Today, Explained - Can you spare some climate change?

Episode Date: November 28, 2022

In a UN-brokered agreement, more than 190 countries agreed to pay for “loss and damage” caused by climate change. But determining who owes what — and for what and to whom — will be a real challenge. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy, edited by Matt Collette, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Paul Robert Mounsey, and hosted by Noel King. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained   Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

27 times. The United Nations has gathered the world, capital T, capital W, together 27 times to try to figure out what to do about climate change. In a good year, things do get done at the Climate Change Conference of the Parties, or COP. But as we close out 2022, one thing we can say for certain, it has not been a particularly good year. Climate change isn't the only issue on everyone's mind. We're facing an era of global inflation, conflict, really high energy prices, and possibly going into a recession. So a lot of people were really not just focused on climate change at the meeting, and it was really hard to get everybody focused on this one thing at one time. So what got done?

The answer is not nothing. Coming up on today explained low expectations, but mixed results. BetMGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the

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concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. It's Today Explained. I'm Noelle King. Representatives from almost 200 countries turned up in Egypt for the U.N.'s 27th worldwide meeting on climate change. Now, that in itself is an achievement. Consider Ukraine and Russia fighting a devastating war. They each sent representatives to this meeting. Although, every single country present refused to go to Russia's roundtable discussions. Omer Orfan is a science reporter

at Vox, and he was at two previous COPs, 25 and 26. This year, he monitored from home. The main agenda item at this COP was this idea of compensating poorer countries facing the effects of climate change now. And this is under a provision known as loss and damage. That's developed nations finding ways to compensate and assist developing nations following decades of environmental damage. This has been something that's been extraordinarily contentious in previous COPs and has been punted on for years. And finally, they got, in principle, an agreement to actually create a fund that would help countries facing the effects of climate change now pay for some of the damages. Which countries agreed to what, exactly? Island countries have been talking about building a loss and damage fund for decades.

Climate change and sea level rise are deadly and existential threats to Tuvalu and low-lying atoll countries. They're saying that they're literally seeing sea levels rise and eroding the shorelines of their country. And that means that they're facing damages from climate change now, even though their greenhouse gas emissions have been tiny relative to some of the wealthier countries. The countries with the highest emissions, China, the U.S., India among them, are mostly responsible for the rapid sea level rise that threatens the Maldives. You know, the United States has been the largest historical emitter of greenhouse gases. And they've been able to become an extraordinarily wealthy country with those burning of fossil fuels, similarly with the European Union

and many other Western countries as well. And so the argument is that the countries that have burned the most fossil fuels and benefited the most financially have an obligation to help the countries that have contributed the least to the problem but stand to suffer the most. The establishment of a fund is not about dispensing charity. It is a down payment and an investment in climate justice. The issue is that wealthy countries have long resisted this idea because they think it opens the door to liability. You know, the word compensation has all kinds of loaded implications. And so the wealthy countries, they prefer to, if they have to give money, to do it out of the goodness of their hearts.

Basically arguing that it's being done on a charitable or on a voluntary basis rather than any kind of treaty or contractual obligation, which is obviously much weaker and gives them a lot more wiggle room to maybe not put up the money that they may have committed to in the past. And so by getting together finally at this meeting, you know, after punting on this issue for so many years and having this being the main agenda item, countries led by the European Union and many island countries finally met at the table and agreed in principle that there should be a loss and damage fund. I hear no objections. It's so decided. So just getting that principle agreement was a huge step forward. But of course, there's huge details that have to be filled in,

namely how much money goes in, who's paying in, and who gets paid from that fund. And those are issues that are going to have to be resolved possibly at the next COP. How many countries signed on? Well, this was passed as a resolution for the entire meeting, and so just about everybody had to agree to it. Like, the COP process is a consensus-based process, so that's why everything is so tedious. You have to get oil producers like Saudi Arabia and island countries like the Marshall Islands all to agree on the same thing. And that's

why every word, every turn of phrase has to be litigated. A show of unity from nations big and small to address a global crisis. There are about 198 parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. And so that's just about every country in the world. And they're there in varying capacities. It gets a little bit really awkward moments where they were discussing some elements of the Kyoto Protocol at this COP, and the U.S. was not allowed to weigh in because they didn't officially sign it. In fact, it was voted down in Congress unanimously. So it's a little bit strange. You have these agreements where not everybody is party to them. But essentially, in principle, there is this agreement that just about every country in the world has to contribute in some fashion to dealing with climate change.

And so as far as like who's going to pay into this, I mean, again, this is going to be the big issue that they're going to have to resolve at the next COP. One of the big issues within this is the role of China. China as a large country that's also developing in some respects, but is also the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter, the world's single largest economy. Are they on the contributor side or are they on the recipient side? You know, this year, China saw some really massive climate disasters. They saw huge heat waves and wildfires as well. The heat is causing widespread power shortages, closing down factories and sparking wildfires that are terrorizing villages.

And the question then is, you know, are they considered a donor country because of their wealth or should they be considered a recipient country because they're also facing the effects of climate change pretty severely right now? Prime Minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Brown, told reporters at COP, we all know that the People's Republic of China, India, they're major polluters and the polluter must pay. And China, of course, is a major player in these international negotiations. And that's just going to be a really difficult thing to hash out. Is the language in these resolutions like the one that 190 plus countries signed?

Is it deliberately left vague in order to kick the ball down the field a bit more for another year? That ultimately ends up being what happens. Yes, the language in these agreements can be a little vague, a little hand-wavy, and often this vibe of go along to get along. As delegates filed out in Egypt, many were left exasperated as they lamented how progress on finance had come at the expense of progress on dealing with the very cause of the climate crisis, emissions reductions and weaning the world of fossil fuels. I mean, imagine getting a dozen people to agree on a pizza topping that you're going to be ordering for a party, right?

Just trying to get a consensus with like a dozen people, let alone 190 plus countries, all of whom have different economic, social and financial situations, and trying to come to some sort of consensus agreement. And so just the fact that you have to get everybody on board with this means that, yeah, you're going to get something fairly tepid. Some wording in the deal is seen as too weak, low emissions energy, unabated coal, less prominence given to the climate goal of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, all seen as leaving the door open to fossil fuels. On this agreement, for instance, they had to struggle just to get fossil fuels mentioned at all. So on one hand, they're talking about dealing with the effects of climate change,

but still struggling to have stronger language on dealing with the causes, you know, burning coal, oil, and natural gas, leading to the emissions of greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet. And so they had to have this sort of bracketing language around it saying that they want to reduce the unmitigated or the unabated emissions of greenhouse gases rather than just greenhouse gases and fossil fuels on their own, basically leaving wiggle room for things like carbon capture technology or maybe cleaner forms of fossil fuels as many oil countries and many countries that depend on fossil fuels still want to use. So yeah, it does look like it's a very weak agreement, especially given the fact that we've been at this for years and the fact that the window for addressing climate

change is slamming shut. But at the same time, there really isn't a better process. We haven't really come up with a better way to do this. There is no other forum that really gets just about every country at the world at the table. So it isn't good enough, but it is still the best we got. Is there a good estimate of how much it would cost in dollars to address all of the stuff that accompanies climate change? There's huge ranges. Like one estimate said that climate damages in developing countries would cost somewhere between $300 billion a year to $500 billion a year by 2030. Some of those estimates go up into the trillions of dollars, but it's hard to get much more specific than that. Okay, so it's one thing semi-done. Were there any other achievements?

One of the things that they made a lot of progress on is this thing called the Global Methane Pledge. This is sort of a side deal at COP27, and it's not something that every country in the world signed on to, but basically it's targeting methane, which is a potent greenhouse gas. It's about 30 times more powerful than carbon dioxide. And one of the advantages of targeting methane is that a lot of it comes from point sources,

meaning it comes from things like gas wells, things like farms, things like waste dumps. And so while it is a very potent gas, you only have to secure a handful of locations in order to limit its leakage. And by getting most of the world's methane emitters on board, you can actually make a substantial dent in global greenhouse gas emissions and avert a good chunk of warming. There were a handful of other side agreements as well. The other big announcement that came during COP27 was that a bunch of countries pooled about $20 billion specifically to help Indonesia transition toward clean energy and get off of coal. Indonesia is one of the most populated countries in the world. It's in Southeast Asia. It's also one of the largest coal-using countries in the world. And so this sort of bilateral deal between like the European Union, the US and

Indonesia shows sort of a model going forward for how you can target some of the biggest greenhouse gas emitters and give them a very strong incentive to decarbonize their economies. We saw a similar deal at a much smaller scale with South Africa last year, about an $8.5 billion deal to help them finance their transition toward clean energy as well. And so potentially in the future, we could see more of these one-off deals going forward with other countries to help them transition. And that was one of the other big headline announcements that came out of this COP. Did the United States make any promises worth talking about? Yeah, they made a bunch of promises. I mean,

President Joe Biden went to the summit himself. The United States of America will meet our emissions targets by 2030. He promised that one that the United States is going to uphold its climate commitments. The United States has committed to cutting its greenhouse gas emissions 50 to 52 percent below 2005 levels by 2030. So that's, you know, less than eight years away from now. And also promised hundreds of millions of dollars for different kinds of one-off partnerships. So funding for global adaptation to climate change, for disaster response across Africa, for clean energy investment support in Egypt, and just a bunch of other projects and basically telling the world that the U.S. is back in the game and that they are, you know, trying to do their part to prevent climate hell, as Joe Biden said.

Does Biden need Congress to approve the things that he promised? Well, yes, that's the rub. We've already seen that Biden has struggled to get the money he wants to use for international climate activity from Congress. You know, he promised that the U.S. would drastically ramp up its contributions towards international climate finance, close to $11 billion. But Congress this year has only appropriated about $1 billion for that. So we're roughly at about 10% of where we committed to being. And so pushing even more money and promising even more money to other countries is going to be more difficult in the next couple of years because, well, he has to convince the Republican House to help pass these budgets that will help the U.S. finance these

international climate initiatives. On a scale of 1 to 10, how productive was COP27 compared to COP26, COP25, COP24, COP23, COP18, COP1? Sorry. Well, it's a little bit hard to make a direct one-to-one comparison between the COPs because each COP has sort of a different set of parameters that they're operating under. So the COP where Paris was signed, COP21, that was basically where they were really looking to establish a global climate treaty and a framework for doing that. And then at COP26, about five years after that, that was supposed to be the first main check-in point after Paris. The idea under the Paris Agreement was that every country would set their own benchmarks, and we knew that those benchmarks would be inadequate, but that countries would ramp them up over time. So the expectations were a little bit different going into COP27, but the one big agenda item that they were looking for, the loss and damage fund, was

actually resolved. But again, at the same time, with each COP, these are meetings where we have every country in the room. It's an opportunity to try to push countries to do more. And every opportunity we don't seize to get closer to our targets is a huge missed opportunity. And, you know, time continues passing. Next year, we're going to have even less time to meet the targets of the Paris Climate Agreement. You know, one of the sub-targets in that agreement is to stay below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Back in 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the world would have to basically cut its greenhouse gas emissions in half relative to where they are now by 2030 if they want to stay below 1.5 C. At this COP, they reaffirmed that they actually want to do that, that they think that this is still a realistic target, but the window for hitting that target is narrower than it's ever been. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura.

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Clear follow-through on the phase-down of coal. Not in this text. A clear commitment to phase out all fossil fuels. Not in this text. And the energy text weakened in the final minutes. In the final minutes, Umair Orfan, senior science reporter at Vox, let's talk about what didn't get done at COP 27. What was the biggest disappointment in Egypt? I think one of the big disappointments was that there was less aggressive action on the causes of climate change. Just trying to get people to acknowledge that fossil fuels are a problem and that we should be using less of them is really tricky. One, from the oil producing countries and from many of the fossil fuel exporters, you

know, countries like Saudi Arabia, but also many countries in Central Africa and many countries in Latin America that are fuel exporters. You know, they count on fuel as part of their economies, a big chunk of how they, you know, feed their countries and keep their economies going. And they were more resistant to language that specifically had fossil fuels in their crosshairs. And so a lot of activists were very disappointed that there wasn't stronger language to say that we need to actually end the use of fossil fuels over time. The fossil fuel producing countries want some wiggle room to have technologies like carbon capture or to, you know, come up with some technology in the future to remove CO2 from the air to sort of balance out their emissions. Basically, just leaving a loophole open for them to continue exploiting and using these fuels.

And another factor this year is also, of course, the energy crisis that many countries are facing. You know, after Russia invaded Ukraine and the subsequent disruption to particularly natural gas to Europe, a lot of countries in Europe started increasing their use of fossil fuels. Germany's parliament on Friday agreed to reactivate retired coal power plants to generate electricity. This would decrease their reliance on precarious Russian supplies, but would potentially bring the country further from its climate goals. And so you had a situation where wealthy countries are actually increasing their fossil fuel consumption. And that's made it a lot more difficult for people to say that they need to get rid of fossil fuels because they're using more of them right now. And so that was a pretty big

disappointment, I think, for a lot of countries who are on the front lines of climate change and wanted more definite commitments. How did it manifest that the countries that are fossil fuel providers and exporters, how did it manifest that they said, we don't want to get into it on fossil fuels? Did they turn down some language? Did they refuse to sign on to something? And did anyone confront them and be like, you guys, we all know it? I mean, behind closed doors, these meetings can get very testy. And that is kind of how it manifests, you know, for specifically like in the initial drafts of this agreement, like any mention of fossil fuels at all was scrubbed

out by some of these oil producing countries. And they finally allowed that language in provided it was only bracketed as things like unabated fossil fuels with the caveat that basically assuming that, you know, burning fossil fuels completely recklessly, which sort of implies that there is a responsible way to be able to burn fossil fuels into the future. Again, this is a consensus-based process. Everybody has to kind of stick to it. So yes, one country, a handful of countries can form blocks and hold up the process. And we've seen that happen in the past before, you know, not just the countries in the Middle East that are oil producers, but also Russia, you know, Russia is still at the table here. And so is Ukraine. And they're still trying to, you know, hammer out agreements here, even while they're, you know, waging war against each other in the real world. And so this is going

to be some one of those issues where they have a very hard time coming to an agreement. And yeah, like up to the last minute, the meeting was supposed to end on a Friday and they didn't get an agreement well until early Sunday morning Egypt time. And that was because, you know, they were lobbying over the minutia of this deal, just specifically a lot of the language around fossil fuels,

just exactly how aggressive they wanted to be and just how much they wanted to put pressure on fossil fuel producers and consumers to phase it out completely. Did COP27 leave you and other science journalists with any sense that we have any hope of keeping warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius? I hesitate to make any kinds of predictions about the future, but I do think that the window for 1.5 C is pretty much closed at this point. I mean, we're talking about

cutting global emissions in half by 2030. That's less than eight years from now. That's not a long time away. Think back to where you were eight years ago and imagine a drastic cut in greenhouse gas emissions beginning then. It's not a lot of time. And even 2050 is not that far away. You know, 2050 is closer to us than 1980. It's closer to us than 1990. But it's a world that we will all be around to see. Most of us, most of the people here, most of the people listening, we're going to be around in that. Like, this isn't just the world of our future. This is the world that many of us are going to retire into. And it does mean that our actions now play a role. And so while some of the most ambitious goals may be out of reach, it's not as though

climate change is completely out of our hands either. So maybe 1.5 is going to be extraordinarily difficult to hit, but maybe we can still stay below 2. And one thing that's kind of implied here is that, you know, as long as greenhouse gas emissions go up, the planet is going to continue to warm. And so what that means is that eventually we do need to zero out our emissions. And anything that we do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have a benefit, which is the converse of the idea that as long as the planet to say, our actions still do matter. And that whatever actions we take now to mitigate the problem, even if they're not enough to meet our targets, we'll still have benefits that were down to us and to future generations. Let me ask you, Leslie, COP28, what's going to be on the agenda? Do they forward project and let you know?

At COP28 in Dubai next year, they're going to pick up from where COP27 left off. Funding the loss and damage mechanism is going to be a big deal and getting the $100 billion for the international climate finance program shored up. That's going to be a big effort there as well. And then mostly also just more language, probably more nudging, more pressure on fossil fuel producers to have stronger language on phasing out fossil fuels. You know, one of the big contentious issues here has always been the words phase out versus phase down. Phase down implies reduction, but phase out means eliminating entirely. And so that was one of the weird niche sub debates over the language here in this agreement. A lot of environmental activists want to have a sunset on fossil fuels entirely

cemented in the near future. And then by next year, also, the hope is that maybe some of these fossil fuel shocks that we're experiencing this year, the economy will be a little bit more settled. Maybe we'll be out of a recession. We'll be out of this inflationary spiral. Many of the supply chains will be unsnarled. And then hopefully people will come to the table with a bit more ambition. They'll realize that the technology has improved, costs have gone down, and that clean energy might be an even more viable option. And so the hope is that everybody will come back with a little bit more ambition and a little bit more hope. Our show today was produced by Avishai Artsy and edited by Matthew Collette, who also helped with fact-checking. More fact-checking by Laura Bullard and engineering

by Paul Robert Mouncey. I'm Noelle King. It's Today Explained. you