The New York Times does the overview, and it’s … hmm. Pretty mixed. A new agreement to cut emissions in half by 2030 is not to be sneezed at, and suggests that the great world powers have indeed internalized how little time there is to prevent the worst and most catastrophic scenarios of climate change. As Antarctica and Greenland began shedding their glacial ice at catastrophic speeds, rapid sea level rise is assured in our (or most of our) lives – terrible news for coastal cities around the world. Climate patterns are shifting and threatening the food supply. Halving emissions in less than 10 years is considered a bold move considering how extensively it has to be done.
It gets a bit shaky there. What the G7 leaders haven’t done is to set a firm date for the final phase-out of coal, one of the dirtiest fuels. The G7 agreed to stop funding new coal projects that did not include carbon capture technology – a technology that previously did not matter much in the global system – but made no commitments to phasing out coal entirely. That makes the rest of the G7 pledge harder to deliver and weakens demands for China, a massive coal-burner, to curb itself. The Times puts some of the blame on perpetual prevaricator and shadow president Senator Joe Manchin, who has seldom failed to put West Virginia’s coal industry above any climate-related problems of the rest of the nation, with speculation that the Biden administration refused to get stronger to urge him not to annoy him further.
It may be comfortable to blame an enemy, but none of the rest of the G7 decisions suggest anyone care to promise concrete, concrete measures to help meet the mid-term by 2030.
Similarly, a new pledge from the G7 to jointly provide $ 2 billion to help other nations transition from fossil fuels seems almost like a sign that (for example) this country is currently on new military spending in excess of over US $ 700 billion debated. This is not disaster-level funding. The G7 is still struggling to deliver on its 2009 pledge to provide $ 100 billion in international funding, a pledge that stalled after most of the money was made available as loans – not something poorer countries are pledging to could even if they wanted to.
More positive news is another new promise by the G7 to get 30% of land and sea globally by the same date in 2030. This is another important step in ensuring that at least a small fraction of the planet’s lungs survive and reduce overfishing. Again, the bad news is that the pledge does not contain any suggested actions on how to do this.
Both pledges set some ambitious targets to indicate when the G7 nations will next attempt to negotiate global climate commitments later this year as part of the United Nations talks. China will push back, and poorer nations will again resist demands to save their own countries from climate catastrophe, unless those demands are accompanied by appropriate funding commitments.
The United States, however, blew four full years strutting around in sociopathic bragging while the planet continued to simmer, so even a return to normal would be considered better. However, Biden seems to be fully aware of the dangers we are now facing, as are many other world leaders. The debate about whether the atmosphere and oceans are warming has largely ended, or at least slipped back into the corners of the disinformation it produced.
The question that remains is whether governments have the courage – or even the strength – to defy global industries that do not care what the climate might be like in a century, as long as every executive can afford the good things that it can gives life this year and next. The Biden approach is the best; he intends to use capitalism itself to force change by pouring money into clean infrastructures and modernized technologies, bolstering the power of any business looking to enter a new energy age while letting the laggards sink into the resulting competition .
Provided, of course, that this nation and the others hold back new fascist movements that assume they are not doing anything for free while tiny groups of power brokers scrape off any wealth while telling their followers that the rest is left to fate. Not given.
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