SEASON FOUR | Time to 1.5

Hail Mary

OPENING TAG: Eva Kalea

MIA: For those who have eyes to see, for those who have ears to listen, and for those who have a heart to feel, one-point-five is what we need to survive. Two degrees is a death sentence.

Welcome to Threshold, I'm Amy Martin, and this is Mia Mottley, Prime Minister of Barbados. She’s speaking to world leaders at COP26, the UN climate conference held in Glasgow, Scotland, urging them not to give up on the primary goal of these talks: keeping global temperatures below one-point-five degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels. 

MIA: Our people are watching. And our people are taking note. And are we really going to leave Scotland without the resolve and the ambition that is sorely needed to save lives and to save our planet? How many more voices and how many more pictures of people must we see on these screens without being able to move? Or are we so blinded and hardened that we can no longer appreciate the cries of humanity? 

What Prime Minister Mottley is pointing to here is something we’ve also been examining in various ways throughout this season of our show. The climate crisis is not just a carbon emissions problem. It's an inequality problem. In fact, global warming and global inequality are the same problem manifesting in different ways. Just take the example of Barbados. The Indigenous population was all but wiped out by colonization. Then Britain built enormous wealth by abducting African people and brutalizing them there during the Industrial Revolution. And now the emissions from the fossil fuels that were part of the same process are threatening the future of Barbados. 

With that history in mind, Mia Mottley has every reason to show up at these conferences with nothing but hostility toward the big emitters. Instead she and leaders like her from countries around the world with similar stories are saying to the wealthy nations: please work with us to fix this. Recognize the loss and damage you’ve caused. Help us to adapt to the coming changes. Because we’re all in this together.

MIA: Do some leaders in this world believe that they can survive and thrive on their own? Have they not learned from the pandemic? Can there be peace and prosperity if one third of the world literally prospers and the other two thirds of the world live under siege and face calamitous threats to our well-being?

If there’s one statistic that you remember from this season of our show, I hope it's this one: the countries of the G20—twenty of the world’s biggest economies—have generated more than 80% of cumulative global greenhouse gas emissions. Twenty economies, 80% of emissions. That means more than 150 countries are stuck dealing with a problem that they did very little to create. So the question at the center of this UN process is: will the countries that got the world into this mess take responsibility for leading the way out of it?

MIA: Code red. Code red to the G7 countries. Code red. Code red for the G20. And we have come here today to say, try harder. Try harder. Because our people, the climate army, the world, the planet needs our actions now. Not next year, not in the next decade. Thank you.

INTRO

AMY: So it's Wednesday of week two, it was a big day today.

SALEEM: Yes, it was a big day because the presidency released their draft text for the Glasgow.... I think they're going to call it the Glasgow Declaration, I'm not quite sure what they're going to call it. But that's the chapeau, the overall Glasgow outcome.

I'm inside the Blue Zone on the second week of COP26, talking to Dr. Saleemul Huq of the Independent University Bangladesh. Saleem is one of the few people who has been to all 26 conferences of the parties, or COPs. He serves as an advisor to the least developed countries group at the negotiations. And I've learned a lot from Saleem, including words like "chapeau." It turns out it doesn't only mean "hat" in French. It's also the first part of an international treaty, where the main goals of the agreement get defined. It's often referred to as the "cover text" here in COPlandia. That is what came out today. There are big sections on adaptation and mitigation, and my colleague Shola Lawal is going to help us get caught up on some of those issues in just a minute. But first, I want to know what's going on with my chosen beat: loss and damage.

AMY: And did it have anything to say about loss and damage in it?

SALEEM: It has a section on loss and damage, but it isn't enough.

In its simplest form, the conflict around loss and damage is that many of the countries that have done the least to cause the climate crisis stand to lose the most from it. They want the big emitters to recognize those losses, and create some kind of system for compensation. And many of the wealthy countries don't want to do that. The details of what the cover text says about loss and damage get pretty technical pretty fast, so I'm just going to summarize it this way: Saleem and other loss and damage advocates here have some reason to be cautiously optimistic but with an emphasis on the caution part. He says they've scaled back their goals. Rather than pushing for funding, they're aiming to get the wealthy countries just to agree to start building a process for addressing loss and damage, through something they’re calling the Glasow Facility for Loss and Damage Finance.

SALEEM: They don't have to give finance, but they have to acknowledge it needs to be discussed. And so we need language that allows the Glasgow decision to enable us to start working on what would finance look like. How much would be needed, who might give it, how it would be arranged and organized.

But even getting this limited goal accomplished is not at all guaranteed, Saleem says. And time is running out. The conference is scheduled to end on Friday.

SALEEM: This is the last 24 hours where pressure can work. After 24 hours that's it.

That pressure plays out in the form of battles over words. Throughout the two weeks of this conference, negotiators on the dozens of issues at play here pass documents back and forth, pushing to get words or phrases added, deleted, or changed. That text eventually makes its way up to the COP president, usually someone from the country or region where the conference is being held. In this case, the president is Alok Sharma, a senior minister in the UK administration of Boris Johnson. He has the unenviable task of weaving all of these different threads together into one document which everyone will hopefully be willing to sign off on by the end of the conference. The chapeau or cover text that was released today is kind of like Sharma's first public draft of that document; it shows what's been agreed to so far, and what's left to be decided. Again, it's Wednesday, and the conference is scheduled to end on Friday. So negotiators are working madly to get the changes they want solidified in the text.

SIOBHAN: We run so hard, you know, our days are 16, 18 hours long. But there's an urgency to these issues, and a sense of the responsibility that we carry with us when we walk into these rooms, that's incredibly profoundly important to the work.

This is Siobhan McDonnel, lead negotiator on loss and damage for Fiji at this COP. She agreed to do a short interview with me as long as we focused on the issue itself—what loss and damage is, and why it matters—and stayed away from the specifics of what was happening in the negotiating rooms here. But before we start, I want to know how people get into this work—how you even become a negotiator. Siobhan gives me a quick overview of her pathway into this role.

SIOBHAN: I'm Australian, I'm a woman of color, I have a long complex history. I have a long complex history. I've lived and worked in the Pacific for many, many years and I've spent a lot of time negotiating on behalf of Pacific Island countries. I am a lawyer professionally. I've written parts of the constitution in Vanuatu, I've written all of the land laws in Vanuatu. I've written environmental laws across the Pacific. And so because of that skill set, I'm quite well placed to be able to do negotiations.

Fiji and Vanuatu are neighboring island nations in the Pacific, archipelagos lying north of New Zealand. And like almost all small island developing states, they are among the most climate-vulnerable societies on the planet. They're already being impacted in the form of droughts, deterioration of coral reefs, deadly storms, and of course, sea level rise. And there are more threats on the horizon.

SIOBHAN: So this is really the heart of climate justice. This is the global south saying to carbon-emitting countries, we emit almost no carbon, and yet we bear the brunt of these impacts. How is this fair?

Siobhan says Pacific Islanders are doing all they can to adapt to a changing climate—they're protecting mangroves and planting more, developing climate-resilient crops, improving their early warning systems, and establishing new marine conservation areas. But not all climate change impacts can be mediated or adapted to. Some loss and damage is inevitable. And not just in the future—it's already happening.

SIOBHAN: We are talking about relocation and resettlement of atoll islands. So beyond adaptation, no amount of seawalls, no amount of mangrove plantations. What are the answers then in this space? This is what we negotiate over.

The answers in this space are not easy. To take just one example, Siobhan tells me about what happened on Vanuatu between 2015 and 2020. The country was slammed by two category five cyclones in just five years. After the first one hit, Cyclone Pam, there was a major drought, and people couldn't provide enough food for themselves through their gardens.

SIOBHAN: And so there was a very extended period in which people became completely dependent on rice. The provisioning of rice that was taken out to villages. And with that came child child stunting as a result. So there is now this period of acute child malnutrition and stunting amongst this proportion of the population in Vanuatu. So climate change has these health impacts. So at what point do we say this is not fair? And at what point do we try and recalibrate that equilibrium? And how do we decide to do it as the world? How do we come together and negotiate a more just outcome? And this is really the issue that sits underneath loss and damage.

Loss and damage is where the rubber meets the road in terms of those “common but differentiated responsibilities" we talked about in our last episode—the principle that everyone has to do something here, but the countries that have released the most emissions have to do more. It's a stated principle of these talks. But loss and damage is one of the places where it becomes real. Or doesn't.

SIOBHAN: So as negotiators, we come together every year and we try to nut it out. But it's slow, processional work about trying to create some arms and legs around what loss and damage might do and how it might work in developing countries, and it's one of the big asks of this COP presidency.

This is where the role of the COP president becomes crucially important. As president, Alok Sharma is not a representative of the UK at this conference. He's supposed to serve as a neutral party that listens to all voices and builds an agreement that balances all the various needs and concerns. It's impossible to find a perfect balance, of course. But that's the goal.

SIOBHAN: We have these huge impacts to our ways of life, to our ways of being. These are material and non-material impacts that we bear every day, every year. Pay up. Where is the financial mechanism? And of course, the answer is...uh-uh.

AMY: The answer from who?

SIOBHAN: The answer from the carbon-emitting developed world.

MUSIC

While I've been talking to Siobhan, my colleague Shola Lawal has been spending time with world-renowned environmental leader Wanjira Mathai. 

WANJIRA: We've got to get serious about the solidarity around the adaptation agenda, the loss and damage agenda. Yes, there have been some openings and we are starting to discuss it more, but we really don't have time to make small steps every COP. We have to make some significant leaps. This is about absolute exponential change that has to happen fast.

Wanjira is from Kenya. She's the Managing Director for Africa and Global Partnerships at the World Resources Institute, and she also chairs the board of the Wangari Maathai Foundation, which furthers the work of her late mother, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. Shola asked her for a general assessment of the conference in the middle of the second week.

SHOLA: What have you seen so far at COP and how are you feeling?

WANJIRA: Yeah, well, the good news first. I think there has been a significant acknowledgment that nature is a big part of the climate solution. A commitment to halt and slow deforestation by 2030 is crucially important and backed with real finance. So that's really good news. We saw also the methane pledge, which is important.

These pledges Wanjira mentioned—one about preserving forests and one on reducing methane emissions—were sort of like side deals made by big groups of countries at COP. They weren't part of the official negotiations here. But they were still significant in terms of ambition and potential impact. The U.S. and China also issued a joint declaration, mapping out common goals and establishing an ongoing working group for enhancing climate action in the 2020s. But when it comes to the work of the conference itself, Wanjira says it's harder to find things to celebrate.

WANJIRA: We came here with a great hope that 1.5 degrees increase would be the general direction of travel. I think we can agree that is still the consensus that we need to get to 1.5. But it's so tragic that there are such efforts to scuttle that.

Those efforts show up in the form of lack of effort. Lack of ambition in the “nationally determined contributions," or NDCs. That's the system created by the Paris Agreement in which countries are supposed to make their own emissions-reduction plans and then report back to the whole group. There's been some progress sorting out some of the technical details around how these get reported, but the plans themselves are still woefully inadequate.

WANJIRA: We need to be within a trajectory that gets us to 1.5 because the alternative essentially is a death sentence. We don't quite appreciate that it is about life and death. We're still on a pathway that will get us to 2.7, 2.8. Whatever it is, it's not 1.5. We have to try harder. We have to do more. And when I say we, it is the big emitters. It is China, it is the U.S., it is Australia, countries that have built their wealth and growth on the back of high-emitting fuels have got to do the most. Simple as that.

Another big topic at this COP is the old pledge made by the world's wealthiest countries to collectively deliver 100 billion dollars each year to developing nations. Those funds were designated for climate adaptation and mitigation projects by the way, not for loss and damage. That pledge was made in 2009, but it had never been fulfilled, and when Shola spoke with Wanjira, it was clear that it wasn't going to happen at COP26 either. Instead, the wealthy countries had announced that they would begin meeting the pledge in 2023.

SHOLA: What has been your biggest eye roll moment here?

WANJIRA: I think my biggest eye roll movement could easily be the the commitment to deliver climate finance by 2023. I mean, how long will we continue pushing the ball forward? So for ten years we didn't make it. And then we come and we say 2023—again, push the ball forward. The rich economies have still not addressed how they'll meet the shortfall. Every African should be rolling their eyes.

SHOLA: First Minister Nicola Sturgeon. In one session I was in said the global south is not just they are not just, you know, seeking money. This is reparations. Do you agree with that very controversial statement, controversial subject.

WANJIRA: But I think that what people are trying to really say is that there needs to be common but differentiated responsibility. That there needs to be an acknowledgment that those who have benefited from a high emitting, high carbon economy ought to repair the damage they've caused. I don't think there's anything controversial about that. And in fact, it's quoted in the Paris Agreement in in the justice elements, the fact that we do have to acknowledge the disproportionate responsibility of of high emitting economies and the fact that they cannot walk away, they cannot walk away from this mess that they have created.

Wanjira says there's nothing controversial about common but differentiated responsibilities, and it's true that every country that has signed onto the UNFCCC process has signed onto that principle. And that's nearly all the countries in the world. But there is a vast ravine between the idea of common but differentiated responsibilities and its implementation. And many issues have gone missing in that ravine for 26 years. It comes down to the difference between saying a thing and doing it. One is much harder than the other.

AMY: What day is it? I keep asking you that. Today is Thursday. I'm with Adelle Thomas again. What is your general feeling at this point in the conference?

ADELLE: My feeling now is actually one of anticipation.

Dr. Adelle Thomas is a geographer from the University of the Bahamas and the global think tank Climate Analytics. She's helping to advise the Alliance of Small Island States, or AOSIS, at this COP. And when I ask her what's going on with loss and damage here on this second-to-last officially scheduled day, she seems to be in a good mood.

ADELLE: We've seen some coming together of small islands and the G77 group. So it's good to see that there is some strengthening of different groups coming together, and we'll see what that looks like and the decisions next.

The G77 is a group of 134 developing nations, which together represent over five billion people—more than 60% of all humans on Earth. So their support adds a lot of heft to the loss and damage proposals being made here in the final days of COP26. Now it's up to the presidency—Alok Sharma and a team of advisors—to review all of the proposals and try to mash them together into a final agreement.

ADELLE: So they collect inputs from all of the different parties and groups, and they try to come up with some compromise that takes into account everyone's wants. And so everyone's disappointed. But that's how it works, like iterations of this draft text, and we try to get it to some point where we can agree upon.

AMY: That sounds exhausting.

ADELLE: I can imagine that it is. Exhausting and thankless, maybe, because you're never going to be able to please everyone. Right? Once everyone is upset, then that's a good outcome. (laughter)

So that's what will be happening into the wee hours of the morning on Thursday night. An attempt to come up with an agreement that is equally dissatisfying to all parties.

ADELLE: So it's exciting to see AOSIS and G77 coming together on a shared position, even though it's really late in the game. So this is like a Hail Mary pass, like we're almost at the end tomorrow and we're coming in strong with this. So it's exciting now to see how that will play out.

AMY: I got to say, I think this might be the most I've seen. You smile and I don't want to read too much into it. But are you feeling a little hopeful that this might go through?

ADELLE: I'm feeling hopeful that this proposal will at least result in a better strengthening of the text. So it's I mean, and as nerdy as this is this, this is this is as exciting as it gets. All right. So like Thursday afternoon before Friday, we're coming in with this text on this key ask. So it will be exciting to see how it plays out.

AMBI: aggressive scrum

It's Friday. The latest version of the text is out, and the Hail Mary pass has been dropped. The text for loss and damage has not been strengthened, as this big group of countries was pushing for. I'm in a scrum of reporters moving quickly through the hallway in the Blue Zone. There's a lot of pushing involved as we all try to get a few seconds with the man in the middle: Alok Sharma, president of COP26.

AMY: What's holding up loss and damage funding? Who's blocking it? Who's blocking loss and damage?

ALOK: Well if you'll excuse me....

As often happens at COP, the parties couldn't reach an agreement within the scheduled time, so they've decided to extend the conference by one day. At this point, I'm pretty tired of all the conflict avoidance and other niceties. I'm starting to get a little shouty.

AMY: Mr. Kerry, are we going to get funding for loss and damage in the final text?

JOHN: I'm sure there'll be something...

That was U.S. climate envoy John Kerry. And what he said was, "I'm sure there'll be something..."

AMY: Who's blocking loss and damaging financing? Who's blocking it?

FRANS: I don't see anybody blocking it. I see differences of opinion which we'll need to bridge.

And that was Frans Timmermans, representative from the European Union. You heard from him a couple of episodes ago—he was the person holding up the picture of his one-year-old grandson. After this interaction with him, I met up with Dr. Saleemul Huq again.

AMBI

AMY: What's your response to that?

SALEEM: It's bullshit. They are blocking it.

When you want to cut through diplomatic doublespeak, Saleem is a good person to talk to. And this is not just his take, I spoke to many people with expertise on loss and damage at the conference, and they all backed up what he said: progress was being blocked primarily by the United States and the European Union.

AMY: When they're in negotiations trying to block it like. And there are all these other countries who want it to go forward. How does is there ever a point where people are just basically calling bullshit and saying, you're blocking it and we're not going to have that? Or how does that look?

SALEEM: That's where we are right now. That's why we're going to go on all night.

AMY: And how do you keep it going on all night?

SALEEM: Till somebody gives up.

AMY: It's just about…. you're refusing to to basically finalize the text.

SALEEM: That's right. That's how you win these arguments. Somebody has to concede.

AMY: What do you think the odds are that the vulnerable countries will win this one tonight?

SALEEM: Not good. But we're going to fight.

We'll have more after this short break.

BREAK

Promo Swap: Carbon Copy

~

ALOK: Right, dear friends, dear colleagues. I think, lets get started, we've had a lot of informal discussions, let's get on with the informal stocktaking plenary.

Welcome back to Threshold, l'm Amy Martin, and it's Saturday morning now. Alok Sharma is addressing the delegates in the big plenary hall. 

ALOK: So, friends, we have reached a critical juncture where we must come together and bring our hard work to a successful conclusion. We know that the climate crisis is a truly global challenge and ensuring the COP26 outcomes match the scale and urgency of our situation is our shared responsibility. As I said at the start of this conference, we will succeed or fail as one.

MUSIC

What follows is a lot of commentary from the country delegates. Each comment is called an “intervention,” and there are many. Some people give speeches that seemed designed for news outlets back in their home countries. Others have technical details they want to speak to. It goes on for a good long while, but eventually, everyone who wants to be recognized has had their turn and Alok Sharma calls for a short recess. Some people leave the hall, but I had to fight a bit to get access to this room, and I'm not leaving now, for fear they won't let me back in.

And I'm glad I stayed put, because everything starts to get more interesting. U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry, sitting a few rows in front of me, stand up and moves across the hall to talk to someone. And as he moves, he collects a small swarm of people around him—delegates from other countries and their staffs, and reporters.

In short order, I join the hive. I'm too far back to hear what's going on, but Kerry is tall, so I can see him talking intently someone, while 30 or 40 people strain to listen. This is what's known as a huddle in COP parlance. Not an informal informal, not a bilateral, but a pop-up conversation between two countries, or a group of countries, who are trying to work out some remaining points of friction. Soon there are several huddles happening in different parts of this big hall. Frans Timmermans from the EU is in the middle of one of the other ones After a few minutes of buzzing around the edges, a guard make us reporters retreat to the back of the room, where I find my colleague Shola Lawal.

AMY: Describe the room. What do you see?

SHOLA: It's a big room. Of course, that we have all the screens, but we also have world leaders gathered to one side of the room. It looks like they're trying to, like, argue something out.

Shola had not been able to get into the morning session, but I'm thrilled that she managed to get in during the break. Because it's not often that you get to see politics in action at this level.

SHOLA: I mean, we're in the conference of of basically the whole world. The whole world is gathered here. I mean, I love being a fly on this wall. I love it so much.

AMY: So do I, I'm glad you're in here with me. It just feels like such an honor to get to watch this process getting worked out like right in front of us. And you look around and you see all these, you know, country names. There's Paraguay, there's Papua New Guinea, there's Japan. And as they said over and over yesterday, the world is watching us. It feels like a really momentous occasion right now.

SHOLA: It does feel like a momentous occasion, and it's a privilege to witness it, really. It is.

It is a privilege. But the problem is that we're not really sure what it is we're witnessing. Like so many things at this conference, we're so close and yet still so far away. We can see the huddles, but we can't join them, so we don't know what's being discussed. The running theory among the reporters and observers we're chatting with is that it has something to do with a paragraph in the mitigation section of the agreement, which calls for an end for most fossil fuels subsidies and the phasing out of coal. If it's accepted, it would be the strongest statement on fossil fuels of any COP agreement to date. But there's talk that China and India are raising objections.

AMY: OK. Yeah, I mean, now you can see from Kerry's walking over, maybe to another huddle...OK. Kerry's coming our way.

SHOLA: Hmm. Yeah. I see him.

AMY: Giving people thumbs up. I noticed him like fist bumping people earlier. Yeah, he's it's like, it's like he's actively, you know, they've ever seen like politics. Like, I'm watching the gears of politics turning right now.

SHOLA: Exactly, I can see the wheels turning. He's like, let's go to this side and then that side, and then these guys haven't agreed yet? OK, let's go talk to them.

AMY: Yeah, exactly. Oh, he's going to. He's talking to...I think that's the minister from China.

SHOLA: Oh, it's China, it's China, yes. So I guess these are the two biggest...

AMY: Two biggest emitters currently talking to each other. And as you can see, like a huddle immediately forming, like a big one.

SHOLA: Yeah, the whole room has now turned towards this side

At some point, the U.S. and China delegations exit the hall together through a back door. The official proceedings were supposed to resume at noon. Then it was pushed back to two-thirty. Now it's three o'clock, and we're completely in the dark about what's going on, and when things will restart.

SHOLA: I think we'll be here for a while.

AMY: Yes.

The story that unfolded next was a microcosm of the entire conference experience: a mixture of confusion, a lot of waiting around, and intense drama that left with me with a bunch of conflicting thoughts and feelings. I want to walk you through what happened, not because the outcome of this last-minute squabble was terribly consequential in and of itself but because I think the story sheds some light on how things actually work at COP.

So the rumors were correct, this drama was centered around the language on fossil fuel subsidies and phasing out coal. To set the stage here I need to rewind the clock 24 hours to the Friday version of this same meeting, when all the delegates are gathering to make comments on the draft text. U.S. Climate Envoy John Kerry specifically mentioned this particular paragraph in the mitigation section which again, calls for ending most fossil fuel subsidies and phasing out coal.

KERRY: Two-point-five trillion dollars in the last five years or six years went into subsidies for fossil fuel. That's a definition of insanity. We're allowing to feed the very problem we're here to try to cure. It doesn't make sense. Those subsidies have to go. And we're the largest oil and gas producer in the world, and we have some of those subsidies. And President Biden has put in legislation to get rid of them.

So Kerry is supportive of this paragraph, and because the U.S. is such a big emitter, that's a big deal here.

KERRY: Phasing out unabated coal and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies must stay that language must stay. Unabated coal, how could we possibly— in 2021, knowing what the evidence is—be wishy washy on that subject.

To many people in the room there was already a lot of wishy-washy stuff in this paragraph. A lot of countries didn't want the words “unabated” or “inefficient' in there. Those are wiggle words that allow for potential loopholes. Here's the delegate from Costa Rica.

COSTA RICA: We understand that these is a systemic change in our economies, and for this reason, we also want clear languages on the need to eliminate all fossil fuel subsidies, not only the inefficient ones, and to accelerate the phase out of coal power.

So that was Friday. Delegates had expressed consensus around this paragraph. It was weaker than many wanted, but stronger than anything that had been said on fossil fuels before to COP. Which, let's take a moment to note, is bananas, considering that the whole problem here is fossil fuels.

But back to the story. Now we're here on Saturday afternoon, truly in the eleventh hour, and the rumor is that India and China want to further water down this section. We're hours past the time when the meeting was supposed to restart, but Alok Sharma doesn't want to call the meeting back to order until he's sure the agreement is going to be accepted by all the parties. There's no voting here, it's not like he steps up to the podium and says “all in favor say aye.” He needs to get that aye ahead of time, before official proceedings restart, or he risks someone raising an objection and refusing to adopt the proposal, and potentially, the whole agreement falls apart.

Finally the huddles start to disperse, delegates return to their seats, and Sharma calls the group back together.

ALOK: (gavel tap) So first...entitled Glasgow Climate Pact….

He proposes that text be adopted. And then there's a pause.

ALOK: I see China is seeking an intervention. I invite China to take the floor.

The Chinese representative says, in so many words, that they have proposed a change to the text. But he doesn't say what it is.

ALOK: Thank you China. I see India wishes to take the floor. India you have the floor.

The representative from India reads out the proposed change that they are proposing. They want the text be changed to say “accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” So instead of phasing coal out, it would be phased down. This is the drama that was presumably playing out in these huddles now being brought forward and into the record.

INDIA ...calls upon parties to accelerate the development, deployment and dissemination of technologies, and the adoption of policies….Thank you. (applause)

SHARMA: Thank you to China and India for their interventions. Dear delegates, you have a revised proposal for the paragraphs that were set out by Minister Yadav. Could I ask whether distinguished delegates, having heard the proposal, is this proposal agreeable to you? I have an intervention from Switzerland, Switzerland. I'll give you the floor.

Switzerland is part the Environmental Integrity Group, or EIG, a small group of countries that negotiate together.

SWITZERLAND Thank you, Mr. President. On behalf of the EIG, we would like to express our profound disappointment that the language that we have agreed on on coal and fossil fuel subsidies has been further watered down as a result of an in-transparent process. Let us be clear we do not need to phase down, but to phase out coal and fossil fuel subsidies. The EIG does not want to risk that we leave Glasgow without an outcome. Therefore, we did not oppose this additional last minute change weakening the outcome of Glasgow. But we are disappointed both about the process and about this last minute change. This will not bring us closer to 1.5, but make it more difficult to reach it.

ALOK: Thank you. Thank you. Switzerland for your intervention.

There is big, long applause in the room. A lot of people are mad. Really mad. Many countries here wanted the language to be even stronger than what they had consented to previously. And now it was being made weaker at the last minute. But if they object to this, then the whole agreement falls apart, and all of this work would be for naught. Not just the two grueling weeks here in Glasgow, but the years of effort leading up to this point. I can feel the tension crackling through the room; it feels like the entire process could implode. That has happened at previous COPs. Here's the representative from Mexico.

MEXICO: We all have remaining concerns, but we're told we could not reopen the text. Mexico, for example, believes the language on human rights should have been strengthened and are very, very disappointed that such demands were not heard while others can still ask to water down their promises. Thank you.

So people are upset both about the content and the process here. This isn't the way things are supposed to work. These kinds of changes should have been proposed much earlier, so everyone would have a chance to comment on them. In fact, that's what they were told they had to do. Here's the representative from Fiji.

FIJI: A few days ago, in fact, about four days ago when we talked about some language on loss and damage, we were told that we are introducing something at the last minute. It's rather ironic that just about two hours ago, we discussed the text, and now there's an amendment being made to that. And that I would call last minute without any due process due process being followed.

Person after person took the floor to voice their disappointment. Immense disappointment, profound disappointment. One of the things I learned at COP is that these are the words diplomats use to express rage. But no one said they were going to walk away. As the interventions rolled in, it seemed like the consensus was going to hold. This is the representative from Liechtenstein.

LIECHTENSTEIN: We believe weakening the language regarding the phase-out of fossil fuels, especially coal, is not ambitious nor in line with reaching the one-point-five degrees temperature goal. For the greater good we must swallow this bitter pill. Thank you and back to you Mr. President.

Like I said earlier, watching all of this play out, I had a mixture of reactions. Part of me was outraged that a few big emitters had been able to affect the process and weaken the text in this way. And at the same time, I was really moved by repeated calls to go ahead and approve the text anyway—to swallow that bitter pill, and not let it poison everything. This is Tina Stege from the Marshall Islands.

TINA STEGE: Thank you, President, on behalf of the Marshall Islands, I wish to read into the record our profound disappointment with the change in the language on coal from phaseout to phase down. I ask that this be reflected in the report of this meeting. This commitment on coal had been a bright spot in this package. It was one of the things we were hoping to carry out of here and back home with pride. And it hurts deeply to see that bright spot dim. We accept this change with the greatest reluctance. We do so only, and I really want to stress, only—because there are critical elements of this package that people in my country need as a lifeline for their future. Thank you.

Alok Sharma listened politely to each objection, thanking each country for their comments, and eventually it was again his turn to speak.

ALOK: May I just say to all delegates, I apologize for the way this process has unfolded. And I am deeply sorry. I also understand the deep disappointment. But I think as you have noted I think it's also vital that we protect this package.

He drops his head, clearly fighting back tears. And when the delegates realize what's happening, they begin to applaud for him, willing him on.

APPLAUSE

It feels like applause for him, but also for the cause here. Like the delegates are saying: we cannot and we will not let this fall apart. Many rise to their feet, and Sharma frowns and motions for them to sit back down, in a classically English way. Then he regains his composure and moves on.

ALOK: Thank you friends. We need to proceed, thank you very much. So given what interventions we've had I propose that the revised proposal is adopted as orally amended. A revised version, a written version will be issued shortly. Hearing no objections it is so decided. (gavel)

It's done. The Glasgow Climate Pact is adopted. It's not strong enough, clear enough, or decisive enough to meet this moment. But it's something. And something is much, much better than nothing.

MUSIC

The meeting continues for a long time. Speeches are made, all kinds of things need to be read into the record and approved. Shola had stepped out hours earlier and hadn't been able to get back in. So finally, I make my out of the hall, say my goodbyes to her, and then I go meet up with Dr. Saleemul Huq one last time.

AMY: What did you think about the the watering down of phase out to phase down? SALEEM: I think the the language issue of the change in wording is much less important than the fact that they allowed India to change language at the last minute, and they told us we couldn't do that. We wanted to do that. We were told you can't do that. So again, it's some countries get to do things and others don't. And the others include us, the poor, vulnerable countries. We never get our way. We never get to overrule other people. We're always the ones who get overruled. That's how this works.

I was and still am somewhat confused about what happened during this final plenary. Why did Sharma allow for this last-minute change? It seems like he just got bullied into it—two big countries decided to object to some text at a moment when they knew it would be very difficult for the group to fight them. And they got their way. But if that's basically the story, I want to understand why there aren't better protections in place to prevent that sort of thing.

SALEEM: This is all about power, both financial and political. And it's the job of the presidency to have a balancing act. And they failed. And I'm not blaming Alok Sharma personally, he's a very nice person. I'm sure he fought. But he got railroaded as well.

And then there's loss and damage. Saleem had called the odds correctly on that: the text that the small island developing states, and the G77 had been pushing for did not make it into the final draft.

SALEEM: So yesterday when we had the second draft text on Friday, it had language that had been proposed by 138 developing countries, representing five billion people on the planet. Asking for the Glasgow Facility for Loss and Damage Finance. It was in the text. The final version we got today on Saturday. It has disappeared. At the insistence of one country, the United States of America, and the COP presidency kowtowed them and deleted it. Absolutely arrogant behavior by the rich countries. Rich polluting countries. Not just rich, they're polluters. They just don't want to take any responsibility whatsoever. It's a fuck you to the victims of the pollution. In our face.

Adelle Thomas was already on her way back home, but I sent her a message on WhatsApp, asking her for her thoughts, and she replied: “Terrible text.”

And what about the core issue here, the central goal of this conference and the entire UN climate negotiation process: holding global temperature rise to no more than one-point-five degrees Celsius over pre-industrial levels? Here's how Alok Sharma characterized it, speaking to the press after the conference ended.

ALOK: We have kept 1.5 alive, but I would still say that the pulse of 1.5 is weak.

This is obviously a less than ideal outcome. And perhaps, listening to our reporting from COP, and the frustrations of the people we followed here, you might be tempted to condemn this entire process as worthless. But I think that would be the wrong conclusion. Clearly, there are huge flaws in the global climate negotiations. But it’s important to remember that this is the first time the world has tried to tackle something this huge together. There was no pre-existing structure for this level of species-wide collaboration, we're making that up as we go along, and it shouldn’t surprise us that it’s a bumpy journey. The fact that almost every nation on Earth is involved here is itself a tremendous victory. So after watching it for two weeks, I want this process to be much, much better. But I don’t want it to die. Because then we’d just have to start over. And we don’t have time for that.

MUSIC

To wrap up our COP26 coverage, I want to take you back to a night midway through the conference. I'd spent most of the day following the first big protest. Now it was dark, I was cold and hungry, and my feet were tired. But I had something I needed to see before I went to find the rest of the Threshold team, and some dinner. 

AMY: Oh, there it is. There it is.

It's the Glasgow Climate Clock. It measures the time we have left before we've committed ourselves to a world of more than one-and-a-half degrees of warming.

AMY: I'm looking at it now. It's projected onto an old steeple. A really beautiful old steeple actually here at this intersection.

There are versions of this clock installed in several locations around the world. This one uses this steeple as a sort of tower-shaped canvas. It's bathed in red and blue lights, with numbers projected onto it in bright white light. And the numbers are moving—counting down the time to one-point-five.

AMY: Seven years, 259 days, eight hours, 42 minutes, 41 seconds. That's pretty intense. Especially after spending the day at the protest.

Seven years, 259 days. That was in November 2021. As we finalized this episode, we're down to seven years and 30-something days.

AMY: I've seen the clock online before, and it's still really intense to look at it. And to watch the seconds tick away. Seven years, two hundred and fifty nine days is nothing. That will disappear so quickly.

MUSIC

We're living through an extraordinary moment in human history—the precious remaining window of time before we've locked in truly catastrophic levels of global heating. But it's hard to actually feel that reality. We're all just moving through our lives, another day, another year, another climate conference. And the climate clock ticks on.

I think part of the reason we don't feel that reality is that it's such a frightening reality to feel. We naturally recoil from it. But if we can face our fears, and take in the truth about where we are in this timeline, then we can start to write the next chapter of this story. Because this clock, unlike most clocks, can actually move in two directions. If we reduce emissions, we can add time to it. Our actions can help to add years to this clock, and we can use those years to accelerate the transition away from fossil fuels, flatten the temperature curve, and eventually start bending it back down. We need to envision ourselves doing that. To imagine ourselves standing in front of the climate clock, watching the time to one-point-five growing instead of shrinking. And then we need to go make it happen.

RACHEL: So we're in uncharted territory. And we have to embrace it. We can't sort of shy away from it.

This is Rachel Kyte, and she's just one of several climate thought leaders we'll be talking to in our final episode. That's next time on Threshold.

FUNDING CREDITS: Jessica Becker

This episode of Threshold was reported by Shola Lawal and me, Amy Martin, with production help from 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 Becca Richie, Damon Matthews, Rachel Waldholz, Carolyn Beeler, Taliah Farnsworth, Christopher Preston, Leslie Scott, Katy Scott, Joseph Harvey, and Abe.