Climate Woodstock

As I almost always do when the issue is climate, I need to farm out any summation of the COPS26 show to David Roberts. Unlike me, he's put his life into knowing what he's talking about when it comes to a warming planet.

And while the UN talks followed their usual, halting, incremental, unconvincing, too laggardly pattern, he takes hope from all the surrounding activity which he calls "Climate Woodstock."

Alongside every official COP is a kind of international festival where everyone who’s doing anything on climate goes to talk about it. Bi- and multi-lateral coalitions, states, cities, nonprofits, corporations — everyone gravitates to the moment when media attention will be most intense.

There was a bit of a sour taste at the festival this year, given that fossil fuels were abundantly represented and the poorest and most vulnerable were, thanks to Covid, unusually under-represented.

Nonetheless, amidst the unsavory optics came all kinds of heartening news. There was a global treaty on methane, brokered by the US and the UK, which has been signed by more than 100 countries. ...

A group of governments and private funders pledged to spend a total of $1.7 billion on Indigenous peoples and local communities (IPLCs) protecting local biodiversity. Over 100 countries pledged to stop deforestation by 2030.

A group of philanthropic and development organizations and governments called the Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) pledged $10.5 billion toward helping emerging economies transition from fossil fuels. Similarly, the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero (GFANZ) pledged over $130 trillion of private capital to the energy transition.

And so on. What this shows is an immense amount of will in the world to address this problem, struggling to organize. There’s so much going on.

... national governments are often going to be in the caboose of this train — civic groups, the private sector, and subnational governments are leading the way. That’s distributed all over the world, less easy to see and sum up, but it shows that the caution and intransigence of national governments are not the whole story.

COP26 was a snapshot of a world — agonizingly slowly but with gathering speed — moving to address a crisis. There’s no reason for anyone to stop pushing, but there’s also nothing wrong with acknowledging and celebrating the progress that’s been achieved by all the pushing so far.

Things are moving!

Check out Roberts' Substack. 

We better hope he is right -- and all do our bits as we can wherever we are located.