The UN Climate Negotiations Are Officially a Disaster and the US Helped Screw It Up

“I’ve been attending these climate negotiations since they first started in 1991, but never have I seen the almost total disconnection we’ve seen here.”

A youth protest outside COP25 in Madrid.AP/Manu Fernandez, Zuma

Each year, the United Nations holds a conference on climate change to try to nudge the biggest polluters toward containing warming under well below 2 degrees Celsius. Now, that goal seems more fantastical than ever; the world is on track for the absolute worst-case, business-as-usual scenario of more than twice that warming by the end of the century. 

The stakes are high enough that even in a normal year the conference is a grueling marathon of all-night negotiating sessions. But this year’s conference in Madrid, known as COP25, entered into overtime on day 12 as an indisputable mess, as the world moves further away from the goals outlined in Paris in 2015. At the center of this mess, of course, is the United States. 

“I’ve been attending these climate negotiations since they first started in 1991, but never have I seen the almost total disconnection we’ve seen here[…]in Madrid between what the science requires and the people of the world demand, and what the climate negotiators are delivering,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has attended these talks for more than 25 years. 

The US, along with Australia, Brazil, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, has helped create a gridlock in this year’s negotiations. The vacuum left by the US has led countries interested in maintaining the status quo—including Australia, a major coal exporter, and Brazil, led by a right-wing government promoting deforestation of the Amazon—to block stronger rules for a global carbon-emissions trading system that are supposed to go in effect next year. 

Fundamentally, COP25 brings to a head a widening chasm between the richer, historic polluters that prefer to maintain the status quo and the poorer nations that suffer the most consequences despite contributing the least to the crisis.

Jake Schmidt, international director of the Natural Resources Defense Council, laid the blame on “key polluting countries responsible for 80 percent of the world’s climate-wrecking emissions” that “stood mute, while smaller countries announced they’ll work to drive down harmful emissions in the coming year.”

Costa Rica’s environment and energy minister Carlos Manuel Rodríguez called out the US, Brazil, and Australia for blocking a deal in the late hours, reports Climate Change News. “Some of the positions are totally unacceptable because they are inconsistent with the commitment and the spirit that we were able to agree upon [in Paris in 2015].”

The US has worked to water down the latest draft of the agreement, which includes language that “invited” countries to “communicate by 2020 their mid and long-term climate plans. In UN parlance, this is particularly weak; stronger language would have urged countries to update or strengthen their commitments. The US said outright it won’t support the more ambitious call to action.“We don’t support such language and we would not think that it would lead to the balance of this text, but rather take us quite far in the other direction,” Kimberly Carnahan, a US State Department official said this week, according to the Washington Post

An analysis from the Climate Action Tracker gives you a glimpse of why another lukewarm global deal is so disastrous. The chart below shows how far off target the world currently is (blue shows how far the policies currently get us, and the green and yellow show what would be needed to keep warming below 2 degrees Celsius). 

 

Climate Action Tracker

“At a time when scientists are queuing up to warn about [the] terrifying consequences if emissions keep rising, and school children are taking to the streets in their millions, what we have here in Madrid is a betrayal of people across the world,” said Mohamed Adow, a climate justice advocate with the think tank Power Shift Africa.

COP25 this year is essentially a warmup for 2020, a pivotal year for determining the next stage of the Paris deal, when countries are supposed to submit more ambitious pledges for 2030 than they submitted five years ago. It is also the year that President Donald Trump can officially withdraw from the agreement, and it coincides with the US election and a potential changing of the guard. 

In the meantime, Trump can still stall action. The climate activist group Extinction Rebellion summed up the state of the talks by dumping a giant pile of horse manure outside COP25, with a sign attached: “The horseshit stops here.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate