Cop26: Compromise in the face of calamity
We are still miles off the limits set in Paris to avoid ‘catastrophic’ climate change, writes Kate Hughes
This, we were reminded endlessly in the weeks leading up to the UN climate conference in Glasgow, was our last chance.
The build-up to Cop26, against a backdrop of increasingly extreme weather and barely a whisper on the subject at the G20 meeting that preceded it, was gloomy, bordering on fatalistic.
Even before it started, and in the face of multiple unmistakable warnings of imminent and widespread environmental collapse, the Glasgow meeting was written off as hopeless, pointless and scarily weak on both the delivery of previous commitments and a consensus over the need for new, stronger ones.
It didn’t help that major and powerful polluters didn’t turn up at all and or that others reneged on their pledges within hours – such as Indonesia over the apparent all-star, big win for the planet – the “agreement” to end deforestation by 2030.
India pledged to achieve carbon neutrality, but only by 2070, and Saudi Arabia’s contingent pushed hard to wipe out the “keep 1.5 alive” message altogether.
Nor, because it didn’t even make it onto the conference timetable, was there any kind of a consensus on reducing the impact of the global meat and dairy industry. And yet, if left unchecked, the forecasted growth in that industry could mean that by 2050, the livestock sector could account for 80 per cent of the world’s greenhouse gas ‘budget’.
Meanwhile, anxious and desperate campaigners, many of them children, demonstrated outside the centre and in cities around the world, prevented from being able to look those leaders – described more than once in the last fortnight as stale, male and pale – in the eye as time after time they drew a line through actions that could have secured a stable future. Again.
Blah blah blah
The rhetoric started strong. The grandiose statements at the beginning of last week came thick and fast as leader after leader got up to urge everyone else in the room to step up, to follow them into battle. But somehow they still failed to reach sufficient consensus to make changes to stop the rot that is already undermining economic and therefore their own political strength around the world.
Even if the pledges thrashed out in Glasgow had held for more than a few hours and the people doing the real work in the background – most of whom are still pulling all-nighters in the Scottish city to get some strategic meat on the bones and somehow deliver on the promises made – it won’t be nearly good enough.
We are still miles off the limits set in Paris to avoid “catastrophic” climate change.
Research group the Climate Action Tracker has calculated that the nations’ current plans for emissions reductions by the end of this decade will still result in 2.4C of heating by the end of the century.
Every business has faced strategic challenges of this kind before. When the future attacks the present, the answer is never to protect the present. It is always to run to the future
Take into account the plans that were thrashed out at Cop and within nine years we will be collectively pumping out greenhouse gases that are twice the amount that would meet the 1.5C Paris Agreement aspiration.
It makes frustratingly little sense to the billions of us who didn’t attend the event. We sit at assume, assuming glumly that they were weighed down by the scale of the problem, by the bottom line, or by lobbyists peddling short-term economic and political positions, such as the massive fossil fuel contingent whose number eclipsed that of any single nation in attendance.
Maybe they also missed the presentation by the CBI’s director general Tony Danker, who reminded the gathering – which this year included a record number of CEOs – that net zero is no longer about reputation, it is about commercial opportunity.
“As policy and market demands shift, we must transform our supply chains just to keep up. Our customers, clients, investors and shareholders expect nothing less,” said Danker, at the end of the first phase of the summit.
“Every business has faced strategic challenges of this kind before. When the future attacks the present, the answer is never to protect the present. It is always to run to the future.
“And as boardrooms around the world run the numbers, they are realising that the business case has shifted. To put it bluntly, in purely commercial terms, the cost of inaction is, for the first time, higher than the cost of action.”
Clear and present danger
The risks presented by insufficient action on climate and the knock-on impact of climate breakdown on economic, political and social stability – domestically and globally – have been made clear and, we must hope, intellectually understood at least by the leaders at Cop26. And now the opportunities presented by change have also been highlighted.
Yet those few individuals with the authority to enact the change we know we need, those in the privileged position of having real power to do something meaningful on a global scale, appear to be engaged in endless rounds of compromise instead of leadership.
There are mixed opinions on how effective Cop26 has been, with some environmental experts reporting surprise that it hasn’t turned out quite as bad as they had expected.
The latest draft of the agreement does still include the phasing out of fossil fuels which, Greenpeace points out, if the wording survives the final hours of the negotiations, would be the first time in 25 years of climate talks that language on reducing fossil fuels is included.
Few dispute that not enough has been done and opportunities have missed though. The word sabotage has been more than once. But nobody at that table was sitting around stroking a white cat while plotting the downfall of mankind and everything else along with it.
So what are we missing here? Because this year we even have proof that rapid, unilateral and broadly successful change is possible if the need is great enough. We have a powerful precedent for decisive but disruptive action in the face of existential threat in the form of the global response to Covid.
The power of the status quo is certainly a force to be reckoned with, notes Jan P de Jonge, a business psychologist at People Business Psychology Ltd.
National leaders are simply not going to experience the worst of climate change, unlike the younger people with stronger motivations
“We suffer from unconsciously accepting the humdrum of repetitiveness and predictability. It’s our psychological inertia to sleepwalk and sheepwalk into the growing problem of climate change when it doesn’t yet affect us obviously and clearly.
“Humans suffer from inaction. It takes a lot to change our behaviour, let alone take firm, decisive action that goes against the grain. Too many of the rules, norms and conventions that try to keep our society operating as it did yesterday are not sustainable and are doing our planet – and life on it – a huge disservice.
“But the status quo, as Danker expressed in Glasgow, has already shifted. Our polling shows climate change is now a top concern among the British public and that they back strong action,” says Lorraine Whitmarsh, professor of environmental psychology at the University of Bath and director of the Centre for Climate Change & Social Transformations.
“But the unprecedented levels of concern have only come about in the last three or four years. Before that, politicians were not hearing concerns about climate change from their constituents, there was no public mandate for action.
“Historically there has also been the perception that the economy and climate protection are not compatible, that it is a luxury to address climate change and that those actions can be kicked down the road until we can afford it, even though it costs more to deal with the impact of climate change than to mitigate against it.”
Whitmarsh is another expert who notes the presence of those very visible lobbyists as well as the age of the delegates.
“National leaders are simply not going to experience the worst of climate change unlike the younger people with stronger motivations,” she adds. “Even if they have young members of their own family urging them on at home, when we’re at work we all have to account to professional stakeholders.”
Then there is the cruelly abstract nature of the problem.
“Covid was very visible in the here and now. Everyone around us was being affected and we all toed the line and accepted the restrictions,” Whitmarsh says. “The psychological distance of climate change means competing priorities are always more pressing, allowing for the pragmatism that comes with leadership - climate change is not the only thing they are trying to address with limited funds.
“Yes, with a step back we can see the compounded risks from climate change across every aspect of our society, but leaders don’t have that mindset. They are focused on the issues of the day and the electoral cycle.
“The political system is too short-term to allow the broader risks of climate change to directly translate into action.”
Existential threat
Meanwhile, psychologist Emma Kenny describes the polarised response to such existential threat on display – at all levels.
“You can see total desensitization on one side and hypersensitization on the other,” she says. “Both are coping strategies and a response to being overloaded. It is easy to blame people when you feel powerless. It’s not helpful to decide some of those people are good and some are bad when we are all feeling overloaded and powerless.”
Leaders – those we perceive as having power in this – are turning up to a climate conference on one of 400 private jets, or not turning up at all. And yet we’re teaching children to be terrified about the world ending and they are dreaming about drowning in their own bedrooms.
“Of course politicians, balancing different aspects of what is important – economy, popularity and even their own mortality. Because of that, the urgency doesn’t necessarily feel that relevant to them even though it seems so obvious to the rest of us.
“That’s one of the big problems here, she adds. “We think about our experience and what matters most and our protective mechanisms and it comes back to our own individual position – is the foreseeable future going to really affect me or my children and what is my capacity to change without it destroying me?
“Those leaders are thriving in lots of contexts, and they’re in a situation where they have been tasked to change the world dramatically in their lifetime. Some of them aren’t on board, some of them don’t believe it, some of them are on board but feel they have to balance the negotiations with other countries and with their other domestic, economic, and political demands.”
Do they understand and believe the information they are getting? Are they perhaps so overwhelmed by what needs to change that they think it’s an impossible dream?
Which comes back to the question we have all been asking in the last two weeks – how far are those in positions of power really invested?
Do they understand and believe the information they are getting? Are they perhaps so overwhelmed by what needs to change that they think it’s an impossible dream?
In high pressure circumstances, the people who thrive are those who believe that things can be changed and strive to achieve it, says Kenny
“Unless you have that mindset, you can be totally overwhelmed.
“The things we’re talking about here, like carbon neutrality, aren’t things that the people at the top or through the proletariat are invested in. It’s too big.
“One of the responses to that is to blame the public for a lack of change. The issue is that the public is exhausted. Who can focus on what Greta is saying when they can’t afford to eat?”
Positive possibility
“On the ground things are definitely changing,” says Whitmarsh.
“Announcements have been made and there has been a great deal of high profile campaigning. So much is happening to provide the sense that people are taking action on climate change and crucially, that action is now considered mainstream.”
That was already happening a year ago, she says, with councils and businesses declaring climate emergencies, for example.
“Some of the noise we’re seeing at the moment is Cop specific and we might see that dying away but we are definitely seeing that climate is a core concern, and one that hasn’t been dented by Covid 19 as it was during the financial crash, which is important,” she adds.
“We have reached a critical threshold now. The message about the need to make behavioural changes is accepted, the evidence is clear. That message is now ever present.
“It isn’t going away and we need to see government taking really concrete actions to facilitate low carbon strategies.”
It seems surprisingly important that we can tap into the positives from Cop26 too.
“Just flying into a room to have a few chats over several large, meat-based banquets is not demonstrating action and it’s not demonstrating faith in the things they are saying,” says Kenny.
“If we don’t believe it ourselves and we don’t take action and nothing changes at any level of society.
“But if our leaders can show us that they have faith and live that belief, the population will start to buy into it. If you look like you have your house in order, the people around you - the leaders at Cop26 or 27, or 29, and the electorate at home will start to believe it too.
“Then we need the steps to start protecting the environment positively - the benefits, the upshots, the personal gains involved,” she adds.
“Let’s stop talking about the world ending and start talking about helping the world to thrive – among our children in schools, in our homes and in the corridors of power.
“When we are presented with a world of wonder and possibility we become protective, we become guardians. We become hopeful. We are empowered to genuine action, positive choice and results that really do change – and save the world.
“It could be incredible.”
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