Bill McKibben writes:

As the second week of the COP26 United Nations global climate talks began in Glasgow on Monday, the Washington Post published a truly remarkable piece of reporting that will surely demoralize the hardworking people gathered in the convention hall trying to hammer out an agreement. A team led by the Post’s veteran climate analyst Chris Mooney went through the emissions data proffered by countries at the summit, and found that they were in many cases wildly wrong. Malaysia, for instance, claimed that its forests are sucking up so much carbon that its net emissions are smaller than tiny Belgium’s—even though most researchers are convinced that clearing peatlands for palm-oil plantations, as Malaysia has been doing, is the very definition of a carbon bomb. The Central African Republic reported that its land absorbs 1.8 billion tons of carbon a year; the Post termed it “an immense and improbable amount that would effectively offset the annual emissions of Russia.” The worst-case scenario: the emissions data could be off by twenty-three per cent over all, or roughly the equivalent of China’s emissions.

That’s the kind of thing that can undercut whatever confidence the U.N. negotiators are trying to build. Barack Obama spoke at the conference on Monday, telling young people (many of whom are complaining that they can’t get inside the hall) that “you’ve grown up watching many of the adults who are in positions to do something about it either act like the problem doesn’t exist or refuse to make the hard decisions necessary to address it.” But, just three years ago, Obama was in Houston, telling a very different crowd, at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, “I know we’re in oil country and we need American energy.” He then said that oil and gas production “went up every year I was President,” adding, “Suddenly, America’s like the biggest oil producer and the biggest gas—that was me, people.” Indeed, although the United States cut carbon emissions during Obama’s years in office, it happened mainly because of his aggressive backing of natural-gas fracking—and the increased methane emissions that came with the switch may have left the nation warming the planet just as much as before. (Methane features prominently in the Post’s analysis.)

Meanwhile, in a press release issued last week, the government of the United Kingdom, which is hosting the summit, initially claimed that a hundred and ninety nations and organizations represented there had joined in a breakthrough pledge to phase out coal and stop investing in new coal-power projects. But, as Agence France-Presse’s Patrick Galey pointed out, by the time the list of nations was published, only twenty-three had announced new plans to abstain from coal, and ten of them don’t even burn coal. Together, he found, the twenty-three nations account for just thirteen per cent of the world’s coal use. China, Russia, the United States, and Australia aren’t on the list. As the headline to an article by Galey politely put it, a “chasm” has opened between “COP26 words and climate action.” [Continue reading…]