Outside In | COP26: Climate deals to achieve net zero carbon emissions? Possible but very hard
- Little common ground has been found for climate action, from ESG investments to fossil fuel subsidies
- But with hope, COP26 will broker detailed net carbon timetables, meaningful carbon pricing and an end to fossil fuel subsidies
With seven months to go before COP26, opinions on what may be achieved range across a huge spectrum, from excited optimism to wrist-slitting gloom. Data on progress since the 2015 Paris accord is, to say the least, confusing, as are prognoses about what we will achieve in Glasgow.
My sheet anchor is Bill Gates in his new book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, who points to three imperatives. First, to get to net zero carbon emissions by 2050, second, to accelerate use of solar, wind and other existing clean-energy sources and, third, to put the pedal down on breakthrough technologies that speed progress in purging carbon and fossil fuels from our lives.
Is he optimistic or pessimistic? Gates’ answer is a fudge, but simple: it is going to be hard, but it is possible. The first step, he says, is to recognise that the world is consuming 4 billion gallons of oil a day, and emitting 51 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases every year – 40 per cent of this from the world’s richest 16 per cent: “When you’re using any product at that kind of volume, you can’t simply stop overnight,” he says – energy transitions over the past three centuries have taken decades, and involved formidable resistance from large communities of vested interests.
“We need to accomplish something gigantic that we have never done before, much faster than we have ever done anything similar,” he says: “We need to build a consensus that doesn’t exist and create public policies to push a transition that would not happen otherwise.”