GLASGOW — President Biden and other world leaders on Monday promised major commitments to slow climate change, but deep uncertainty remained about whether two weeks of international talks here can yield breakthroughs significant enough to avoid a catastrophic rise in global warming.
Complete coverage from the COP26 U.N. climate summit ArrowRight
Many leaders have billed the United Nations climate negotiations, known as COP26, as one of humanity’s last chances to adopt the kind of dramatic cuts to greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are essential before warming spirals out of control. If the world fails in that common goal, they warned, climate change will inflict more suffering and fundamentally reshape the way humans live on the planet.
“Our addiction to fossil fuels is pushing humanity to the brink. We face a stark choice: Either we stop it, or it stops us,” U.N. Secretary General António Guterres told world leaders as the summit opened on Monday. “We are digging our own graves.”
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Despite the bold rhetoric from dignitaries who traveled to windy Glasgow, one of the birthplaces of the industrial revolution, the absence of the leaders of some of the world’s biggest emitters of greenhouse gases offered an ominous reminder that the talks could fail to live up to expectations. Neither Chinese President Xi Jinping, Russian President Vladimir Putin nor Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan came to Glasgow, leaving the talking to their subordinates instead.
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Some of the lower-level officials locked in negotiations said they were worried that absent a fresh round of global commitments, the talks would fall short of their grand ambition of bending the world’s current warming trajectory.
Biden billed U.S. plans as both a “short-term sprint to 2030” to bring down emissions immediately, and a marathon that would make his country climate neutral within three decades. But he, too, has struggled to deliver on his goal to put the nation on track to cut its emissions in half by the end of the decade, with his climate agenda yet to be approved by a Democratic-controlled Congress despite his making it a top priority.
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“The United States is not only back at the table, but hopefully leading by the power of our example,” Biden told fellow leaders of the nation’s return to the global climate stage that President Trump abandoned. “I know it hasn’t been the case, and that’s why my administration is working overtime to show that our climate commitment is action, not words,” Biden said.
Biden also announced plans to work with Congress to set aside $3 billion a year by 2024 in financing for adaptation to climate change in developing countries, the White House said Monday. The sum, which will go toward protecting the world’s poorer citizens from rising seas and scorching temperatures, is part of an $11.4 billion commitment the president detailed earlier this year.
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The most significant new pledge on Monday came from India, the world’s third-largest greenhouse gas polluter. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s vow to reach “net zero” emissions by 2070 disappointed climate advocates who had urged the nation to aim for a much earlier date, but he received praise for an updated commitment to make massive investments in renewable energy. Modi said the country of nearly 1.4 billion people would install 500 gigawatts of non-fossil energy by 2030, and that India would meet half of its energy demands from renewable sources by then.
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Modi called his country “the only big economy in the world that has delivered both in letter and in spirit on its Paris commitments,” but he said that if developing nations are to continue to shift away from fossil fuels, it will require significant financing and technical support from the developed world.
Xi on Monday offered no updates to China’s commitments, submitting only a terse statement for the record. “China will continue to prioritize ecological conservation and pursue a green and low-carbon path to development,” Xi wrote, offering no specifics other than reiterating a promise to release concrete plans to peak his country’s emissions in 2030 and achieve carbon neutrality by 2060. “I hope all parties will take stronger actions to jointly tackle the climate challenge and protect the planet, the shared home for us all,” he wrote.
Monday’s gathering had a rock festival aspect to it, with hundreds of climate leaders, activists, business leaders and policy wonks all descending on a Glasgow convention center to push for a greener planet.
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Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenager who is something of a star for climate campaigners worldwide, arrived by train Saturday night and was quickly surrounded by about 100 people at the station. Several police officers escorted her away. The 18-year-old tweeted a picture of her giving a thumbs-up to the crowd. Scotland’s Sunday Mail newspaper called the scene “Greta Mania.”
The calls from her and other youth activists for increased sense of urgency dovetailed with the warnings from scientists here that climate-related calamities will become more frequent and intense without major policy changes. This year alone, wildfires, floods, deadly heat waves and other episodes of devastating extreme weather have plagued rich and poor nations alike.
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Already, the world has warmed roughly 1.1 degrees Celsius compared to preindustrial levels. But the United Nations warned in a recent analysis that the world is on a path to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius, or 4.9 degrees Fahrenheit, of warming over the course of the century based on existing emissions-cutting pledges that nations have submitted.
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Guterres pointed to the unmistakable signs of a changing planet, such as rising sea levels, warming oceans, and forests that now emit more carbon than they store. The six years since the world signed the Paris climate accord, he noted, have been the six hottest on record. Yet current promises from countries to cut greenhouse gas emissions remain woefully inadequate to avoid what scientists say would be disastrous levels of warming.
“The sirens are sounding,” he said. “On behalf of this and future generations, I urge you. Choose ambition. Choose solidarity. Choose to safeguard our future and save humanity.” He urged leaders to use the two weeks ahead to act collectively and swiftly to tackle a growing crisis.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who as host of the conference has sought to claim the limelight for his nation, walked through doomsday scenarios that could result of the world does not choose a more sustainable path.
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“Two degrees more, and we jeopardize the food supply for hundreds of millions of people, crops wither, locusts swarm,” he said. “Three degrees, and you can add more wildfires and cyclones, twice as many. Five times as many droughts, and 36 times as many heat waves.” He continued, “Four degrees and we say goodbye to whole cities, Miami, Alexandria, Shanghai, all lost beneath the waves.”
In a conference room along the River Clyde that was both vast and unadorned, leaders sat elbow to elbow, each allotted a same-sized section of table. But in a fiery speech, Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley said that outside there was no such equality and that some island nations vulnerable to rising seas could be submerged within a generation.
The current pace of warming “is a death sentence” for island and coastal nations, she said. “Try harder because our people, the claimant armies, the world, the planet needs our actions now, not next year, not in the next decade.”
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The Seychelles and other island nations could also soon be underwater, its president, Wavel Ramkalawan, told the gathering. “We are already gasping for survival,” he said. “May the industrialized nations understand that they cannot continue polluting without reserve. May those who exploit without thinking of tomorrow stop. May the current poachers of our planet change their ways.”
The main goal of the conference is to get nations to lock in emissions-cutting plans that keep alive the target of limiting Earth’s warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit. That remained in doubt on Monday.
But those targets alone are not the only aspiration in Glasgow. Top officials have made clear their desire to finally “consign coal to history,” in the words of Alok Sharma, the British politician serving as president of COP26.
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Meanwhile, rich countries face mounting pressure to deliver on their unfulfilled pledges to mobilize at least $100 billion a year to help poor developing nations become more resilient to climate disasters and move away from fossil fuels. They have said that those funds won’t fully be available until three years later than promised in 2023.
In coming days, negotiators also will be working to finalize the Paris accord’s “rule book,” which would strengthen the outlines of the 2015 agreement. While officials worked out many details at earlier summits, important issues remain unresolved, including the complex rules that govern global carbon markets, a topic that has tripped up negotiators at the last two U.N. gatherings in Poland and Spain.
Even as national leaders commanded the spotlight here, other voices young and old were making themselves heard Monday in Glasgow. Youth activists from hard-hit countries were among those skeptical of the soaring rhetoric and fervent pledges being made at the summit.
“Decisions are being made about our present and our future by world leaders who don’t know what the climate crisis looks like,” said Mitzi Jonelle Tan, a 33-year-old from the Philippines, at a protest on the banks of the River Clyde. “What we’re seeing now is already hell.”
Meanwhile, the 95-year-old British naturalist Sir David Attenborough made a passionate plea inside the sprawling convention hall for world leaders to “rewrite our story,” warning that those who stand to suffer from climate change are not “some imagined generation,” but “young people alive today.”
Attenborough noted that the warming of the planet is not merely a story of instability, but also of inequality. “Those who’ve done the least to cause this problem are being the hardest hit,” he said. But, he added, there is yet time to forge a better future.
“In my lifetime, I’ve witnessed a terrible decline,” he said. “In yours, you could, and should, witness a wonderful recovery. That desperate hope — ladies and gentlemen, delegates, excellencies — is why the world is looking to you and why you are here.”
Dennis reported from Washington. Karla Adam and William Booth in Glasgow, Lily Kuo in Taipei and Steven Mufson and Sarah Kaplan in Washington contributed to this report.