At the COP

Reflections on a climate summit

The first event I attend at COP26 Glasgow concerns zero-emission shipping; everything from the latest sail-cutting technology to hydrogen refuelling. The panel discussion takes place on the opening morning of the summit and delegate speeches are occasionally hard to hear, or at least to concentrate on, because of the thud of police helicopters low overhead. Something about the distraction, particularly with the main arena anyway behind an armoured and police-patrolled fence, feels apt.

The next climate summit is to be held in Sharm El-Sheikh, the Egyptian resort-city used occasionally to keep talks concerning Israel and Palestine away from the pro-Palestinian public and civil society of Cairo. As with the G8 and then G20 summits that long ago left the contested and protestable city centres of Seattle and Genoa for the defensible fortresses of Gleneagles and other exclusive resorts, it is not hard to imagine climate – just as it becomes more urgent and understood – being cosseted away as an elite issue. Outside the arena, a group of Bangladeshi activists hold their national flag and a banner demanding action on rising seas, though in truth and in climate terms, the message of the banner is by now near-interchangeable with the flag.

Elsewhere, perhaps just two miles and another world from the arena and city centre, are more heartening signs of life. The south side of Glasgow’s long lines of tenement blocks, imposing were it not for the soft warmth of their red sandstone, have in places been decorated by those unlikely to afford or receive the COP arena pass. A window with stencil-cut animals and vines are illuminated by light and call, in cut-out letters, for ‘the right kind of Amazon’. Another window demands to ‘save our seas’, arguing in the adjacent pane that the ocean produces at least half the world’s oxygen.

Here, priced-out of the full insanity of the opportunistic, thousand-pound a night Glasgow centre – a temporary airbnb goldrush economy of its own – together with friends we rent the flat of a local arts facilitator who seems a mixture of intensely guilty and grateful to have a month’s rent covered in return for leaving her flat but a few nights. Perhaps such wealth exchanges are among the most inadvertently useful of the COP bonanza coming to town. She tells us to make ourselves at home; help yourselves to the record collection, eat the grapefruit in the bowl.

To give events on the summit floor some attention, it is fair to say that most have seemed underwhelmed. Both Boris Johnson and the cover page of The Economist either flirted with or committed whole to the cringingly obvious pun, “COP out”. The COP system of summits operates a so-called ‘ratchet’ mechanism, whereby every five is a ratchet year in which progress is accelerated by something big. COP21, Paris, saw a first commitment to a temperature target of limiting global heat rises to 2 degrees. Glasgow’s COP26 ratchet is so far missing, or perhaps it is broken altogether. One delegate I speak with – a climate banker – praises progress on targeting methane emissions, a greenhouse gas either 30 or 80 times more potent than carbon, depending who you ask. As always in this optimism, the biggest word, said with the intonation of a question, is ‘binding?’.

Predictably enough, the methane concern has focussed largely on cattle ranching, Brazil, and the Amazon (or ‘the earth’s lungs’ as it is coming to be known). Rather less attention is given to US fracking and its fugitive emissions, principally methane, released by fracturing deep inside the earth’s crust. The fracking boom of recent years has by chance coincided mysteriously with the largest increase of methane in the earth’s atmosphere for decades. The same banker, mutedly, expresses concern that the high oil price will justify a rush back into more of such ‘unconventional’ energy assets, and for Canadian banks particularly, tar sands, where mud containing hydrocarbons is heated to separate the earth from its oil residues. Separately, a representative from Morgan Stanley laments to me that his client, Primark, resents that despite a greater amount of sustainability work, they receive far more criticism than their more middle class clothing rivals. In Britain, no amount of ethical auditing can apparently make-good the sin of selling affordably-priced clothing to lower-income people.

As well as wet Glasgow autumn and its falling yellow leaves, something in the air is of vague disappointment. A convoy of cyclists ride from Edinburgh to Glasgow to raise the demands for sustainable and pro-people transport; as with much else, they praise the atmosphere but doubt the impact. Growing is the awareness that almost anything short of total and immediate cancellation of capitalism as we know it will be too-little, too-late. Most of the most idealistic and constructively critical forums are at the People’s Summit on the fringes of the official COP - only there is a disappointing lack of interaction between the two.

The wind energy majors, arguably most darling of all the eat-your-cake-and-have-it-too green capitalist success stories, are issuing warnings on profitability. Turbine manufacturer, Vestas, now have their supply chain optimised and globalised way into the realm of diminishing returns. Offshore wind developer, Ørsted, is condemned to compete with the financial war chest of less experienced and efficient new wind developments from Big Oil. The company also continues to pay billions in rent to the British monarchy and their Crown Estate for seabed leases, driving-up UK energy bills and driving down renewable profitability. It would be hard to craft a better example of the impossibility of fixing climate within political systems that were already unfit for purpose.

As the summit moves to a second week, in Beijing, the equivalent of all Polish coal production is being added each day to guarantee energy supplies in the current energy crisis. The supplies are to help China continue manufacturing on behalf of a world economy trying to recover fast from the pandemic and the initial energy shutdown of March 2020. Even with this role, Chinese per capita emissions remain one-third that of their US counterparts. Xi Jinping declined the opportunity to attend Glasgow in person.

Looked at objectively, the inescapable reality is that politicians, media elites and all humans will be required to look at the inadequacy of our climate inaction for centuries to come. It is uncertain whether our egos and faculty of attention will be able to withstand such a constant assessment of our own failures, across periods of time we grow unaccustomed to thinking in.

One night, after dinner at home, we get a taxi back to the centre; driven by a Pakistani-Brit who has moved Bradford-to-Glasgow because he feels Scotland more inclusive and, he confesses, less at risk of crime. COP, he says, has been good for business. I ask his views on the summit, and on the climate, a subject from which he retreats humbly, as if such concerns go beyond his pay grade, and the entire earth’s climate is an issue of which he admits he knows little. He reports, nevertheless, that relatives of his outside of Lahore now endure temperature up to 45-degrees for some six months of the year. More than ever, he says, the only rain that now falls is in the monsoon. Higher up-in Pakistan, he knows the glaciers are melting.

I wrote a second piece, about cycling to COP26, from London to Glasgow, which appeared on the website Adventure Uncovered. The post covered the diverse appeal of cycling, the patience involved with cycling a long way, and the relation between these ideas and working on climate change.