze on Ecological Leninism and James Butler's A Coal Mine for Every Wildfire. From Butler: "For those convinced that it is impossible to circumvent politics, either by direct action or through a state of emergency, the task remains to construct, from the imperfect tools available, a viable ecological platform. [...] it would be foolish to dismiss such a politics as utopian. It is on utopia that we now depend."
posted by mittens at 6:36 AM on November 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

The James Butler essay has lots of good stuff, but after watching the excellent 2018 documentary The Green Lie (directed by Werner Boote, and a central episode is very much about German coal mines, available via Kanopy if your library has a subscription!), this paragraph stuck out to me:

Over the past decade, Germany has been the world’s leading producer of brown coal. In 2019 it accounted for 21 per cent of emissions in the EU; in 2018 it was the world’s sixth biggest emitter of CO2 from fossil fuels. Germany’s lignite mines account for seven of the ten largest point sources of CO2 in Europe. Almost no single action would yield as significant a reduction in European emissions as the closure of these mines. But Lusatia, where many of the lignite pits are found, is also a stronghold of the far-right AfD: in 2017, the same year the Grosse Koalition contemplated closing these mines, the party won more than 30 per cent of the vote in the region. In the Bundestag, the AfD climate spokesman, Rainer Kraft, attacked what he called ‘eco-populist voodoo’; the party castigated Merkel for both a ‘disastrous asylum policy’ and a ‘left-green ideologised climate policy’. Under pressure from the AfD, the coal exit commission set an end date of 2038. This concession only emboldened the far right: in 2019, the top AfD candidates for Saxony and Brandenburg (neighbouring lignite states) met at their common border to declare their intention to mine coal for another thousand years – a duration not lit on accidentally by German nationalists.

posted by spamandkimchi at 9:27 AM on November 9, 2021 [2 favorites]