SEASON FOUR | Time to 1.5

The Ants Go Marching

OPENING TAG: Dan Nagler

AMBI: protest hubbub

I'm standing in a park in Glasgow, Scotland waiting for a protest march to start. It's the end of the first week of COP26, the UN Climate Conference, and thousands of people are gathering to demand climate action. I'm up toward the front of the march, where people are trying out their megaphones, testing out chants, getting warmed up.

PROTESTOR: Keep the oil in the ground!

Climate celebrities Greta Thunberg and Vanessa Nakate are both scheduled to speak later, and everyone's keeping an eye out for them. But they're also checking out each other.

AMY: Hey, can I interview you real quick?

PROTESTORS: Yeah, yeah!

AMY: Just on my phone.

PROTESTORS: Yeah, that's fine!

AMY: I was not recording yet but I have to ask you, did I just hear you scamming on hot guys at the protest?

PROTESTORS: Yeah you did!! (laughter) You know there's gotta be a bright side to these kinds of things.

AMY: Absolutely!

There were two huge protests at COP26, on the Friday and Saturday mid-way through the conference, and I followed them both. But really, the protests never stopped. For all two weeks, morning, noon, and night, people were outside the conference center singing, shouting, and waving signs. And when I asked people why they had come out to protest, a lot of them said things like this:

SHANNON: It's just a fancy meeting. We have conferences like this every so often. We have parliaments, we have politicians, but they don't do what they're voted in to do. They're full of promises and they don't do it.

This is Shannon, she's in her early 20s. I talked to her and her friend Grace while we were waiting for the march to begin. Just to be clear, these are not the same people who were scoping out guys a minute ago. I asked Grace what she thought might be happening inside the Blue Zone.

GRACE: It seems to be quite elitist, and the people on the ground are kept out of it. This is why we need marches like this.

SHANNON: Leadership comes from people on the ground so I think you're not going to see a real change until you bring that inside.

Over and over, the people I talked to who were out protesting expressed a similar frustration. They didn't just want to stand outside and shout, they want to get heard inside. Penetrate the bubble of the Blue Zone. Affect this process somehow.

LILIUS: Well we just need to make change, and we need to make change now. And it gets very frustrating when you feel like there's only so much you can do. So we just really want people to listen.

PROTESTOR: We're here to tell the world leaders that we are holding them accountable to take real action and not just make pronouncements. And that's what I'm really worried is happening.

MUSIC

Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and in this episode, we're continuing our coverage of the UN climate conference held in Glasgow, Scotland in November 2021. Like I said in our last episode, these UN talks are the biggest, most complicated, highest-stakes group project humanity has ever known. And the goal of that project is to manage change. Because the reality of the climate crisis is that change is coming, one way or another. As we disrupt the climate, it is disrupting our societies, and if we continue on our current path, those disruptions will become increasingly chaotic and deadly. The UN talks are an attempt to get ahead of that curve, to instigate and guide a massive social and economic transformation before we are forced to change by the brutal circumstances we have created. So we're trying to do something very messy in an organized way here. In a sense, these talks are an attempt to design a revolution.

So how do we actually do that? How do we make the rules for breaking the rules? Because that's not generally how these things work. Revolutions usually just sort of happen, and they're often painful—even bloody. That's definitely an option with climate, and that's what the UN climate talks are trying to prevent. So I'm grateful for the thousands of people who are working hard inside the Blue Zone, trying to steer us toward a less damaging version of change.

But I also understand the protestors’ frustration with how slow and opaque this process is. The UN climate talks are one of the most important things happening on the planet right now—maybe the most important thing we've ever tried to do. So people understandably want to see what's going on here. Inside the conference, people are trying to assert order over the chaos of climate change. Out on the streets, people are trying to shake up the status quo of climate inaction. Everyone wants the process to go faster, but no one can make that happen alone.

INTRO MONTAGE

AMBI: entering the conference

It's the second week of the conference and I'm walking through the Blue Zone—the official UN-controlled territory, where the heart of the action takes place. I feel like I've got my feet under me a bit now. I know where to find the best food and I can sort-of decode the signs listing the different meetings. But my colleague Shola Lawal has just arrived.

AMY: It's day one for you. How are you doing?

SHOLA: Good. Actually, not too bad. I was expecting more overwhelm, but I guess I'm the right amount of whelm.

AMY: Maybe since you live in Lagos, you're used to like giant crowds in a certain time.

SHOLA: Yeah, that kind of thing. Yeah. Yeah.

I've you've listened to our whole season, you've already met Shola back in episode seven, when she reported from her home country of Nigeria.

AMY: How old are you?

SHOLA: I'm 27.

AMY: So you are one year older than this conference.

SHOLA: (laughter

AMY: And how does it feel to just arrive at something that has got all this huge international significance, but that most of us don't really understand.

SHOLA: I feel privileged to be here. So just to be present here I think is a great privilege. But it's also interesting because I know that a lot of the people who are being affected by what's happening with the climate, I don't know if many of them are here as well. So that's one thing that's on my mind.

Shola says attending any UN climate conference would be a privilege, but maybe especially COP26. This conference was supposed to happen in 2020, but it was postponed because of the pandemic. And COVID was still keeping many people away, especially people from less developed countries where it was harder to find the resources to manage all of the pandemic risks and restrictions.

MUSIC

Shola heads out to explore and get oriented, and I go find the latest news on my chosen beat here: loss and damage. Reckoning with climate change impacts that cannot be repaired. There are hundreds of issues being discussed and debated at COP26, and they're almost all interesting to me, but in order to really understand how this cooperative process works, I needed to narrow my gaze. If making a climate agreement is like building a barn, I wanted to see how people try to get one plank hammered into place. I decided to focus on loss and damage, because several of the people I'd reached out to before COP told me it was going to be a big deal here. And they were right. There are protestors holding big “loss and damage” signs just outside the conference gates, a lot of observers are wearing “loss and damage” buttons. It's a thing. The question on the table is if the wealthy countries will agree to provide some funding for loss and damage at this COP. The less developed countries have been pushing for this for years, and one of the people I'm following, Dr. Adelle Thomas, told me at the start of the conference that she thought change it might actually happen this time. Here at the beginning of the second week, I find her and check in again.

AMY: If you had to predict a week from now, will you be feeling like, OK, we made some progress on loss and damage at this COP or not?

ADELLE: I think my expectations have been lowered quite a bit.

Adelle is a geographer from the University of the Bahamas and the global think tank Climate Analytics. She's been a lead author on multiple UN scientific reports, and she's serving as an advisor to the small island developing states at COP26.

ADELLE: I came into this even though I didn't want to have high expectations. I did come up with I did come in with high expectations, listening to the political rhetoric that's been around loss and damage. So, you know, we've been hearing from world leaders. Climate change is affecting us now and we need to, you know, act and support, and all of this stuff. But that's not translating into the negotiating rooms. I think we've made some incremental progress. It's not enough.

Even though loss and damage is pretty visible inside the conference, I don't think very many people outside of this context really know what it is. So I ask Adelle to define it for me again, and she starts by making a framework. You can divide climate issues into three main categories, she says: mitigation, adaptation, and loss and damage.

ADELLE: Mitigation is reducing our emissions. So trying to reduce climate change itself. And then adaptation is putting in place measures that try and reduce impacts of climate change. So mitigation tries to make sure that climate change doesn't happen. Adaptation says, OK, climate change is going to happen, but we can put these measures in place so that the impacts hopefully won't happen. And loss and damage is actually the impacts have happened.

MUSIC

One analogy here might be disease. We do things to prevent diseases, like wash our hands and get vaccinations. That's kind of like mitigation. Then, if we get sick, we do things to manage the symptoms; we change our lifestyle, we take medicine, we try to diminish pain and maintain quality of life in different ways. That's like adaptation. But sometimes, no matter what we do, the disease wins. We die. In a climate context, individual people die, as well as places—coral reefs, forests, entire islands—and communities that are parts of those places. Dealing with that is what loss and damage is all about. And that's what I want to understand: how does that get dealt with in a climate agreement? How do you take something as gut-wrenching and multi-layered as the extinction of an animal that's at the heart of your culture, or the conversion of your community's rainforest into a dry savanna, and account for those losses in the technical bureaucratic language of the COP process? How does this damage get known, seen, and valued here? Adelle says the first hurdle—and it's a big one—is just getting everyone to consent to the same reality.

ADELLE: And this is what developing countries have been fighting for since the beginning of the UNF-triple-C, that loss and damage is a reality. We are facing impacts of climate change and it's something that we need to address under the UNF-triple-C. We can't continue to act as if mitigation and adaptation are enough because they're not, you know, we've been seeing the impacts of climate change around the world, and it's time that we start paying attention to how we're going to address them within the process.

AMY: Do you feel like that message is getting across to the to the richer countries?

ADELLE: I think they're hearing us, but I think they're still trying to shirk responsibility. We're hearing more talk about loss and damage, more acknowledgment of loss and damage, which to me is insane because it's like acknowledging that you have a nose. So like, it exists. Wow. Great insight there. But that hasn't translated into saying, OK, we actually need to provide support on the level that countries need it, and that is on par with our responsibility due to the emissions that we have released.

MUSIC

This idea that the developed world owes the developing world support as we navigate the climate crisis is not at all a new concept. It's the principle of common but differentiated responsibilities, and it's one of the central tenets of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNF-triple-C, formed back in the early 1990s. Common but differentiated responsibilities is a fairly straightforward idea: countries that have released the most planet-warming emissions need to take the most responsibility for solving this problem. Makes sense. And as long as it stays in concept form, it's not controversial at these talks. Everyone agrees with common but differentiated responsibilities. In theory. But this fight to recognize loss and damage is an attempt by developing nations to put that theory into practice, and they are meeting big resistance. We're 26 years in, and the wealthy countries have only recently acknowledged that loss and damage exists.

SALEEM: And so this isn't about charity. This isn't about giving a helping hand to poor people. This is about admitting responsibility.

This is Dr. Saleemul Huq from the Independent University Bangladesh. Like Adelle, he is an advisor to the negotiations at COP26, and he's also agreed to let me follow him around here.

SALEEM: We are now seeing actual climate change happening. Causing loss and damage to people, livelihoods, infrastructure. That's the reality of what's happening on the ground. The question here in the COP is, are they going to recognize that reality? Are they going to do something about it? We hope they will. We, when I say we, I'm talking on behalf of the vulnerable countries who are here, we want them to do that. We've asked them to do that. We haven't got very far with them yet. So let's see.

MUSIC

Earlier I said this process was like trying to design a revolution. And one of the hard things about that is getting everyone to agree on what the revolution should be about. The wealthy countries would like to keep the focus on mitigation: reducing emissions, transitioning to renewables, sparking green innovation. And the poorer countries are saying, that all sounds great, but you're skipping a big, important step: taking responsibility for your impact on us. The world's wealthiest countries have a vested interest in avoidance, they don't want to look at these irrevocable losses of the climate crisis, because they are causing them. But the people who are on the front lines of climate change are saying: we don't have the luxury of your denial. You have to face what you've done, and account for it. As we enter the second week of the conference, Saleem says he's not feeling terribly optimistic about the possibilities for progress on loss and damage at this COP. But there is one bright spot, he says. Scotland's top elected official, First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, has made a pledge.

SALEEM: She put a million pounds of her budget into a loss and damage fund. So effectively she's challenging all the parties to the convention and the leaders who came and gave speeches yesterday to put their money where their mouth is and to match her money. She's put the money on the table a million pounds. Not a lot, but it's a start. The others have given zero.

By “the others,” Saleem means the other wealthy countries, especially the world’s biggest cumulative emitter, the United States. Saleem and others close to the loss and damage negotiations told me that progress was being blocked primarily by the United States and the European Union. But it’s surprisingly hard to get people to just state that plainly, on record:

AMY: Who's holding up funding for loss and damage?

SIMON: There needs to be pressure in all areas, from all parties.

AMY: But where's the block? Because everybody's saying, oh yes, we want loss and damage, we support it, blah blah blah, but who's stopping text saying we are going to fund loss and damage?

SIMON: I can't answer that.

AMY: (laughter) If I turn this off will you answer that?

SIMON: I can't answer that…

AMY: OK, thank you.

That was Simon Stiell [steel], minister of climate resilience from Grenada, a Caribbean island nation. His country is part of AOSIS, the Alliance of Small Island Developing States, and they are pushing hard for funding for loss and damage. But he doesn't want to call out the opponents to that, because he's still trying to convince them. Being too transparent about what you're negotiation for and who is blocking you could muck up the process in all kinds of ways. You might show your cards too early, or say something that polarizes your opponent against you. So there are good reasons for people to be cautious about naming names here.

But at the same time, these climate agreements are of vital importance to the whole world. This isn't some little private business deal or something—this is about all of us, and our collective future. So people outside of the Blue Zone need and deserve to know what's going on here. What the conflicts are, and where representatives from their countries stand. If the U.S. is blocking loss and damage funding, then I want to see how, and why, so I can share that with you, our listeners. But I couldn't witness that conflict in action, because like Adelle Thomas described in our last episode, almost all of the most important meetings, where positions might be made more clear, don't show up on the official meeting schedule.

ADELLE: That's like wheeling and dealing, right. I mean, like I said, it's informal informals. Or informal informal informals, right. So trying to formalize that? It's not going to happen.

AMY: So is there a moment then when when a country like the United States or a bloc like the EU says, no, we don't want to fund that? Or how does it get how does it become clear that it's not going to happen?

ADELLE: They won't come out and say we're not funding that. (laughter) But they'll say, you know, we can't agree to this text, we'd like the text to be reflected in this way. And the way that that text is clearly shows that there's not going to be funding. So it's very diplomatic. You have to know the ins and outs. You have to know the jargon to understand what's going on. I'm very blunt. I would prefer, “we're not doing that,” you know what I mean?

AMY: Yeah.

ADELLE: Yeah. But that's not how it works.

How it works is like this.

NEGOTIATOR: ...to maintain an explicit reference to the various organizations, the WMO, CO...IPCC, etc., so if we can streamline things a little bit but maintain explicit reference to those organizations that would be our preference…

We're going inside the negotiation rooms, right after this short break.

BREAK

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AMBI: street noise outside of Blue Zone

Welcome back to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and I'm heading back into the Blue Zone at COP26, the UN climate conference. I approach the first of several check points, where I need to present my press pass and my daily COVID test results.

GUARD: Morning!

AMY: Good morning

GUARD: You need to remove your mask.

The guard gives a nod to my COVID test, scans my badge, and then a troubled look comes over his face. Like...uh-oh, something's wrong with your credentials.

GUARD: I have some bad news for you. Those guys have the new passes, why haven't you picked one up?

AMY: You've done this to me before, I'm not falling for it again.

GUARD: (laughter)

AMY: You have a good time today.

GUARD: (calling out in the background)

This is his schtick. He pulled this same routine on me a few days earlier, and enjoyed watching me get agitated. As I walk away, he yells, “I've done it to everyone, especially the BBC!”

MUSIC

Trying to solve the climate crisis is the kind of thing that can make people a little edgy. The pressure is on, the stakes could not be higher. So I really appreciated this guard, taking the opportunity to have a little fun. Lighten the mood a bit. Create a moment of human connection in the midst of the madness.

But there were other, less delightful, expressions of humanity on display as well. After that security check, everyone gets funneled into a long, snaking line. And at the busiest times, it got really backed up. Sometimes you had to stand outside, barely moving, for a half-hour or more. And more than once, while I was waiting there, I saw people cutting in line. They would inch forward slowly, getting a foot ahead here, a shoulder ahead there, and in a few minutes, they'd be five or ten people ahead of where they started. I was watching this happen one morning, and I heard a guy behind me say, “I guess some people don't know the meaning of a queue.” That emboldened me a little, so the next time someone tried to edge past me I said, “excuse me, there's a line here.” Which was obvious. They just ignored me. And it ticked me off.

But it also really made me want to laugh. I mean, we were there for a climate conference. To solve a problem that requires the whole world to set aside their differences and work together. And some people were choosing to cut in line. To push themselves forward at the expense of slowing down the rest of us. It was just too perfect. It's the whole problem with climate change in a nutshell: we have to cooperate to solve a problem, all together. And that requires us to manage our selfishness. To tolerate a little discomfort for the greater good. And that is so hard for us. So here's humanity in this line, being human. Working extremely hard to solve a pressing global problem, but with some people being kind of assholey while they're doing it.

SHOLA: Like we were talking about this yesterday, it's difficult to even agree to what seven people want to have for dinner. Now, imagine a conference of countries. How hard can that be? It's difficult.

This is my colleague Shola Lawal again. After a few days of watching people from around the world try to work together on climate issues, she's feeling struck by the magnitude of the challenge.

SHOLA: No matter how we approach it, no matter where we approach it from, what angle we take this from. What I'm saying is it would always take time. It would always take not just one COP, it would always take.

AMY: But it's been it's been 26 years. They've been doing it literally your entire life, Shola.

SHOLA: I know. But what I'm saying is. It will probably see. Look, the way that I see it, do you think it would end? Like the way that I see it, this is the new normal.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. That's how I'm feeling, too. I mean, it's like we need to basically not have this be a conference. We need this to be an ongoing, everyday thing that we do all the time.

SHOLA: Exactly! We need to be paying more attention to these issues, not just when we come to a two week conference.

AMY: Yeah, right.

SHOLA: We need we need more.

The COP process does involve a lot more than this two-week conference. There are various sub-meetings planned throughout the year, and there's a whole scientific wing of the work—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—which is constantly synthesizing and assessing the latest climate science. But even still, a whole lot of really important decision-making ends up getting crammed into these two weeks, inside rooms that sound like this.

NEGOTIATOR: Co-facilitator, we are happy to oblige....

I'm inside a negotiating room. It's a very sterile space—kind of like a giant office cubicle, with long rows of white tables arranged in a rectangle in the middle and the constant numbing drone of a loud HVAC system. Microphones are evenly spaced on the tables, next to small plaques with country names on them. Negotiators sit behind the microphones, and behind them, there's another row of chairs, where support staff or advisors can sit. Every meeting is run by facilitators. Negotiators ask to be recognized, and then wait to talk until they have official permission. And whenever a new person takes the floor, they start with something like...

NEGOTIATOR: Thank you very much co-facilitators, and good morning every one….

The language is thoroughly diplomatic; it's all about restraint and carefulness and extreme politeness. Everyone appears to have checked their emotions at the door. Words seem to flow through a sieve before they're spoken; all feeling, color, and vitality has been strained out. And no one visibly reacts to what other people say. Even when they must be extremely frustrated inside, facial expressions remain blank. For example, on one of the first days of the conference, I watched delegates from India and Saudi Arabia raise objection after objection about the order of items to be discussed. Not the content of the agenda items, the order in which they were going to be handled. It was an obvious delaying tactic, and it worked. They wasted a bunch of time, and the meeting ended before they could get through even half of the agenda. And throughout the whole show, not a brow was furrowed, nor an eye rolled. It's just not done.

NEGOTIATOR: Moving forward, ah, I think, option one and two, it might be good to move us forward that they can be combined.

I found the negotiations at COP26 fascinating…because they were so boring. The goal of the people in these rooms is essentially to save the world. To try to stop a speeding train just before it goes flying off a cliff. Climate is a big, dramatic problem, so you'd think that what happens inside the negotiation rooms would be big and dramatic too. But it's not.

NEGOTIATOR: There will be a conversation on finance going forward. We all purposefully created that precisely because we knew that this mandate was expiring in 2020. And I hope that parties are working in a constructive spirit to not go back on that conversation, and not trying to renegotiate the outcome and the way he had sketched out in Katowice by insinuating that there's not going to be any space to talk about finance after this agenda item closes. Because that's not true and we look forward to continuing our discuss on finance under the Paris Agreement going forward with all of you.

The negotiators at COP are trying to make an agreement that representatives from every country in the world can say yes to. Just thinking about all of the different languages, customs, and cultures in the room is pretty mind-boggling. And in that light, I can sort of see the purpose of the formal, hyper-polite, bureaucratic language. It can serve as an equalizer. A set of rules for communication that anyone can learn—stripped of context and specificity, more like computer code than organic human speech. But as I sat there listening to people speak this code, I couldn't help but wonder about the impact of excluding all the imagery, beauty, and authentic feeling from the negotiation rooms. I get why it's hard to incorporate those things into this context, but I also wondered what might happen if there was just a little bit more of something raw and real inside the Blue Zone.

PROTESTOR: Our message is that we need to listen to the science. We need to act on that science. And we have to do it as soon as we physically can.

I met her outside of the Blue Zone on one of the first nights of the conference. She was trembling and fighting back tears as she explained to me why she had come out to march that night.

PROTESTOR: We need to act today and not make empty promises. We're not looking for words, we're looking for action.

MUSIC

The contrast between the conference and the protests was so stark. Inside, its a world of order and rules. Of process and procedure, plans and systems. People in business clothes sit quietly and wait to be called on before they speak. Outside, it's chaotic. It's loud. There are tears. There's laughter. There's a guy riding a bike in a panda suit. There are bagpipes and marching bands. And lots of shouting.

CROWD: Our planet! Not for profit!

And there's a lot of criticism directed toward the Blue Zone.

GRETA: This is no longer a climate conference. This is now a global north greenwash festival. A two-week long celebration of business as usual and blah blah blah.

That was Greta Thunberg speaking from the stage. And of course, she's not alone in this feeling. Many people think the UN delegates don't really care about the climate crisis; that this whole thing has become a sham. And although I think it's obvious that leaders need to be pushed to be much, much more on climate, I found myself longing for the protestors to be more specific in their attacks. Simply stamping the whole process useless and corrupt feels reckless. That cynicism can do real damage to the efforts of people like Saleem, Adelle, and thousands of others in the Blue Zone, who care deeply about the climate crisis, and are working hard for meaningful action.

CROWD: What do we want? Climate justice! When do we want it? Now!

On the flip side, it might be easy to say that the protestors only have slogans without solutions, and more anger than information. But I think that would also be unfair. Many protestors are doing a lot in their own communities and internationally. Some of them had organized a whole parallel convention, the People's Summit, during the two weeks of COP26, with dozens of learning sessions, and interpretation in 11 languages. And the urgency and intensity of climate protestors has helped to change the conversation. In the U.S., a strong majority of people now want the federal government to do more on climate, including investing in renewable energy research and regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant. That's according to surveys by Pew Research Center and Yale University. And protests are important in other ways too. When you're facing something as overwhelming as the climate crisis, it helps to know you're not alone.

AMBI: protests

AMY: Why did you come out today?

ZARA: To prove to the world that everyone can do something.

AMY: What are you trying to do something about?

ZARA: Climate change. To help stop it. 'Cause it's our topic in our class at school. So it's something very new and disastrous to me.

This is Zara, she's 9. She was out marching with her mom and her younger brother, Zane.

AMY: Is this the first time you've done a climate march?

ZARA and ZANE: Yes.

AMY: What do you think about it?

ZARA: It's very tiring. My legs are sore. But also nice. Quite exciting!

As I moved back and forth between the conference and the protests, what I kept thinking about was how powerful it would be if we could get all of these people working together somehow. Here are some of the world's most dedicated climate leaders, gathered in one city, and the majority of them want the same thing: to prevent climate chaos. Here's Tina Stege [STEH-gee, hard “g”] climate envoy from the Marshall Islands:

TINA: This will be the decade that will determines the rest of human history. We cannot let it slip by.

And here's Grace, one of the protestors we met at the top of this episode.

GRACE: Time's running out, like it's….we're desperate at this point.

Ultimately, I think the delegates and the protestors really need each other. Inside the conference, they could use a massive infusion of energy, emotion, urgency, and simple, clear language. Out on the streets, they need processes and procedures and plans to turn their passion into meaningful action. It's kind of like the conference is the super-ego of climate action, and the protests are the id. In isolation from each other, they're both made weaker. But if we could get these two parts of our collective psyche better connected, I think they could make each other much more effective.

AMBI: bike bell protestors

This was one of my favorite protests—dozens of people standing in a long row ringing the bells on their bikes. They're right outside the conference grounds, next to the security check-in, and honestly, I don't remember the specifics of what this group was advocating for. But the general message was: hurry up and make something happen in there. Stop this speeding train. Fix the climate crisis. But instead of shouting, this group was just standing there together, gently ringing their bike bells.

AMBI: ding ding ding

As I walked past them and headed into the conference, I found myself wiping away tears. I'm not sure why. There was just something beautiful about them, standing there together, making this quiet little chorus. You could say it was pointless. But was it any more pointless than spending 20 minutes arguing over whether or not paragraph three should be combined with paragraph four? The truth is that we are in a climate emergency, and none of us really know for sure what to do. So maybe what matters is that we just do something. Sit at the negotiation table. Stand outside and ring a bell. Bear witness, and try to tell the story.

BARACK: Keeping the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees Celsius will not be easy. It is going to be hard.

This is President Barack Obama, speaking at the start of the second week of the conference.

BARACK:The thing we have going for us is that humanity has done hard things before. I believe we can do hard things again. Yes, the process will be, be messy. I guarantee you, every victory will be incomplete. But if we work hard enough for long enough, those partial victories add up. If we stay with it, we will get this done. So to all the young people out there, as well as those of you who consider yourselves young at heart, I want you to stay angry. I want you to stay frustrated, but channel that anger, harness that frustration. Gird yourself for a marathon, not a sprint. For solving a problem this big, this complex and this important has never happened all at once. If each of us can fight through the occasional frustration and dread, if we pledge to do our part and then follow through on those commitments, I believe we can secure a better future. We have to. And what a profound and noble task to set for ourselves. I’m ready for the long haul if you are. So let’s get to work. Thank you very much, everybody. Thank you.

So what happened with loss and damage? And what else was accomplished at COP26? Find out next time when we conclude our coverage from Glasgow.

CREDITS: Leah from Alaska

This episode of Threshold was produced and reported by me, Amy Martin, with help from Shola Lawal, Nick Mott, Erika Janik and Sam Moore. The music is by Todd Sickafoose.

The rest of the Threshold team is Eva Kalea, Deneen Wiske and Caysi Simpson. Our intern is Emery Veilleux. Thanks to Sally Deng, Maggy Contreras, Hana Carey, Dan Carreno, Luca Borghese, Julia Barry, Kara Cromwell, Katie deFusco, Caroline Kurtz, and Gabby Piamonte. Special thanks to Dan Nagler, Christopher Preston, Leslie Scott, Katy Scott, Joseph Harvey, and Taliah Farnsworth.