COP26’s compromise on coal is still a victory, US climate official says

Name: Climate deal to ‘phase down’ coal reached at COP26 as nations seek to avert climate disaster
Uploaded: 2021-11-18T23:28:33.000Z
Duration: 3 min 7 s
Description: Climate deal to ‘phase down’ coal reached at COP26 as nations seek to avert climate disaster

President Joe Biden’s climate deputy also says too much was made of Xi Jinping’s absence from the recent UN conference

The Glasgow Climate Pact included a commitment to ‘phase down’ coal, a late change reportedly pushed by China and India from the original ‘phase out’

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Delegates confer during COP26 meetings in Glasgow on November 13. Photo: Reuters

Owen Churchill

Published: 7:28am, 19 Nov 2021Updated: 7:28am, 19 Nov 2021

A top US climate official on Thursday played down the weakening of commitments to reduce coal usage at the recent COP26 conference, stressing that the fossil fuel’s inclusion in the summit’s resulting document was a victory in itself.

Jonathan Pershing, the US administration’s deputy special climate envoy, also said that too much had been made of Chinese President Xi Jinping’s absence from the conference, in contrast with US President Joe Biden’s assertion that the no-show signalled that Beijing had “walked away” from the climate issue.

Held in Scotland, the United Nations-backed summit culminated last week in a document – the Glasgow Climate Pact – that included a commitment to “phase down” coal, a last-minute change reportedly pushed by China and India from its original wording of “phase out”.

Speaking at an event hosted by the Washington-based Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), Pershing said the edit was a case of “minor tweaking”, and said the difference was not consequential given that the original “phase out” wording itself did not come with a deadline.

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Climate deal to ‘phase down’ coal reached at COP26 as nations seek to avert climate disaster

“There was never, in that coal language, any discussion of when a phase-out would happen,” Pershing said. “So if I have no timeline for a phase-out’, and then I put in ‘phase down’ instead, it’s actually not clear that they’re radically different.”