The United Nations Climate Change Conference just concluded in Glasgow, Scotland after two weeks of political rhetoric with backtracking delay tactics rather than achieving substantive changes right now! Reuters provided the play-by-play to complete the diluted agreement.
To have any hope of Peace on Earth, the world needs an immediate drastic change in course, what I call a sea-change transformation and America can and is obligated to lead the way! The Economist shows how bad disasters could be with the current trajectory of carbon emissions causing our Earth to warm by 3 degrees Celsius.
For 26 years, the UN Conference of the Parties (COP) have been meeting annually to attempt to solve the climate crisis. By the way, discussions to phase out chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) preventing further damage to the protective ozone layer only took about a decade according to C2ES.
At COP26, many world leaders and statesmen like Sir Richard Attenborough verbally and visually demonstrated the imminent climate catastrophe. At the beginning of this week, former President Barack Obama gave a passionate speech lasting about 45 minutes to share successes and shortcomings on the fight for clean green energy encouraging young activists to stay angry and keep fighting. What he and most everyone attending the conference left out is a COPout!
The United States of America is the world’s largest cumulative contributor to greenhouse gases adding 20% of the world’s carbon pollution into the atmosphere according to CarbonBrief. So we Americans are the most responsible for fixing the problem and openly discuss all solutions, right?
Some are blaming President Biden for not wanting to raise taxes on people making less than $400,000 which would prevent creating a carbon tax while President Biden rightly blamed his predecessor for moving out of the Paris agreement reached five years ago that proposed to limit future temperature increases to 1.5 deg. C.
In the summer of 2008, when Democratic nominee Obama came campaigning to Las Vegas where I lived and worked for the feds dealing with nuclear waste, we saw him make a deal with Senator Harry Reid. Top on Reid’s list was ending the proposed Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository project to be located on the atomic bomb testing grounds at the Nevada Test Site. I discussed the world’s nuclear waste issue and my experiences in this 2019 blog. The key to solving climate change requires conservation and new innovations in all power generation including nuclear fission and fusion. Here are some current breakthroughs by government-industry and MIT.
About 20% of the world’s power currently comes from nuclear energy but only one country, Finland, is building a repository to solve the nuclear waste problem.
The American Nuclear Society expressed concern of being silenced before the COP26 conference and issued a statement at the opening: “we urge the delegates to assume that a significant commercial deployment of new reactor designs and advanced nuclear fuel will occur in the 2030 timeframe and to acknowledge that such a scale-up will require a significant investment in research and development funding for advanced nuclear technologies.”
Time Magazine reports that nuclear is COP26’s quiet controversy with some side agreements being arranged but certainly is not in the mainstream conversation.
The U.S. and other huge carbon emitting countries are reluctant to pay for damages to developing countries. This is contrary to standard laws like Superfund where the polluter pays. Meanwhile, developing countries like India proposed becoming net zero by 2070 which is at least 20 years too late as well as weaken language in the final agreement to “phase down” instead of “phase out” coal. Other coal and hydrocarbon-rich countries including Australia, China, Russia and Saudi Arabia worked hard to weaken agreements. No agreement was reached to stop drilling for more oil.
All the delays in taking action are not just An Inconvenient Truth but an Inconvenient COP-out!