Now, a new study has shed light on a crucial schism, suggesting that those afforded seats at the global policymaking table are vastly underestimating the support of the public on certain policies.

Last year, researchers published the results of a survey of 130,000 people living in 125 countries that found that 69% of respondents were willing to contribute 1% of their salaries to help fight global warming. But a subsequent Oxford University report, released this month, based on a survey of 191 attendees of the United Nations Environment Assembly in early 2024 found that they believed support for such a policy to be at only 37% – just over half the actual amount.

The Oxford researchers surveyed politicians, people working at the UN and other institutions, and policy negotiators. “It’s not just policymakers – our findings suggest that individuals playing a diversity of roles at international environmental governance meetings could be operating under the assumption of a weaker public mandate for climate action than reality,” said lead author Ximeng Fang, a research fellow at Oxford’s Saïd Business School.

This illuminating research is key to rethinking global climate ambitions, at a time when the policies that have been adopted are falling short of what is needed to curb rising temperatures.

As delegates prepare to travel to Belém, Brazil, in November for the COP30 climate conference, another stiff debate around emissions targets is on the horizon. Brazilian organizers have vowed to bring “a new dynamic to global climate action” that aligns efforts to adhere to a battery of already-made commitments.

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Stefania Innocenti, a co-author of the report and associate professor at Oxford’s Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, said that some possible reasons for the misperceptions could be traced to news coverage, lobbying or perhaps the information bubbles that emphasize certain ideological viewpoints.

In the United Kingdom, for example, former prime minister Tony Blair grabbed headlines for a new report he authored that argues for a climate policy reset, suggesting that the current approach is doomed to fail. “Though most people will accept that climate change is a reality caused by human activity, they’re turning away from the politics of the issue because they believe the proposed solutions are not founded on good policy,” he writes. “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.”

Although surveys have repeatedly shown that the public wants action, leaders and the media continue to miss opportunities to place the climate fight at the centre of public discourse.

The global survey of 130,000 people, conducted in 2021 and 2022, “found widespread support of climate action,” with 86% endorsing pro-climate social norms and 89% wanting more intense political action from their governments on the dilemma. The study included countries that account for 96% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, 96% of the world’s gross domestic product and 92% of the world’s population.

Another survey of people living in 77 countries, called the People’s Climate Vote, found that 80% want their communities to strengthen their climate commitments, and 71% want their countries to replace coal, oil and gas with renewable energy quickly or somewhat quickly.

“I hope our research encourages policy officials to be braver and pursue more ambitious climate policies,” said Oxford study co-author Joshua Ettinger,​ who is now a postdoctoral research fellow at the George Mason University Center for Climate Change Communication. “They have more public support than they may realize.”

Natalie Alcoba is a Buenos Aires-based journalist and senior editor at Corporate Knights. 

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Many delegates, advocacy groups, and UN officials are hopeful that the 10-day session, which runs through August 14, will result in a final agreement that delivers on the UN’s objective to “end plastic pollution.” But progress has been slow at each of the five preceding sessions, in large part because of a consensus-based decision-making structure that has allowed oil-producing countries to obstruct progress.

While the UN Environment Programme is eager to conclude the negotiations, some delegates and environmental groups are worried that the pressure to agree to something will yield an unambitious treaty. They’re gearing up for a contentious week and a half and preparing for the possibility of more deadlock – in which case negotiations could continue at yet another plastics treaty session, or at a separate, higher-level UN meeting that’s happening this December.

For Chris Dixon, who has attended each of the plastics treaty negotiating sessions and is the oceans campaign leader for the non-profit Environmental Investigation Agency, the discussions in Geneva will be a “real test” at a time of flagging confidence in multilateralism. “There’s currently a lot of investment in delivering this [treaty] within the UN,” she told Grist. “Can we still get countries around the world to commit to something really meaningful?”

Here’s how we got to where we are now, and what to watch for over the next 10 days.

Why the UN is negotiating a plastics treaty

The world is drowning in more plastic than it can manage. Since the material began to be mass produced in the 1950s, annual production has soared to some 460 million metric tons – roughly the weight of 1,400 Empire State Buildings – and is projected to triple by 2060 under business as usual.

Today, only 9% of plastic is recycled because of technical and economic limitations; the rest is sent to landfills and incinerators, or becomes litter in the environment. Plastic now permeates virtually all of the Earth’s landscapes, as well as human organs such as the brain, lungs, testicles and ovaries. It’s associated with myriad health concerns, and – because it’s made from fossil fuels – it’s a major contributor to climate change.

“Plastics have so many egregious issues,” says Holly Kaufman, a senior fellow at the non-profit World Resources Institute and co-founder of a research project on plastic’s contribution to climate change. She also notes the disproportionate pollution burden borne by people living near plastic manufacturing facilities, as well as plastic’s impacts on ecosystems and wildlife.

UN member states agreed in March 2022 to tackle the problem by negotiating an international, legally binding treaty to “end plastic pollution” and set a goal of finishing it by the end of 2024. Few foresaw how contentious the process would be. Over five rounds of scheduled talks, countries have repeatedly sparred over the scope of the treaty, including whether its mandate to address the “full life cycle” of plastics implies some sort of limit on how much plastic the world can create.

A handful of fossil-fuel-producing countries including Iran, Russia and Saudi Arabia used the consensus-based decision-making process to their advantage, stalling the negotiations over their opposition to plastic production limits, while a much larger bloc of other nations expressed a desire for more “ambitious” provisions. By the fifth round of talks in Busan, South Korea, last December, negotiators were so far behind that there was little hope they would be able to finish the agreement on schedule. The UN agreed to schedule one more meeting in 2025, calling it “part two” of the fifth negotiating session. That’s what’s kicking off this week.

What’s being negotiated

At the end of the last round of talks, the chair of the treaty negotiating committee published a “chair’s text” meant to encapsulate the full range of proposals under discussion and serve as a starting point for further negotiations. On production limits – the issue that has divided treaty negotiations from the outset – the text offers two options. One, depending on how it’s worded, could set a “global target” to “reduce,” “maintain” or “manage” the production of plastic, with the potential goal of reaching “sustainable levels” of “production and consumption.” The other option is no text at all, eliminating the article on plastic production altogether.

For green groups, a best-case scenario would be for the treaty to enshrine a global target directly – by requiring production to drop, say, 40% by 2040. Some countries might have to make deeper cuts, depending on their share of global plastic production and historical responsibility for plastic pollution, and each country would have to implement this goal through national legislation. Dixon said the window may have closed for such an agreement; it could be more realistic to push for the treaty to kick off a “target-setting process” that would unfold at annual meetings after the treaty is finalized.

Bjorn Beeler, executive director of the non-profit International Pollutants Elimination Network, has attended each treaty negotiating session, as well as previous UN meetings on plastic pollution starting in 2018. He isn’t expecting much progress on production limits either, saying the conversation on the topic hasn’t “matured” in the same way it has for other priority areas, particularly chemicals and their impacts on human health. Since treaty negotiations began, researchers have identified more than 16,000 chemicals used in plastic products, 4,200 of which are known to have hazardous properties. Most of the other chemicals have never been assessed for toxicity.

At the end of the Busan talks, 94 countries signed a declaration calling for the treaty to include legally binding phaseouts of “the most harmful plastic products and chemicals of concern in plastics.” A coalition of scientists advocating for an “effective” plastics treaty favour treaty regulations based on broad chemical classes, with a streamlined process to regulate more chemicals over time. The chair’s text, however, currently lists just seven chemicals for phase-out, and only in specific products. It also lists seven types of single-use plastic products like straws and cutlery, and does not mention particular polymers – polyvinyl chloride, or PVC, for instance – that are more likely to leach hazardous chemicals. Enforcing a phaseout of selected chemicals would likely be up to individual countries.

Other, less controversial parts of the chair’s text aim to create better waste-management systems; improve the “durability, reusability, refillability, refurbishability, repairability, and recyclability of plastic products”; clean up existing plastic pollution; and foster a “just transition” for waste pickers and other workers who may be affected by the implementation of the plastics treaty. Several of its objectives, like preventing the release of microplastics into the environment, could also protect human health, since exposure to these tiny plastic fragments is linked to heart attacks, strokes and chronic degenerative diseases, among other conditions.

The UN resolution for the plastics treaty acknowledges that it may create expensive legal obligations, especially for poorer developing countries – these countries may not have enough money to create more robust waste-management systems and replace the plastic they buy with costlier alternatives. Negotiators have been considering how to create a mechanism that would ease this burden, either by standing up a new multilateral fund, drawing from an existing one or designing some combination of the two. They’re also deliberating on whether and how to differentiate countries’ financial responsibilities based on their wealth and historic contribution to the plastic pollution crisis. The chair’s text on this topic is heavily bracketed, meaning little of it is set in stone, although a widely supported proposal that African, Latin American and small island countries released last year suggests that most delegates favour a new fund with mandatory contributions from the most developed countries.

Other financial proposals include a tax on plastic manufacturing and the elimination of plastic production subsidies, although these measures face long odds in Geneva because of opposition from industry groups and oil-producing states.

Rules of procedure and the specter of no agreement

More mundane, although perhaps more important, than any of the substantive issues up for discussion in Geneva is the way negotiators make decisions. So far, procedural rules that encourage consensus-based decision-making have made it possible for oil-producing countries to stand in the way of progress when confronted with proposals they dislike. This dynamic will likely continue unless negotiators adopt “rules of procedure” that allow for voting.

“It doesn’t matter if we’ve got 11 days or 11,000 days,” Beeler says. Without the possibility of a vote hanging over delegates, “it’s just going to be a perpetual discussion.” He says that Geneva would be a victory even if new rules of procedure were its only outcome, because “then you’ve cleared up the mechanism to actually negotiate” at a future date. Beeler and other observers would rather end the Geneva talks with no treaty rather than one that’s been watered down just to accommodate an August 14 deadline.

If negotiators leave Geneva without an agreement, the next official opportunity for them to engage in plastics treaty diplomacy will likely be at the UN Environment Assembly’s next convening, in Nairobi, Kenya, in December. That forum allows voting – a double-edged sword. Countries that want an ambitious treaty could use the meeting to break the logjam around issues like production limits and chemicals of concern – but oil-producing states could also introduce a proposal to rewrite the treaty mandate originally agreed on in 2022, striking language around the “full life cycle” of plastics and perhaps reorienting it around waste management.

Some environmental groups have suggested that, if the talks in Geneva go poorly, high-ambition countries could drop out of the treaty altogether and negotiate their own agreement outside the UN’s purview. There is precedent for this, notably in a 1997 multilateral agreement to ban landmines that Canada spearheaded after countries couldn’t agree to do so within the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons. But others say this is unrealistic, given countries’ commitment to the plastics treaty process and the logistical difficulties of trying to start anew.

Whether or not negotiators finalize the treaty this month, Beeler emphasizes that the hard work of enacting and enforcing its provisions will take many years. These negotiating sessions are “a warm-up for a marathon,” he says. “The global fossil fuel-plastic-chemical economy is massive, and to address it and make any changes does not happen overnight.”

This article originally appeared in Grist. It has been edited to conform with Corporate Knights style. Grist is a non-profit, independent media organization dedicated to telling stories of climate solutions and a just future. Learn more at grist.org.

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“You could hear a pin drop – not just in the Great Hall of Justice, but across thousands of homes, classrooms, and offices around the world tuned in to watch,” Christiana Figueres, the influential climate activist and a key architect of the Paris Agreement, wrote in a post on LinkedIn about the opinion delivered by Judge Iwasawa Yuji on July 23.

“In short, phasing out fossil fuel production is no longer only a scientific demand – it’s a legal imperative,” Natalie Jones, a policy adviser for the International Institute for Sustainable Development, wrote. “A state’s fossil fuel production, fossil fuel consumption, granting of fossil fuel exploration licenses, and the provision of fossil fuel subsidies may constitute an internationally wrongful act which is attributable to that state.”

But will countries Russia, Saudi Arabia or China pay attention to the ruling? Yes, Figueres later wrote: “Even if this opinion is not binding, it clarifies and consolidates existing legal duties. It strengthens the legal foundation upon which more and more climate litigation is being built, and it gives moral and jurisprudential weight to the demands of citizens, youth, and vulnerable nations.”

“The highest UN court made it clear that climate issues are inherently linked to international law and human rights, and that past and present responsibilities for its consequences can be attributed,” Ana Toni, CEO of the COP30 climate conference in Brazil, wrote. “The opinion also leaves no doubt that, although climate change affects everyone, its most vulnerable victims have faces, colors, genders, and nationalities.”

Read more excerpts from posts written by climate lawyers, scholars and activists responding to the ICJ opinion:

Legal wings

Today, Judge Iwasawa Yuji, President of the International Court of Justice (ICJ), delivered the ICJ’s Advisory Opinion on climate change.

It is the most far-reaching legal statement ever made on the responsibility of states to protect the rights of current and future generations to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment.

And it is the clearest legal affirmation to date that cooperation among states to address climate change is not optional – it is a binding obligation.

I confess I am writing through tears. With each increasingly bold sentence from the Court, my mind and heart turned to my beloved colleagues at the UNFCCC UN Climate Change Secretariat who worked tirelessly from 2010 to 2015 to bring the Paris Agreement to life. To each of you, my deepest gratitude once again. You didn’t just make history then – you laid the very path that allowed the ICJ to make history today.

I also thought of the 27 Pacific Island law students – visionaries who first dared to imagine this moment. As the Pacific Islands Students Fighting Climate Change, they mobilized the government of Vanuatu, then others, until 130 governments formally brought this request before the Court via a resolution of the United Nations. Those students – now lawyers, organizers, public servants – are surely crying too today. Their courage and perseverance have changed the legal landscape. And they’ve lit a fire of hope for young people everywhere.

And I thought of the vast network of lawyers, activists, scholars, and diplomats who carried this effort over political, legal, and diplomatic thresholds – driven by love for our common home. Their joy is as profound as their achievement.

The road ahead remains steep. But today’s Advisory Opinion gives legal wings to countless efforts already underway – and to many more to come. We now walk forward not just with moral clarity, but with judicial affirmation.

This is a day for the history books. And a day for renewed resolve. —Christiana Figueres, global climate leader and co-host of the Outrage + Optimism podcast (Read post)

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Persuasive authority

While not legally binding per se, this Advisory Opinion carries significant legal and political weight. The Opinion interprets binding international law to which countries have already committed. Courts are likely to treat this Opinion as a persuasive authority, and it will impact rulings that have binding effect under national or regional legal systems. —Andreas Rasche, professor and associate dean, Copenhagen Business School (Read post)

Stopping at a red light

Until yesterday it was not entirely clear that passing through a red light was illegal. But now, thanks to the Advisory Opinion, all drivers (States and private actors) know that driving without care and passing through a red light can be illegal. Does that mean that from one day to the other all drivers will stop at a red light? No, but they will think twice about it. If you are a responsible driver (State or private actor) you now know that: a) you have to stop at the red light and b) you will face a penalty if you pass through the red light. —Francesco Sindico, professor of international environmental law, University of Strathclyde Law School (Read post)

The work ahead

As a climate change lawyer who’s helped shape arguments in these very proceedings, I know this is just the beginning. The hard work now lies in: translating this clarity into domestic legal systems; building litigation and compliance strategies that reflect these standards; ensuring that vulnerable communities can access and benefit from this global legal shift. The ICJ has given the world a new foundation. Now we build on it. —Anushree Tripathi, climate change lawyer (Read post)

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The post Experts react to the ICJ’s landmark opinion on climate change appeared first on Corporate Knights.

With little to no power to enforce compliance, Stiell has responsibility without authority. In two years as the UN’s executive secretary for climate change, he has pushed for action at two COP conferences in oil-producing countries (Egypt and the United Arab Emirates) while seeing the number of fossil-firm lobbyists in attendance quadruple. And he’s about to do it again at COP29 in Azerbaijan. He has learned not just to argue for change, but to paint vivid pictures of the costly dangers we now face – and the safer, more just world we could build for a fraction of that cost.

In mid-July, Stiell stood in a roofless home on Carriacou, his home island, surveying the damage from Hurricane Beryl. “I and my community are experiencing the devastation that has become all too familiar to hundreds of millions,” he said in a UN video. “Beryl is yet more painful proof: every year, fossil-fuel-driven climate costs are an economic wrecking ball hitting billions of households and small businesses.”

If no action is taken to slow climate change, a German government-backed report released in April says the costs will total US$38 trillion a year through 2050. “The same report,” Stiell noted, “says climate action will cost less than a sixth of that.”

With degrees in business and engineering, eight years with Finnish-based Nokia, and business development experience with a Silicon Valley AI start-up, Stiell moves easily between the public and private sectors. He’s also led the fight for a multibillion-dollar loss and damage fund for hard-hit developing countries, to be paid for by affluent industrial nations. With Canada and other G20 nations dragging their feet, the fund was finally established – if not yet funded – at COP28 in Dubai last December.

Now Stiell says the world has just two years left to agree on actions to achieve the Paris goals. To save COP29 this month in Baku, he’s been arm-twisting for a “quantum leap” in climate financing, including non-loan programs to help struggling nations cut emissions without drowning in debt. On the bright side, says Stiell, “Bold new national climate plans will be a jobs jackpot and economic springboard.”

Rick Spence is a business writer, speaker and consultant in Toronto specializing in entrepreneurship, innovation and growth. He is also a senior editor at Corporate Knights.

The post Meet the man most responsible for saving COP29 from irrelevancy appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That’s a key recommendation from a United Nations expert panel led by former federal environment minister Catherine McKenna and comprising 17 business and government leaders from around the world. 

“We must have zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing,” said UN Secretary-General António Guterres at the launch of a report by the panel, which he called “a how-to guide to ensure credible, accountable net-zero pledges.”  

Notably, the panel is also calling on corporations and financial institutions such as banks and pension funds to end all investment in new fossil fuel supplies – a recommendation that comes as Canada and other oil and gas producers are being urged to increase supply to make up for lost Russian production and help bring stability to global energy prices. 

Guterres established the expert panel to recommend ways of ensuring that climate pledges made by “non-state actors” (corporations, financial institutions and local and regional governments) are implemented.  

The panel’s report, which was released this week at COP27 in Egypt, lays out a truly ambitious prescription that both private sector and lower levels of governments will have to embrace to do their part to limit the increasingly dire impacts of climate change. 

It comes at a challenging time for those who want more aggressive climate action. 

With the likely loss of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, U.S. President Joe Biden will be hamstrung in getting more climate legislation passed, although he can still wield executive powers. 

Calls to end investment in fossil fuels facing challenges

Despite the growing urgency of the climate crisis, the twin spectres of inflation and a looming global economic slowdown will make it politically difficult for governments to impose any emissions-reduction measures on the private sector that are seen as having short-term costs. Europeans are facing a tough winter that will test the notion that the energy crunch resulting from the Russian invasion of Ukraine will accelerate the transition from fossil fuels rather than delay it. 

Some of the panel’s recommendations – like the end to fossil fuel investments – are likely to land with a thud. The world is too focused on elevated fuel prices and their impact on inflation and even democratic stability to foreswear all spending on new supply. And there is too much money to be made to expect that the financial sector will voluntarily end its support for oil and gas companies. Just last month, former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney’s net-zero banking alliance backtracked on mandatory net-zero requirements as some members balked at the more prescriptive approach. 

A more nuanced message would be to end investment in new fossil fuel infrastructure that would significantly boost supply over the longer term. 

We must have zero tolerance for net-zero greenwashing.

-UN Secretary-General António Guterres

Still, McKenna and her colleagues are laying down some crucial markers. Taken together, their recommendations are a needed blueprint to transform net-zero pledges into fully funded, science-based plans that deliver in the short and long term. 

Corporations, financial institutions and local governments “will either help scale the ambition and action we need to ensure a sustainable planet or else they strongly increase the likelihood of failure,” McKenna said in the foreword to the report. “The planet cannot afford delays, excuses, or more greenwashing.” 

A fundamental point made by the McKenna panel is that we cannot continue to rely on voluntary plans – too often vague, riddled with loopholes and lacking in enforcement mechanisms – to meet our goals.  

“To effectively tackle greenwashing and ensure a level playing field, non‐state actors need to move from voluntary initiatives to regulated requirements for net zero,” McKenna said in the report. 

The expert panel is also categorical about carbon offset credits: companies and local governments should avoid using “cheap credits that often lack integrity” and instead focus on immediately cutting their own emissions. We need to focus on “zero,” not the “net.” 

There are 10 recommendations in all. They all demand big changes, to be implemented quickly: 

Net-zero plans must have short-term targets that are consistent with global emission reductions needed to achieve a 1.5°C target for average global temperature increase – that is, a 50% reduction by 2030.  

They must also:  

• include annual performance reports that report progress in clear language with data that can be compared to other companies in their sector  
• focus on absolute emissions – not “intensity based targets,” which are relative to the portfolio’s size and have been adopted by several Canadian banks  
• lay out how the company or government is aligning its governance, pay structures, capital spending research and development and public advocacy with those goals.  

 As well, companies that claim to be climate leaders should not be lobbying against legislation that would reduce emissions, or supporting industry associations that do so. 

Will Canada regulate corporate net-zero pledges?

The panel’s call for governments to add some regulatory heft to net-zero commitments is particularly germane in the financial sector. In Canada, the federal regulator expects all federally regulated financial institutions to disclose climate-related financial risks. Neither the Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions nor Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland have shown any inclination to go beyond mandatory disclosure to regulate the details of the net-zero plans. 

It would be easy to dismiss McKenna’s report as wishful thinking. Canada certainly faces a lengthy list of climate challenges. The Liberal government in which McKenna served as minister is still funding the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion and supporting construction of liquefied natural gas plants on the West Coast.  

The country’s big banks have strenuously opposed federal regulations prescribing the details of their net-zero pledges, or any suggestion that they refrain from financing oil and gas operations. 

And then there’s Alberta. The province’s environment minister, Sonya Savage, is attending COP27 in Egypt, intent on voicing the “views of Albertans” – as she told Toronto Star columnist Graham Thomson – in defence of the province’s oil industry. Six of Canada’s biggest oil producers – who account for 95% of oil sands production – have signed on to the Pathways Alliance, which commits to net-zero production by 2050. However, there are gaping holes in that plan as it does not consider emissions from burning their fuel and will rely heavily on technologies such as carbon capture and storage and on the purchase of carbon offset credits from other industries.  

After the panel’s report was released this week, Pathways Alliance spokesman Mark Cameron said in an email that it “presents a lot of challenges for us since our pledge is about net zero production by 2050 but the report calls for the complete phaseout of oil and gas by 2050.” 

Still, the panel has laid down important markers that will allow us to assess the credibility of net-zero pledges.  It will now be up to the thousands of advocates in business, environmental groups, government and politics to take those criteria and see that they are given some teeth. 

The post It’s time for a crackdown on corporate net-zero pledges, UN expert panel says appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The United Nations last week launched an international panel of 16 experts, chaired by former Canadian environment minister Catherine McKenna, to recommend how best to assess, track and verify those net-zero commitments.

It is a daunting task. In many cases, corporations or local governments don’t yet know how they will achieve net-zero status by 2050. Often, they plan to rely on technology that has yet to be scaled or on offset systems whose credibility is hotly debated. They will also require massive amounts of capital from financial markets that still don’t adequately value the risks and opportunities associated with climate change.

In a June 29 webcast, McKenna and other panel members said it is critical that we have clear, practical and consistent ways to measure the progress – or lack of – that companies and sub-national governments are making toward their net-zero targets. 

“We know that pledges alone aren’t going to reduce emissions, that we need to see robust delivery plans and concrete actions,” McKenna said. “We need speedy implementation; the science shows this. We’re very far from where we need to be. But the good news is we can get there; we know what the solutions are.”

Disclosure standards are being pursued by securities regulators in Canada and around the world but often with gaping holes in them. And they are being met with considerable opposition from corporate lobby groups and conservative politicians.

The expert panel’s assessment will include how low-carbon-transition efforts by corporations and sub-national governments align with national commitments made under the Paris Agreement, which aims to limit average increase in temperatures to 1.5°C.

The committee has opened consultations with the public – submissions can be made here – and it is due to report back to UN Secretary General António Guterres before the next climate summit, COP27, which will be held in Egypt in November.

We need speedy implementation; the science shows this. We’re very far from where we need to be. But the good news is we can get there.

– Catherine McKenna, former Canadian environment minister

Net-zero commitments proliferated ahead of COP26, held last November in Glasgow. Banks, insurance companies and institutional investors – including many of Canada’s biggest financial institutions – rushed to join the Glasgow Financial Alliance for Net Zero, led by former Bank of Canada governor Mark Carney. However, critics in Canada argue the banks have not produced credible plans to achieve their goals.

Cities, states and provinces around the world announced net-zero commitments. Even some of the world’s leading oil and gas companies say they aim to be net-zero by 2050. 

In Canada, producers in the Oil Sands Pathways to Net Zero Alliance announced a goal of being net-zero in their operations by 2050, although that target does not include emissions from processing or the burning of their products. The oil sands producers’ plan relies heavily on carbon capture and storage and offset credits, both controversial approaches.

Broadly speaking, net-zero pledges amount to mere aspiration or greenwashing if they are not backed by science-based strategies. Those must include concrete actions geared to meet a series of short-term targets, full participation of company boards and top executives, and rigorous transparency and public accountability measures. 

In the webcast, McKenna drew on a quote from Guterres: “The world is in a race against time. We can’t afford slow movers, we can’t afford fake movers, and we can’t afford any kind of greenwashing.” 

One area of focus will be the lobbying practices of corporations that make lofty pledges on the one hand and then quietly work to erect roadblocks to progress on the other. 

Spain’s Helena Vines Fiestas – a former senior executive at BNP Paribas and advisor to the country’s financial markets authority – said we need to have greater transparency to ensure that public pledges on climate action are not counteracted by quiet lobbying, either directly or through industry groups to which the companies belong.

Most reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have pointed to lobbying by energy companies as a key barrier to greater action and ambition on a clean energy transition.

It’s important that publicly announced climate strategies are “actually aligned with public policy positions, whether directly or within the company’s circle of influence,” Vines Fiestas said.

Correction, July 5, 2022:
A previous version of this story erroneously referred to Helena Vines Fiestas as a senior exective at BNP Paribas. She is in fact a former senior exective at BNP Paribas. Corporate Knights regrets the error.

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That isn’t to say there wasn’t progress last year. The conference’s British hosts trumpeted COP26 as a “step forward in global efforts to address climate change.” The summit resulted in some significant pledges by governments around deforestation and methane emissions, as well as by leading financial firms vowing to achieve net-zero in their portfolios by 2050. But as climate disasters escalated in 2021, many were left feeling frustrated that more wasn’t achieved through all the summit’s “blah-blah-blah.” 

“There is much that is good, some bad, some lacking and without a doubt lots still to do to build on in a deal which may yet prove to be a turning-point,” said Mark Campanale, executive chair of the London-based think tank Carbon Tracker in a post-summit statement. “That’s especially true if governments can return next year, and the next, with more ambitious emissions targets.”

At the end of the summit, Climate Action Tracker, an independent analysis that measures country emissions, found that even if leaders achieve all their 2030 and long-term targets, the world is still on track for 2.1°C of warming.

Bold climate action is looking uncertain for the world’s second largest climate polluter, as U.S. President Joe Biden’s Build Back Better bill stalled in late 2021. In December, coal-friendly West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin had delivered what appeared to be a death blow to the bill, telling a Fox News host that he would vote “no” on the US$1.75-trillion package. The bill had carved out a whopping $555 billion to combat climate change, including $300 billion in tax incentives and rebates for clean energy, electric vehicles and greener buildings. Even the United Mine Workers of America, which represents West Virginia’s coal miners, called on the senator to reconsider his opposition to the bill.

There is much that is good, some bad, some lacking and without a doubt lots still to do to build on in a deal which may yet prove to be a turning-point.

-Mark Campanale, executive chair of Carbon Tracker

In his first public comments about the bill in 2022, Manchin said no negotiations were happening at the time. He added, however, that “the climate thing is one that we probably can come to agreement much easier than anything else.” If the bill does survive, its scope likely will be far narrower than what was originally proposed.

There are signs that 2022 may be more constructive, at least in Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau issued mandate letters to his cabinet ministers in December that signalled an unprecedented government-wide effort to tackle the climate crisis. The letters underscored a more robust climate approach, including a zero-emissions-vehicle mandate, a 100% net-zero electricity grid by 2035 and mandatory climate-related financial disclosures for banks, pension funds and others.

Admittedly, Canada has been notorious for not following through on its carbon-trimming resolutions. But Canadian climate activists are hopeful that the government will be more active on the climate file in 2022, given Steven Guilbeault has been appointed to serve as the country’s new minister of environment and climate change. Guilbeault, who was once a director of Greenpeace Quebec, had a long to-do list in his mandate letter and is expected to unveil a new federal climate plan in March.   

Ten months from now, Egypt will host the 27th UN climate summit. Expect fossil fuels and climate injustice to be in the hot seat. The UN had billed COP26 as humanity’s “last best chance” to tackle the climate crisis. Let’s hope the political actions of 2022 will meet the ambitions of 2021.

The post What will climate ambition look like in 2022? appeared first on Corporate Knights.

In the election campaign, the Liberals made some bold climate-change promises, including capping greenhouse gases (GHGs) from the oil and gas sector, forcing the industry to make big reductions in its methane emissions, and ensuring the country’s electricity sector becomes carbon-neutral by 2035. 

The specific planks – along with many other commitments – are meant to put meat on the bones of the Liberal government’s commitment to the UN in July that Canada will reduce its GHG emissions by 40 to 45% below 2005 levels by 2030, on the road to net-zero carbon by 2050.

Trudeau fell short in his bid for a majority government as many critics questioned the need for the summer election call during the fourth wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. However, the Liberals can count on support from the New Democrats, Green Party and Bloc Québécois for ambitious climate action at home and on the world stage. 

For many voters, the election was less about climate change and more about a rising cost of living and affordable housing. To maintain support for costly climate policies, the Liberals will have to ensure that Canadians don’t feel overwhelmed by the wrenching transition ambitious climate action will entail.

Still, Canada – led by a reinstated Prime Minister Trudeau – has a key role to play in getting the world on a better track. 

As Canadians were casting their ballots Monday, UN Secretary General António Guterres and British Prime Minister Boris Johnston kicked off “climate week” in New York by hosting a closed-door session of world leaders to address shortfalls in GHG targets and climate finance.

A UN analysis of countries’ emission-reduction pledges – known as nationally determined contributions, or NDCs – concluded that the world remains far off track to meet the Paris Agreement goal of holding the global increase in average temperature to 1.5°C, or even 2°C. 

After reviewing all the updated NDCs submitted this year, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said the new targets would still leave the world on pace for a 2.7°C increase in average global temperature by 2100 – and that assumes the leading countries actually meet their commitments.

To maintain support for costly climate policies, the Liberals will have to ensure that Canadians don’t feel overwhelmed by the wrenching transition it will entail.

Gathered in New York for the opening of the General Assembly, Guterres and Johnson made it clear that all nations have to step up their ambition and action. The re-elected Liberal government can provide international leadership, but only if Canada is meeting its own obligations. 

To date, the federal and provincial climate policies have failed to stop the inexorable rise in GHG emissions, which are believed to have fallen in 2020 as a result of the pandemic only to rebound this year as the economy recovered. In 2015 – the year in which the Liberals were elected – Canada had emissions of 723 megatonnes; that climbed to 730 in 2019. In a report this month, Climate Action Tracker said Canada’s policies are “highly insufficient” to meet its commitments. 

Clearly, it takes time to develop policy, enact it and then see its impacts. The stubbornly high emission levels, however, illustrate the enormous challenge in achieving a transition that requires major changes to the country’s energy production and consumption.

With the election win, the Trudeau government can be expected to move quickly to legislate the planned increase in the carbon price from $50 per tonne next year to $170 in 2030, through yearly increments of $15. That higher levy will drive up the cost of gasoline, heating fuels and electricity fired by fossil fuel for Canadian consumers and businesses.

The Liberals have said they will continue to provide rebates to families to compensate them for the higher carbon price – an average family of four in Ontario will collect roughly $2,018 annually from the rebate by 2030. However, small businesses and the not-for-profit sector will see their costs rise significantly.

The minority Liberal government will also have to enact measures to reverse the dramatic increase in emissions seen from the oil and gas industry over the past 15 years. In its platform, the Liberal Party said emissions from the sector must not rise above current levels and promised to set targets for GHG reductions in the industry for 2025 and 2030 consistent with a path to net-zero by 2050.

That won’t be easy. Any policies aimed at achieving the pledge will almost certainly provoke a backlash from oil- and gas-producing provinces unless accompanied by massive aid for both the companies and their workforces (including retraining and financing the adoption of new technology). Industry critics, on the other hand, will loudly oppose any further subsidies for oil and gas producers, even if they help reduce emissions from production.

The Liberal pledge to make the electricity system emissions-free by 2035 will conflict with plans in some provinces to use natural gas as a replacement for coal or to back up intermittent renewable sources like solar and wind.

As a wealthy country with one of the world’s highest rates of GHGs per person, Canada has a special responsibility to address climate change, even though it accounts for only 1.6% of global emissions. Failure to meet the Liberals’ lofty promises would once again undermine Canada’s reputation, which has suffered from broken commitments in the past and the rapid expansion of the oil sands, known throughout the world as one of the most carbon-intensive sources of oil.

In a report this month, Climate Action Tracker said Canada’s policies are “highly insufficient” to meet its commitments.

In the past six years of Liberal government, Canada has staked out a leadership position on climate change internationally. Ottawa joined with the U.K. in establishing the Powering Past Coal Alliance, which encouraged countries around the world to phase out reliance on coal-fired power.

In a pre-recorded message to the UN meeting in New York, Chinese President Xi Jinping said his country would no longer finance the construction of coal-based power plants abroad, which represents a major victory in the powering-past-coal effort. However, Beijing remains committed to coal-fired electricity at home. 

In July, Environment Minister Jonathan Wilkinson and his German counterpart were chosen to co-lead a process aimed at securing greater commitment from developed countries to deliver on their commitment of US$100 billion in climate financing for developing countries. 

Canada has pledged $5.3 billion (Canadian) toward that global commitment. The Biden administration announced it would seek approval from Congress to double its climate financing to US$11.4 billion annually.

Countries’ representatives are now preparing to gather in Glasgow in early November for the 2021 Conference of the Parties. COP26 president Alok Sharma – who also serves as the U.K.’s Minister of State at the Cabinet Office – says it’s critical that we achieve significant progress on climate financing to help developing countries prepare for the inevitable impacts of climate change and reduce emissions in order to limit the damage. Tellingly, these countries won’t be adequately represented at COP26 because of vaccine inequity.

In 2015, a newly elected Trudeau arrived at the Paris climate summit with a promise that Canada was “back” and ready to forge an ambitious role in battling climate change after 10 years of resistance from former Conservative prime minister Stephen Harper. 

Since then, the Liberal government has made considerable progress, including being re-elected on its platform that proposed a large increase in the carbon prices. 

Now it must work with other parties – including the Conservatives where possible – to ensure the path to a net-zero carbon economy is secured domestically and work with global leaders to meet the goal of the Paris Agreement. The growing urgency of the climate crisis makes clear the inadequacy of half measures.

The post Justin Trudeau has a key role to play in getting the world on a better climate track appeared first on Corporate Knights.

While rising concentrations of human-generated carbon in the atmosphere will continue to heat up the earth, we can still avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change by rapidly moving away from carbon-based energy, the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in a report released Monday.

The IPCC report provides ammunition to critics who dispute industry’s claim that natural gas is an environmentally acceptable choice that, when combined with carbon capture and storage technology, will remain viable for years.

“For existing natural gas, we do need much stronger regulations to make sure industry deals with methane leakage,” says Julia Levin, senior program manager at Toronto-based Environmental Defence. “But the problems with natural gas go well beyond methane leaks. As the IPCC report shows, there is no room for new natural gas projects in the global carbon budget.” She specifically targets liquefied natural gas projects that are being built and others that are proposed in British Columbia.

The industry is pushing back, however, arguing that natural gas will remain a major energy source in Canada and around the world for decades to come and that this country should aim to be a global supplier of the fuel.

“We don’t see natural gas as a bridge fuel or a transition fuel; we think it’s a foundational fuel,” says Tim Egan, president of the Canadian Gas Association.

The carbon budget measures how much more greenhouse gas can be emitted before the planet reaches the point where the target for holding average temperature increases to 1.5°C is essentially out of reach. At the rate of emissions seen in 2020, the world would exhaust its carbon budget within 11.5 years, based on a 1.5°C target.

Meeting the climate targets will require a net-zero energy system, combined with urgent reductions of short-lived climate pollutants such as methane and the scaling-up of efforts to remove carbon dioxide from the air, the IPCC report concluded.

The authors of the report – which was approved by 195 governments – based their conclusions on some 14,000 research studies from climate scientists around the world. They note the world has already experienced roughly 1°C of warming, which is responsible for extreme weather events such as the droughts and heat waves that are plaguing western North America.

The report places an increased emphasis on the importance of the short-lived carbon pollutants, such as methane, which is 80 times more powerful as a heat-trapped gas than is carbon dioxide.

“Drastic cuts in CO2, and eventually net-zero CO2 emissions, will be critical to limiting the maximum extent of future warming,” Ilissa Ocko, senior scientist with the U.S. Environmental Defense Fund, said Monday. “But cutting methane emissions is the single fastest, most effective way there is to slow the rate of warming right now.”

Methane emissions currently account for a quarter of average global temperature increases, a percentage that is second only to carbon dioxide. Targeting methane emissions is “the leading opportunity to slow the rate” of global warming over the short-term, Ocko said.

She said the world needs a two-tracked approach: focus on longer-term decarbonization by transitioning off fossil fuels while tackling the short-lived pollutants in the near-term.

Canada and the United States agreed in 2016 to aim for a 40% to 45% reduction in methane emissions from the oil and gas sector by 2025, though former president Donald Trump backed away from that commitment. The federal government passed regulations aimed at achieving that target, though environmental groups argue the rules will not achieve their stated aim.

The Biden administration is now determined to not only meet, but exceed that commitment, said Rick Duke, White House liaison for the special presidential envoy for climate change, during a conference call on Monday.

Duke said the U.S. government is working with like-minded nations, including Canada, to accelerate the reduction of methane emissions from industry, agriculture and landfills. The most economical measures exist in the oil and gas sector, where captured methane represents added fuel supply that can be sold to customers.

The Calgary-based Pembina Institute has urged Ottawa to require the oil and gas industry to reduce its methane emissions by 75% from 2012 levels by 2030 and to invest in greater efforts to detect fugitive emissions.

The Gas Association’s Egan says companies are already spending on technology to reduce their methane emissions, driven both by regulation and the economics of capturing more of their fuel.

As to the staying power of natural gas, Egan says the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) notes that natural gas accounts for 35% of Canada’s end-use energy and forecasts that it will rise to 40% over the next 20 years. (The CER forecast is not consistent with Canada’s commitment to achieve net-zero emissions by 2050, however.)

“Natural gas is our most affordable and most reliable energy source,” Egan says. “We think natural gas is here for the duration.”

Shawn McCarthy is an Ottawa-based writer who focuses on climate change and the low-carbon energy economy.

The post Methane burning through global carbon budget appeared first on Corporate Knights.

That organ invented a concept none of the other creatures had – the future – and realized we could affect that future by what we do in the present. By looking ahead, we were able to, using our experience and observation, anticipate hazards or favourable possibilities and thus deliberately choose to avoid danger and take advantage of opportunity. 

Foresight was a major factor in our survival and success as a species, and we have grown explosively as a result. But today, we have become a very different animal. We now use foresight to serve priorities far beyond basic biological and social needs like food, shelter, clean water, clean air, energy from sunlight – elements that are the key to our survival and well-being. Now foresight is used to sustain elaborations of human constructs like economics, politics, law and religion. However, the COVID-19 crisis is a reminder of our basic animal nature – and the difficulty humans have prioritizing the wisest choices when politics and economics intrude on what is a biological challenge. 

We’ve been aware of the threat global warming poses to humanity since 1824, when the greenhouse effect was first described by Joseph Fourier. By the 1950s, Russian climatologist Mikhail Budyko presciently warned that loss of Arctic sea ice would accelerate warming. Taking the science seriously, U.S. President Lyndon Johnson warned about the need to act on global warming in the mid-1960s, and Jimmy Carter put solar panels on the White House in the late 1970s. 

Canada played a major role in 1988, when 300 scientists, policy-makers from 46 countries, UN representatives and NGOs met in Toronto. Prime Minister Brian Mulroney spoke, and Stephen Lewis, Canada’s UN ambassador, chaired the conference, which concluded that global warming represented a threat to humanity second only to a global nuclear war and called for “urgent action” to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 20% over 15 years. Had Canada acted on our foresight then to achieve that target, we could have ​led the world away from the urgent crisis we now face.

The Nature of Things did its first television program on global warming in 1989. That year, I hosted a CBC radio series, It’s a Matter of Survival, that warned of a perilous future if we didn’t act immediately. The huge public response to that series prompted me to form the David Suzuki Foundation to look at the underlying root causes of our unwillingness to act on our basic survival instrument, foresight – to look ahead, recognize the danger of the climate emergency and act to avoid it. 

Fast forward three decades and the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow will be the 26th annual meeting to deal with a crisis we have long known about. If history is any guide, COP26 will accomplish little. While there are numerous solutions to climate change, ideological differences, national interest, corporate priorities, religious pressures, political timidity and legal strictures all act to block real action. All the while, the reality of climate change becomes ever more obvious and dire. 

The biggest hurdle is our belief that the economy or political future must be considered first. The most challenging obstacle to action is the mindset that no longer recognizes that our very lives and well-being remain utterly dependent on nature – air, water, soil, photosynthesis and biodiversity – while economics, politics and law are human creations. (Has COVID-19 respected human borders or cared about corporate or political priorities?) Humanity has inadvertently created an existential crisis by failing to recognize that we remain embedded in a web of relationships in nature and must act as a single species with a common goal.  

I have no idea what the final path will or should be. I only know that if we keep putting ourselves and our inventions (economics, politics, law) ahead of nature’s laws, we will bicker away and try to resolve the issue with incremental changes here and there.  

We must act the way we do in science fiction movies when Earth is invaded by aliens from another galaxy who kill humans indiscriminately: seize the challenge as one species in a common commitment to defeat a threat that imperils all of us.

Dr. David Suzuki is a scientist, broadcaster, author, and co-founder of the David Suzuki Foundation.

On December 9, David Suzuki joined Corporate Knights with Margaret Atwood and Sheila Watt-Cloutier for a fireside chat about climate action.

Watch the full event below.

For more information about the event, visit corporateknights.com/paristoglasgow.

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