This particular conference was looked at as more important than several previous for two main reasons. First, the 2015 Paris Agreement states that parties will assess their own compliance with their greenhouse gas reduction goals every five years, beginning in 2021. The assessments are underway now and will be made public in 2022, so this year marks the treaty’s first milepost. Second is that with the election of Joe Biden to the presidency, official US policy is no longer to ignore the problem, so hopes were reasonably high for progress.
The conference, which ran one hour short of the 2015 Paris meeting, produced an agreement known as the Glasgow Pact (by the terms of the framework convention, these agreements negotiated at COPs are formal addenda to the main treaty).The Glasgow pact is divided into eight sections: (1) Science and urgency; (2) adaptation; (3) Adaptation finance; (4) Mitigation; (5) Finance and technology transfer: (6) Loss and damage; (7) Implementation; (8) Collaboration.
Not attending were Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro, Xi Jinping of China, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and the national heads of Iran, South Africa, Japan and Mexico. While these countries did send delegations, the leaders' absence has been interpreted as a lack of urgency or outright dismissal of the conference's aims. Furthermore, several national delegations, including Russia's, Canada's and Brazil's, included fossil fuel lobbyists.
Though not an official delegation, collectively, the oil industry was the best represented group, with 503 attendees, more than the next-best-represented, Brazil, with 479. Lobbyists outnumbered indigenous leaders from around the world by more than two to one. This is a very visible sign of how thoroughly the fossil fuel industry has co-opted action on global warming. In short, the foxes still control the henhouse.
Tomorrow: the 2021 Glasgow pact.
Be brave, and be well.
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