 I learned, welcome to Newsclick. Today we're going to review what have been the results of COP26, which ended on some positive and some negative note. If we look at what has been happening, particularly after the Paris Agreement, which itself was a problem, but after which we had the additional problem of President Trump walking out of it, taking the biggest problem of the global warming issue, the United States out of the Paris Agreement. Biden coming back, how do we see this agreement? Is it a step beyond Paris? Is it a step below Paris? Or is it something which is potentially still to be realized? And we hope for something better in the future, but at least it has opened the discussions again. My assessment is that it's a marginal step forward from Paris. If you go by the narratives of the UK, which were the hosts of this meeting, Boris Johnson and his Minister Alok Sharma, or if you listen to President Biden or John Kerry in particular, his climate envoy, you'd think this has been a major achievement in Glasgow. I suppose that's to be expected. The host will always say that he's had a good party, but one should ask the guests what they thought of the event. And if you judge by the outcome in concrete terms, there's only, I think, three major concrete achievements that one can speak of. One is by cajoling and pressuring, etc., etc., with additional commitments by various countries, you've managed to reduce the gap. You're now looking at a potential temperature rise of 2.4 degrees Celsius instead of 2.7, which was the position before Glasgow. Now, that is a minor achievement, yes, but it's not a great achievement in view of the fact that you want to reach 1.5. The second achievement, I think, is that for the first time, in whatever imperfect manner, fossil fuels and coal have actually made an appearance as terms in the Glasgow pact, which till now all the agreements have spoken loosely in terms of reducing emissions. The third is that there has been some small incremental gain in the promise of adaptation funding, which the developed countries have promised to double by 2025 compared to what they had said earlier. But as I said, these are all incremental changes offset by huge negatives. If I take the last one, the pledge of $100 billion a year, which they have now said we will double by 2025, is still a promise. It was mentioned first in Paris itself in 2015, later reiterated in 2019, now promised in Glasgow, but now they have said this will start in 2023. That's a big loss in terms of this. And as I said, the temperature rise is only 2.4, no major emission reduction promises by the developed countries. I think that's been the biggest loss in this, that the main agenda and action points emphasized in COP26 have been the agenda points pushed by the developed countries. And if we had heard the closing remarks of more than 20, 25 countries, we heard representing much larger groups, group of 77 in Africa, least developed country, groupings, the island states, all of them said we are very unhappy with the statement, but we have to get some statement at the end of this. So let's look at the positive side and let's go forward. You talked about the developed countries not meeting their whatever promises they had made. In this particular case, we did talk about what are the emission cuts, what are the various things countries would do, but the promise of money is only going to be discussed next year in terms of commitments. And the fact that they have made again another promise of doubling the non-existent funds which they had promised earlier, that itself still raises question that people are being asked to commit to cuts of either emissions or future emissions, but the ones who have the money, they're not being asked to produce the money right now. So this delinking of the two itself is a big issue as far as this agreement is concerned. Absolutely. And that's why I said the developed countries have been allowed to get away with their agenda setting. The least developed countries and the island states have been focused this time far more on adaptation funds and on loss and damage funds and they have not pushed as much as they have done in earlier cops on mitigation and reducing temperatures. This suits the developing the developed countries because so long as you keep talking about money and dangling some money in front of you, they can keep you enticed with the promise of money and they can postpone other decisions, making you believe, well, if not today, tomorrow, we will give you the money. And I think that has been a bit of a problem in the way negotiations have been conducted by overemphasizing the financing aspects we have lost out on the mitigation targets in the COP26 negotiations. When you come to mitigation targets, when you talk of 2.4 degrees, it might not appear to be such a big number, except for the fact that this is an average global temperature rise. Even on this 1.1 degree rise, which is what we have already reached, you saw temperatures like 45 to 50 degrees over North America, Canada, something that you had never seen before. So already extreme weather events is also rocking not only the rest of the globe, but also the developed countries who thought being cold countries, they were not going to suffer from global warming. They now see also that that's not true. But nevertheless, this 2.4 degrees, 2 degrees actually do not tell us the full picture because rise is what you see as the highest temperature that you might see. And if it rises in parts of the tropics by 3 to 4 degrees, which is what is likely to happen in summer then with a 2.4 degrees average, you're likely to actually make it uninhabitable. In fact, the average global rise of temperature is only one indicator of a much wider multi-dimensional process of climate change because what we have witnessed now is not just a global average temperature rise of 1.1 degree Celsius. It's also resulted in more frequent storms. It's resulted in forest fires. It's resulted in large-scale drought covering most of the southern United States. So we must remember climate change is a multi-dimensional phenomenon. And if we are seeing these scale of climate changes at 1.1 degrees Celsius, the mind boggles at what kind of changes we are likely to see if temperatures rise crosses 2 degrees or more. Also some of the other problems which have not come to light in this discussion is the fact that while renewables are the obvious way to go, the problem you have is of course the daily storage which you can handle with what would be called battens. But when it comes to seasonal variations, as we saw for instance in Germany, that they had to up their fossil fuel consumption because stealing of the winds led to much lower wind generation. Renewables also need seasonal backups and that the world does not seem to be prepared for. And those are technological issues still to be solved. But again, there does not seem to be so much of discussions on these issues and there is a techno-optimism, somehow batteries and particularly because Mr. Tesla keeps on, Elon Musk keeps on talking about batteries, which he doesn't produce but keeps on talking about them, is somehow obfuscating the market benefit certain companies seek to achieve from the real hard technical and techno-economic decisions we need to take. I think that's absolutely correct in terms of the power generation, which as you know contributes about 75% of the total greenhouse gas emissions that we are talking about. But there is another side effect to this you've already spoken about the technical limitations of phasing out fossil fuels, that's easier said than done. So in a sense, what has been made a big fuss off at the last leg of the Glasgow conference that India said, look phasing out is a problem if you talk about that and therefore a compromise language of phasing down was introduced. The basic issue is however that even the phasing out language didn't set a timeline. But I think there should have been an emphasis on the fact that whether you phase down or phase out, one will lead to the other, you can't phase out without phasing down. That's fair enough, but both of them will require a lot of other technological adjustments in terms of production of electricity, storage of electricity, diurnal across as well as seasonal. And these need to be taken into account and they need to be far more technical inputs into this. The second aspect is I think because of the emphasis on the power generation part of this, there has been less emphasis on all the other things that you can do in terms of emissions reduction. Now they are part of this 25% that do not come under the power generation emissions, but they are important when we are talking about a couple of points of degree Celsius this way or that way, they make a difference. For instance, the methane pledge, which is not a documented formal pledge, it's an informal agreement by countries saying we'll reduce methane by 30% by 2030. This is expected to contribute a drop of about 0.2 to 0.3 degrees Celsius. Now that looks very small, but when you're talking about the difference between 1.5 and let's say 1.8 or the difference between 2.4 and 2.1, 0.3 makes a big difference. You know, coming back to this issue about what you call about methane, you know there's also about coal. What important issue is that Europe as well as United States has chosen gas as the intermediate proven from coal to gas and then from gas to renewables as their route. It's only India and China who do not have access to gas easily and they have large reserves of coal. Therefore the problem is not identical for both. In fact, that is one of the reasons India had a problem and even China and the US talked about phase down. They didn't talk about phase out. But if you look at that, that if gas is not an intermediate fuel for India, for example, then of course the issue is different and methane in fact in India would be more agriculture as well as livestock. Unlike those who have a large gas infrastructure, whether it's Russia, whether it's West Asia or it's United States which does a lot of fracking. So the methane emissions are really more concentrated on these issues. Coming back to what you have said that the technology part of it, in fact, that is a weakness that we see that we have focused too much on only the emissions and not to the technology side and we have assumed that if money is available, technology is available and it's interesting that Africa, how does it make the transition or does it not make the transition at all because it is still infrastructure has not been built and infrastructure will need large amounts of energy investment. They have access to oil and gas but the way the whole discussion is going, Norway which wants to expand its gas is moving resolution saying no finance and finances should be made available to Africa for gas. So those are very unfortunate directions we see. What is good for us is not good for you. Absolutely. So that way we don't seem to see these issues come to the fore in COP26. Absolutely, the only example that one can think of where a different route has been taken was in South Africa which has been promised money to phase out coal in an accelerated manner but even there the source of the alternative source of generating electricity has not been mentioned. Some positives of the agreement from what you say but unfortunately very much detailing on the balance and so is global climate change from negotiations to what is likely to happen. A small word on India before we leave I think and that is India has not just not covered itself in glory at the end of this COP. Of course the India blaming by the developed world if you see most of the western media it was India which has been cast as the villain of the Glasgow summit. It's not so much I think because of the position India took but of the way in which India has conducted its negotiations throughout the Glasgow summit. You had the Prime Minister come first and make a series of announcements which are actually quite significant emission reduction announcement particularly when you compare it with the very poor emission reduction commitments by the US and several other developed countries. He makes these statements makes no mention of any conditionalities or anything then suddenly the Indian delegation says all this is yes very good but this is all conditional upon India getting 1 trillion dollars of financing. So it was extremely badly and then to have this last minute drama 24 hours extension the minister on his return has written a blog where he has spoken of the Indian position and talked of how it has put forward the opinion and views of the developing countries as a whole. Unfortunately on the floor of the plenary none of the developing country groupings the Africa group G77 and China group least developing countries group island state none of them have supported this position. India was left alone to feel this position not done well at all and I feel many countries would feel that India has conducted these negotiations not just badly but in bad faith. So I think Indian performance in this except for the initial announcement that was done the rest of it has been downhill all along the way. What you mean is that the announcements made by the prime minister was either not worked out to the delegation that was there properly they were as surprised by the delegations by the announcement as other delegations or that it was thought to be appropriate to delink the two in a way the prime minister covers himself with the glory while the in glory comes to the delegation not to the PA but unfortunately no one doesn't see it as that India and therefore it whatever brownie points we might have won by the declarations exactly of it lost most of that most of that most of the goodwill and we have particularly lost again goodwill of the developing countries which is why the president of the corp Anok Sharma finally even said that India and China he said would have to explain themselves to these countries but that's a bad faith declaration but Mr Sharma as well considering Johnson Mr Prime Minister Johnson was promising a new coal mine in UK very recently but the point is they would like to turn the divisions between India China and others quite clear of the sidelines and exactly disavow that historical responsibility which still shows the largest amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere come from this few countries the rich countries absolutely anyway Ragu thanks for being with us this is all the time we have for news click today do keep watching news click and do visit our website