Before international summit: Most nations fumbling climate targets
| Heather Richards reports in Politico’s Power Switch: Two weeks before the COP30 climate summit in Brazil, one pattern among nations could prove the most revealing: Most can’t seem to hit their deadlines. Namely, more than 125 countries have missed the September date for filing new pollution-reduction targets ahead of next month’s United Nations conference, writes my colleague Sara Schonhardt. Fewer than 70 nations out of 195 turned in their homework on time. Some climate diplomacy veterans blame the long shadow of President Donald Trump. Trump has threatened countries with punitive tariffs for supporting international climate action and has withdrawn the U.S. from the 10-year-old Paris climate accord. Oddly enough, one country that submitted an aggressive new climate pledge ahead of schedule was the United States — under former President Joe Biden, who announced in December that the U.S. would slash its planet-warming pollution by 61 to 66 percent by 2035. But Trump’s description of climate change as a “hoax” concocted by “stupid people,” and his decisions to double down on fossil fuels, somewhat undermine that pledge’s credibility. “The rest of the world knows they have to deal with Trump, and they’re trying to figure out, particularly in this [climate] sphere, how do you make progress when he’s driving so hard in the opposite direction of where everyone else wants to go,” John Podesta, Biden’s senior adviser for international climate policy, told Sara. The practical considerations of rising energy demand, and energy costs spurring populist outbreaks across Europe, could also be dampening countries’ appetite to slash their fossil fuel emissions.“It’s not really surprising to me that countries are saying, you know, why would I put our country on the hook for some big and ambitious set of actions that would be hard on a good day,” said Jonathan Elkind, a senior research scholar at Columbia University and former Energy Department official during the Obama administration.“The real issue is can we sustain over time — and I mean over decades — attention and focus and creativity and capital, capital, capital,” Elkind said. The Big Three climate polluters Last month, the U.N. convened a climate gathering in New York aimed at catalyzing new pollution-cutting plans for 2035. Even with Trump urging countries to throw in the towel, more than 100 countries attended. Additionally, the United Kingdom, Japan, and Brazil have all submitted stronger climate targets in the lead-up to COP30, and the European Commission has announced that the EU will submit a plan before the summit commences on November 10. Still, India, the world’s third-largest climate polluter behind China and the U.S., was a no-show in New York, and half of the Group of 20 — the largest economies, which account for three-quarters of global emissions — have yet to reveal new targets. Last year, a report found that even if nations met their 2030 targets, carbon pollution would decrease by less than 3 percent compared to 2019. It needs to drop 43 percent, according to a U.N. panel of scientists. Meanwhile, pledges that China announced in September, promising to stop releasing carbon emissions before 2060, are too low to prevent catastrophic climate impacts, analysts say. Coupled with the Trump administration’s antagonism, that means the Earth’s two largest climate polluters are leaving an enormous gap in the defense against a warming planet. |
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