World leaders unveil climate promises: “OK. But how?”

Jordan If you read headlines this week from the United Nations Climate Summit and you thought that our prime minister’s big promise sounded a little familiar. Well, you’re right.

Trudeau Clip …and just this morning, we committed to exceeding this target and to joining countries around the world in reaching net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050…

Jordan That pledge was first made during Justin Trudeau’s campaign for reelection. One of the reasons his Liberals returned to power was on the strength of their climate plan. But by now, surely we all understand that the fate of the world in the climate era will be decided not by pledges and plans, but by action. Still, the world keeps coming together to chart what progress has and hasn’t been made to stem the tide of global warming and other climate emergencies. And every time everyone vows to do more. So this year, after twelve months that made pretty plain that the climate crisis is here, is killing people now, not some indeterminate number of years from now, what progress has been made at the summit? What have Canada and other countries actually accomplished? And what are they still promising us is on the way in the future? And when you ask the people who have been warning us all about this for decades, what do they think of the promises?

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings, this is The Big Story. Fatima Syed is a reporter with the Narwhal’s Ontario Bureau. She is also the host of the podcast The Backbench, and, of course, every once in a while the host of this podcast. Hey Fatima.

Fatima It’s been a while, Jordan.

Jordan It’s been a long time, but we’re back to talk about the future of the world in the climate era, so always positive to have you on for such a happy episode.

Fatima I only do happy episodes on The Big Story. That’s all I do.

Jordan Why don’t you try to give me, and I know that you’re not over there right now, so you’re not on the ground, but maybe heading into the UN conference this week, what has the most recent scientific consensus been on where we are right now, what’s already baked in and what we’re still trying to change with regards to the impact of global warming?

Fatima I was on the Big Story talking about the IPCC report that came out just before our election. There was an IEA, the International Energy Agency report that came out several months after that. And both those reports were big bombshells, right? The IPCC report, not to sound like a broken record on the show, but it was a huge deal because it said that some of the impacts of the climate crisis are irreversible. And countries and policymakers and businesses and all levels of society really need to step up the speed and aggressiveness with which we were trying to lower emissions, adapt to the changes in climate around us, and mitigate some of those impacts faster, quicker and just more urgently. And then the IEA report comes out and says that we need to phase out of fossil fuels immediately. We need to shift our attention to clean energy and really increase clean energy investments ASAP.

That’s my very colloquial analysis of these two very concerning, very clear cut reports that the climate conference that’s happening this week was kind of starting with. Leaders around the world had the responsibility to get to this stage and not just pledge what they were going to do to meet these urgent calls for action by the scientific community, by the energy industry, by citizens around the world, but also show how they would do it. Really sell us that they have the plan and the ambition to do things. Well, I don’t know if you’ve been watching Jordan, but we didn’t really get that.

Jordan We’re going to talk about that in just a minute, the promises versus an actual laying out of what’s going to happen. But maybe before we do, because I think a lot of the times you and I have talked about this or you’ve talked to a guest, or I’ve talked to a guest. We’ve kind of flip flopped between, like absolute pessimism, ‘we are doomed’, and optimism when things, some things, are happening faster than we could have hoped for. So what’s been the mood, I guess, surrounding this conference? Is it one more useless meeting? Is there actual urgency taking place?

Fatima Look, if you want me to be really kind to politicians and I struggle with being really kind to politicians…

Jordan I don’t necessarily need you to do that, but you’re welcome to.

Fatima Any opportunity for world leaders to gather in a room and hash out ideas and plans, in theory, could be a good thing, if it is a constructive conversation. I think two COPs ago at Paris, that was one of those constructive conversations. We got a benchmark. We got countries to sign into that benchmark. It was historic. This COP isn’t as historic, and we’ll get into the details of why, but here’s the good thing, if we want some optimism: if all the countries follow through on the pledges that they have made on COP26 in Glasgow this week, then we are on track to reduce global warming or global heating by a few Celsius, which is great. So before COP started, we were on track for global heating to reach 2.1 degrees Celsius. Now, after we’ve heard everyone’s pledges, the scientific and data community has calculated that we are on track for just 1.9 degrees Celsius. Now, this is going to sound a little nerdy that’s still above the 1.5 that the Paris agreement wants us to reach. But honestly, even knocking down a few points of ascent and Celsius is going to save us from death and climate emergencies like we saw in Lytton, BC this past summer. So that’s a good thing. But again, that is assuming all the leaders stick to all their pledges and actually follow through. And that part is still a big question mark.

Jordan So I want to ask you about those pledges, because Prime Minister Justin Trudeau is there this week and he’s made a whole lot of pledges. And what I’m trying to figure out is how many of those are new, what are we promising, exactly, and what kind of plans come along with it?

Fatima Well, let me preface this by saying that Justin Trudeau didn’t announce anything that’s new to us here at home in Canada, everything that he shared on the world stage was stuff he has promised for a long time. And specifically, he had promised during the election cycle, which wasn’t that long ago. But it was perhaps new for a global audience. And the reactions to these policies are interesting to get into.

Justin Trudeau led a conversation on carbon pricing, that was like the first thing that he mentioned in his remarks.

Justin Trudeau COP26 Clip …our carbon price trajectory is one of the most globally ambitious ones. I call on other countries to do the same. Just as globally, we’ve agreed to a minimum corporate tax. We must work together to ensure it is no longer free to pollute anywhere in the world…

Fatima …and celebrated Canada as this example, where polluting isn’t free and all countries should follow suit, because right now, according to Justin Trudeau, only 20% of emissions around the world actually have a price attached to it. The rest can be done freely. The problem, of course, is that us Canadians watching from home are like, why are you selling this when it was really complicated to do? And there were a lot of kinks to sort out over the last several years.

Jordan Not the easiest thing to put in place on a national level, let alone on a global level.

Fatima Exactly. There’s a lot of considerations that the carbon price presented to us and a lot of problems the carbon price presented to us as a country. And I think it’s all well and good to celebrate the policy. It’s a Nobel Prize winning policy. But when it comes to actual implementation, I’m not sure Mr. Trudeau did a good enough job selling why countries should go through that. The devil is, unfortunately, in the details. And we didn’t get a lot of details from Mr. Trudeau or other world leaders. And that is incredibly frustrating when there is a ticking clock that is counting down very quickly.

The second one, of course, that’s got a lot of headlines is his announcement or his reiteration of an election pledge to put a cap on gas on the oil and gas sector. Great thing to say on a world stage, especially after the IEA report that advised countries to do that and advised countries to boost clean energy investment. But again, there are problems. It’s all good to say that we’re going to do this, but how exactly are you going to do this? Researchers and experts much smarter than me have noted that this cap would only apply to existing emissions, not future emissions.

Jordan So wait. What would that mean exactly?

Fatima So that means that right now the amount of emissions that the oil and gas sector produces, that’s what will be capped.

Jordan Not any new emissions we might create over the next 30 years or so.

Fatima Yeah. And the fact is maybe they will be. But we haven’t seen a plan, so I don’t know if they’re factoring that in. All we know right now is that at Glasgow, Prime Minister Trudeau shared that his newly minted Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and Environment Minister Steven Guilbeault had written a letter to the government’s Net Zero Advisory Board asking for guidance on how to legislate the country’s 2050 goal, which will be laid out in, and I’m quoting, “quantitative five year targets”. Writing a letter is great, five year targets gives me pause, because if the deadline is 2030, 5 years from now we will be very close to 2030. And I’m not sure that leaves enough time for this transition and this cap to happen.

There was one tiny, huge moment at COP26, and that was when over 100 countries signed on to a pledge to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. And Canada was part of that. And that’s important because Canada, along with, like five other countries, has over 80% of the world’s forests. The problem, of course, is that the same day that this pledge was signed, BC released a plan on how it would reduce old growth logging with no deadline. Now, British Columbia’s forest sector cuts 55,000 hectares of old growth trees every year. And as news consumers and listeners of The Big Story may know, they’re in Fairy Creek right now, cutting down some of the oldest trees in the country.

The last thing I wanted to bring up is the methane pledge, which Canada also signed into. This pledge aims to reduce methane emissions by at least 30% below 2020 levels by 2030. Methane is like a big deal in terms of creating emissions. And there have been many countries from Norway to Australia that have really strong policies to cut methane production. Again, the problem is we have regulations to reduce methane emissions from oil and natural gas facilities, but they take a very bottom up approach. They kind of let individuals and corporations decide how they’re going to do it, as opposed to overseeing the reduction. And our regulations aren’t nearly as comprehensive as they should be. So again, great that we signed another pledge, but how are we actually going to follow through on them?

Jordan And that’s fair. And I think based on our conversations and our conversations with experts, it’s really fair to be skeptical about this government saying awesome things and hoping that it gets done sometime in the future. But I guess my question for you about the summit in general is if we look at what other countries are promising and what they’re doing, are there likely daily news podcasts in those other countries kind of looking at those promises the same way, right? Like, oh, ‘we’re going to do this, we’re going to do that, okay, but how?’ Is Canada unique in talking really big and not offering plans, or is that what this whole conference has been?

Fatima I think, ‘Okay, but how?’ is the tagline of COP26. I think leaders are grappling with the fallout of their ambitions and with delayed action time and time again, and at this world stage at this juncture, at this moment in time, where the pandemic really showed us how damaged the natural world is and where we’ve seen record breaking heat, record breaking weather events, here in Canada, we lost a whole village. We’re seeing more of that and we’re not seeing action to match. So ‘okay, but what?’ is the question of the climate emergency now. Because we’ve heard the pledges, we’ve heard the good intentions. We’ve seen the direction that they want to steer the country in. Now we’re at a point where we all need to see things get done.

To be clear, Cop 26 isn’t over. The world leaders may have gone home, but their staffers, their negotiators, they’re all still in Glasgow, and they will be in Glasgow until the end of the next week negotiating details of some of the things that the world leaders talked about. And maybe, just maybe in a perfect world, there is a chance where by the end of next week, we will have a plan for some of these things because of that collaborative global on the ground effort. But the speeches that we’ve heard in the last 48 to 72 hours leaves me deeply, deeply skeptical.

Jordan In terms of our friends directly to the south of us, I know this was the first summit since Trump became President and pulled the US out of the Paris accord, did that make any difference to have the Americans reengaged on the global stage on climate?

Fatima Yes and no. Yes, because the US is one of the largest emitters in the world, and to have them sign back into the climate conversation is a good thing. It ensures that all the countries in the world will also follow suit. Unfortunately, the United States still carries a lot of sway in that. But President Joe Biden had this opportunity to share more of what he was doing in America, and he has done or announced or tried to do some really cool things. He presented a whole infrastructure bill recently that included a lot of climate initiatives that, if implemented and if passed by all levels of the US government, could really change the climate direction that country is in.

But the headlines that Biden made instead was of him dozing off during speeches. It was him attacking China and Russia for missing the summit. It wasn’t policy and action based. And don’t get me wrong. I love politics. I love the drama of politics, but not in this moment. And Joe Biden, in the lead up to Cop 26, in my opinion, presented himself as this leader who’s going to have this big ‘the US is back, and here’s what we’re going to do’ moment, but we didn’t really get that. We got a wonderful meme of him. I think he has a superpower, he can sit up really straight and fall asleep. But I thought that was really interesting and I was a little envious of that superpower, but I wish it wasn’t at a climate conference.

Jordan In general, that kind of gets at one of the things I wanted to ask you last, which is there’s been a bit of a discussion this week about whether or not climate is still a political issue, and I know if I asked you, you would probably say it’s not, it’s an emergency. I would agree with you, but there are lots of people that still debate this as though it’s politics, whose policy is better. Who’s leading the pack on this? And how do we make that shift from the climate being one issue on an election checklist to being, ‘oh shit, if we don’t fix this, we’re going to die’?

Fatima I think we shift it by having better conversations. You and I could sit here and we could talk for another several hours about all the politics involved and seen at COP26. Everything from Joe Biden’s apology for America and America under Donald Trump and pulling out of the Paris accords and everything, to Boris Johnson’s metaphor of James Bond…

Boris Johnson COP26 Clip …who generally comes to the climax of his highly lucrative film strapped to a doomsday device, desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a destination that will end human life as we know it. And we are in roughly the same position my fellow global leaders as James Bond…

Fatima …or of India’s net zero ambition being much delayed than everyone else’s and Narendra Modi playing politics. But the fact of the matter is words are just words in the end. I think the climate conversation needs to shift past words and demand better answers and more details from those in positions of power. And a lot of this is on the shoulders of media, of course, but it’s also on the shoulders of residents and citizens I think. Climate isn’t a headline issue. It’s serious, it’s complicated, it’s complex, and that’s why I’ve been on the show so many times to try and make sense of it myself, with you and with other experts. But it requires a lot of nuance and a lot of persistent understanding. And I was hoping COP26 would be an educational moment, and it wasn’t.

For us to make that shift, we have to ask better questions, and we have to ask questions everywhere, not just at COP26. My frustration began even before Monday, which was the first official day of COP26, because there was a G20 meeting over the weekend where the leaders of the 20 biggest countries in the world gathered and decided that they were just going to maintain the status quo and agree to agree on what they had agreed in 2015. And then they decided to stand outside the Trevi Fountain in Rome and throw coins into the fountain for good luck for COP26, which is the ultimate Lizzie McGuire moment.

Jordan I’m really glad you mentioned the coin thing, because this is the last thing I want to talk about, is the coin thing was a meme and the Joe Biden falling asleep thing became a meme, and is this just because people are so cynical now about the complete lack of action, as opposed to words, that there’s a tendency to see everything through that lens, including even like, ‘oh, they had to fly here on planes?’ Do you know what I mean?

Fatima You know what, when I see those memes, yes, I laugh, but I don’t think those memes are created out of cynicism. I think that’s us holding our leaders accountable. Look at how stupid you look, Joe Biden, falling asleep at the most consequential moment that you could have as the President of the United States to set American and global climate policy. Or, hey, Emmanuel Macron, look at how dumb you look throwing a coin in a fountain for good luck when you literally have so much power to affect change and could be doing anything else. It’s accountability, right? And I think the world is now at the point where that’s what we want from our leaders, and when we don’t get it, we will shame them, clearly, as these memes show, we will ask hard questions.

Again, to your point, the fact that it was at the G20 meeting where all the world leaders agreed to this and no one asked questions of it. No one was there to say, ‘hey, do you want to wait until you get to COP26 and maybe face some accountability for the decision to just stick with the old and not try anything new and not present more ambition and more aggressiveness in your policy?’ I think we’re sick and tired of seeing the same old thing, of hearing the same old words. I know I am. And I’m at this point where I want details or I want nothing from these leaders. If you can’t do this job, please leave and let someone else do this job because my future is at stake. My generation’s future is at stake and we’re still waiting for action to be taken.

So again, it’s all very well and good for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau to present Canada as a climate leader at COP26 and say, ‘hey, we’re going to put a cap on oil and gas, and you can use us as a model for carbon pricing and we’ll help you.’ But how? Because 2030 is eight years and one month away.

Jordan That’s really close in terms of climate, anyway.

Fatima That’s not that far away.

Jordan Fatima, thank you, as always, for this. One day we will end these conversations on an optimistic note. I swear.

Fatima Thanks for having me, Jordan, and I hope it was semi-optimistic at the start.

Jordan Fatima Syed of The Narwhal of The Backbench and sometimes of The Big Story.

That was, in fact, the Big Story. If you’d like more head to thebigstorypodcast.ca. Talk to us on Twitter at @TheBigStoryFPN. We love to hear from people who care about the climate. You can also email us at thebigstorypodcast@rci.rogers.com [click here!]. And find us in your favourite podcast player. You pick which one I don’t mind. As long as you download and listen to the end and buy whatever the ads tell you so that we know they work.

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.

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