Madrid Climate Talks End in Disappointment

The UN climate conference, COP25 in Madrid, ran two extra days into Sunday, but failed to accomplished its goals. Matters including Article 6, reporting requirements for transparency and “common timeframes” for climate pledges failed to reach any agreement and were pushed into 2020. UN secretary general António Guterres tweeted “I am disappointed with the results of #COP25. The international community lost an important opportunity to show increased ambition on mitigation, adaptation & finance to tackle the climate crisis. But we must not give up, and I will not give up.”

This year’s talks were unable to reach consensus in many areas, pushing decisions into next year. The talks had aimed to finalize the “rulebook” of the Paris Agreement essentially creating the operating manual needed to set rules for carbon markets and other forms of international cooperation when the Paris Agreement goes into effect in 2020. Matters including Article 6, reporting requirements for transparency and “common timeframes” for climate pledges failed to reach any agreement and were pushed into 2020, when countries are also due to increase their pledges of reduction in CO2 equivalents. The meeting had been scheduled to wrap up on Friday, but dragged on two more days attempting to accomplish something.

So as not to end on a total downer, progress was made by the private sector, and by national, regional and local governments. The UN Global Compact, which works with the private sector, announced that 177 companies have now agreed to set science-based climate targets and will reach net-zero emissions by 2050. That is double the number of companies that signed up to the pledge at the Climate Action Summit, and is equivalent to the annual total CO2 emissions of France. In addition, the European Union committed to carbon neutrality by 2050, and 73 nations announced that they will submit an enhanced Nationally Determined Contribution. A groundswell of ambition for a cleaner economy was found on the regional and local level, with 14 regions, 398 cities, 786 businesses and 16 investors are working towards achieving net-zero CO2 emissions by 2050, California among them.

The chart below was in the Wall Street Journal on December 16th its source: Climate Action Tracker.  The chart shows the annual greenhouse gas emissions, historic and targets pledged under the Paris Accord. You can see that the current pledges are inadequate to prevent average global temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees C.  India emission are tagged to their GDP and China plans to stop growing by 2030. The  U.S. target based on Obama administration Mid-Century Strategy, but while the US is pulling out of the accord (until the next administration puts us in) states are pledging carbon neutrality by 2050.