COP 24 Stumbling To A Close As Lies, Bullshit, Greenwashing And Greed Dominate Climate Summit
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Things started to change with the election of Donald J. Trump. Less than six months after taking office, he announced the United States would withdraw from the Paris Agreement. At home, his administration has pushed to overturn pollution regulations, making it far less likely that the United States will meet its Paris pledge to cut emissions sharply by 2025.
In August, an effort in Australia to transition away from coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, resulted in the ouster of the prime minister. The man who succeeded him, Scott Morrison, endeared himself to the industry by bringing a lump of coal into Parliament. In November, Brazilians elected Jair Bolsonaro, who had pledged to promote agribusiness interests in the Amazon forest, the world’s largest carbon sink. In Poland, the host country of the latest United Nations talks, the right-wing president, Andrzej Duda, opened the negotiations by saying flatly that his country did not intend to abandon coal.
Other leaders face their own domestic difficulties. Emissions in China have grown for the past two years, signaling the difficulties of shifting the country away from its coal-dependent industrial economy. Germany is having a hard time moving away from lignite because of political opposition in the country’s coal-rich east. The French president, Emmanuel Macron, faces unrest at home over a layer cake of taxes that working-class people say burdens them unfairly.
All the while, the science has become clearer. A United States government report issued last month concluded that if significant steps were not taken to rein in global warming, it would put a huge dent in the American economy by century’s end. And an exhaustive report issued weeks before by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, compiled by hundreds of scientists from around the world convened by the United Nations, said emissions would have to decline significantly by 2030 for the world to avoid a world of worsening food shortages and wildfires. “The I.P.C.C. has sounded many alarms, and the world just keeps smashing the alarm and keeps on sleeping,” said Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, founder of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, on the sidelines of the talks in Katowice.
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https://www.nytimes.com/2018/12/14/climate/paris-climate-future-poland.html?smid=tw-nytclimate&smtyp=cur