Host: Ross Kenyon
Guest: Brock Benefiel | Co-Host | The Climate Pod
Category: 📄 Carbon Policy
Podcast’s Essential Bites:
[2:54] “COP26 [is short for] Conference of the Parties. The way I see it, there's kind of a literal cop and then there's like a figurative cop. […] Why COP is important is that this is the […] biggest world stage for climate change. This is the big world climate change conference every year. So this is not like your G7 summit or name your regional or elite summit, this is more than 200 countries participating. And they're not just participating. They're creating formal agreements, proposals, their speeches on a variety of aspects of the climate crisis and actual things have to get done.”
[3:34] “There's this thing that was in the Paris Agreement called these nationally determined contributions. And that's […] the national targets for that country's set for reducing their greenhouse gas emissions and getting to net zero by 2025 or 2030. And that has to be reviewed every five years. 2020 was the five year mark for the Paris Agreement and COP26 was delayed a year […] obviously because of the pandemic. So in 2021 at COP26 now is the time when […] we're looking at the Paris Agreement, looking at our targets, which […] if you look at […] the path that nations are headed on, they're nowhere near the targets we need to hit the Paris Agreement.”
[4:21] “There's literal things that have to get done. They have to create these carbon market mechanisms, which was a centerpiece of what COP25 was going to be and it was a complete failure. […] There was no formal agreement on establishing these carbon markets, […] understanding of price on carbon, and what nations that are not getting it done what they have to do as a result. There's funding for damage and loss. What do wealthy nations […] that are the most responsible for greenhouse gas emissions […] owe nations that are the least responsible but the most impacted? Those are the kinds of things that need to get done. That's like what literal COP is.”
[5:05] “But I feel like what figurative COP is, we've gone through this pandemic, we have seen what happens when we don't take the threats to our natural world very seriously, what we have is we don't listen to science. […] Through the past couple of years, especially the incidence of extreme weather, the impacts of the climate crisis could not be more visible. They're in our news, our headlines all the time. So when you look back at that, how are world leaders going to act? It's a massive question. I feel like a lot is going to be hammered out at this year's COP26 event.”
[5:55] “If you're gonna […] define what success would look like for COP26, actual success, I feel like it's automatically going to be a failure. What we need to do with the climate crisis is to […] make a dramatic shift to decarbonisation, adaptation and move towards a more sustainable planet. When it comes to these […] massive global agreements, you think about 200 countries participating with all of the fossil fuel interests that are entangled, and all of the competing interests. I just don't think we're going to decarbonize at the base that we need to. Nevertheless, you do see many pledges, right from leaders around the world, especially in recent years that are relatively aggressive. So am I optimistic that we're going to do everything we can do to fight the climate crisis? Absolutely not. But do I think that there is an opportunity […] for more pressure on policymakers as they meet to make really important decisions? I do think that's at least possible.”
Rating: ⚡⚡
🎙️ Full Episode: Apple | Spotify
🕰️ 13 min | 🗓️ 08/17/2021
✅ Time saved: 11 min
Additional Links:
Nori
