26: Leo Hickman: COP26 hopes and fears
Leo Hickman of the Carbon Brief looks ahead to COP26. We also invite back a selection of guests from across Local Zero's first year, to hear their hopes and fears ahead of this historic climate summit getting underway in Glasgow.
Episode Transcript:
Rebecca: Hi Local Zero. It’s Becky here. I just wanted to share our really exciting news that we’re going to be recording a live episode of Local Zero during COP26 all about local action to deliver a just transition in Scotland and beyond. It’s happening from 4-6.30 pm on Saturday, 6th November at Charles Rennie Mackintosh’s The Lighthouse in Glasgow City Centre. We’ve got a great line-up of guests from government, industry, community energy and academia. If you’d like to attend, please direct message us on Twitter @LocalZeroPod or send an email to LocalZeroPod@gmail.com and we’ll provide you a link to sign up to. Alright, now on with the episode.
[Music flourish]
Hello, welcome to Local Zero. You’re listening to Matt, Becky and Fraser.
Matt: Hi.
Fraser: Hello.
Matt: So today, we’re moving our sights to all things COP26.
Rebecca: That’s right. I can’t believe it’s been almost a year since we started recording Local Zero and COP26 is finally upon us and so it only seems fitting that for this episode, we start to think about our hopes, concerns and aspirations for this historic climate conference.
Matt: Yes, the last year certainly has flown by and to mark the occasion, we’re joined by none other than Leo Hickman, Director of the Carbon Brief. He’s going to talk to us about why COP26 is so important, hopefully, such a historic event for all the right reasons and what we should look out for as these critical discussions get underway.
Leo: We’re going to have Biden and all these other leaders rock up, helicopters landing and all the big razzmatazz and show of any of these kinds of things. They’ll come in, make a speech and say, ‘We’re doing this. We’re doing that,’ but that’s actually outside of the process in a way and has nothing to do really with the Paris Agreement.
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Matt: As always, you can reach out to us on our dedicated Twitter handle. If you haven’t already, go find us and follow us @LocalZeroPod to get involved with discussions over there. If you’ve got something longer to say like recommendations about what we should be covering next or views on what we’ve said before, you can email us at LocalZeroPod@gmail.com.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: And, of course, as always with Local Zero, welcome Fraser. It wouldn’t be a proper episode if you weren’t here taking the mick out of me and Matt [laughter].
Fraser: Hey guys, how are we doing?
Matt: Great, yeah. You?
Fraser: Yeah, hanging in, mate. Hanging in. Very, very excited about COP. I don’t know about you guys and how you’re feeling.
Matt: It’s happening. It is happening [laughter]. We are T-minus... I’ve lost... we’re down to days. That’s all I know.
Rebecca: I went on the website a couple of days ago and got my tickets for three of the days, so gearing up for the events. Very cool.
Matt: Just like Glastonbury [laughter].
Fraser: Yeah, yeah, sold out in seconds. I had to refresh the page and everything.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Well, as we said, it has been 12 months since we started Local Zero. We launched the series with a year to go to COP26 and we’ve had a string of brilliant guests across our episodes. To help set up today’s show, we’ve gone back to some of them to ask what is one thing they’d really like to see emerge from COP.
Emma: Hi Local Zero. I’m Emma Bridge. I’m Chief Executive of Community Energy England and a Yorkshire and Humber Climate Commissioner. I want people and communities to be seen as essential at COP for achieving net zero. We need much greater ambition and commitment from all nations but ultimately, we need that ambition to be deliverable. Now, that won’t happen unless we ensure people and communities are invested in and supported to grasp the opportunities that net zero brings. As part of that, we need community energy to be recognised as a delivery mechanism for net zero and the just transition with concrete commitments to remove the policy obstacles that prevent the sector from achieving its potential.
Sam: Hi, my name is Sam Gardner and I’m the Head of Climate Change & Sustainability with Scottish Power. The one thing I would like to see come out of COP is momentum; the intangible but so important momentum and that will come from raised ambition, commitments from the private sector, improved NDCs and a whole suite of things but ultimately, COP has to be a point of acceleration.
Lucy: Hello Local Zero. My name is Lucy and I run South Seeds. The thing I’d really like to see come out of COP is support for the brilliant community responses to living sustainable lives here in Glasgow and elsewhere in the UK.
Dhara: Hi, I’m Dhara Vyas and I lead Citizens Advice’s work on net zero and energy consumers in the future. What I’d really like to see at COP26 is the British Government leading the way with a clear plan to make it easier for people to make the changes that we need to our homes and strong protections for if and when things go wrong. Right now, it’s just too confusing and complicated. People need the government to help them and it needs to be simple, easy and fair.
Magnus: My name is Magnus Davidson and I’m a researcher with the University of the Highlands and Islands and also Director of Community Land Scotland. From COP26, I want to see a stronger commitment to a just transition as set out in the Climate Justice Alliance with principles such as equitable redistribution of resources and power, creating inclusionary spaces for traditions and culture as well as looking at regenerative ecological economies. I want to see a transition to net zero that works for all rather than the few.
Kate: Hello, I’m Kate Swade. I am one of the co-directors of Shared Assets. I would like the people at COP26 to explicitly recognise that humans aren’t separate from nature and to acknowledge the link between land use and climate change as well as acknowledge the need for justice in the land system if we’re ever going to come together to solve and prevent catastrophic climate change.
Jeff: Hello Local Zero. My name is Jeff Hardy and I’m a Senior Research Fellow at the Grantham Institute at Imperial College London and I’m part of the EnergyREV team. I’m a big fan of the show and mildly addicted to Future or Fiction? So my ask for COP26 is twofold. First, that all countries agree on targets commensurate with the Paris Agreement and second, that fairness, both between and within countries, is central to decarbonisation plans. So if you can make that happen, that would be lovely. Thanks.
Matt: So what are your thoughts? I mean there’s quite a lot of similarity with some of the lines here but actually, I think there were a couple of points which surprised me and I’m really happy to hear.
Rebecca: Yeah, I was really pleased to hear people talking about fairness. That didn’t surprise me but I guess one thing that I drew across what everybody said was this idea of interconnected action. We need the leadership from government but it’s not just about our national governments making these agreements. It’s also recognising that a lot of this actually really needs to be delivered at the local level by people and communities and so we need to have a lot more joined-up action if we’re even going to get anywhere.
Matt: I think the point made by Emma and Lucy, amongst others, was that there needs to be action from government to enable local action or action from communities and individuals. One needs to act before the other can. I mean it’s not entirely true, right? I mean we can all go and do stuff now without government intervening but to support and facilitate.
Fraser: Ah, but it’s very, very difficult when you don’t have those frameworks or that support in place...
Matt: Quite right.
Fraser: ...to enable you to do that kind of stuff. So putting you on the spot then, guys, adding our own thoughts into this, and we’ll start with you, Becky, what are your hopes for COP26?
Rebecca: I hope that it isn’t just a talking shop and I think it’s so easy for these things to be just talking shops with this agreement that doesn’t then translate through to delivery. For me, that’s got to be one of the most important things and not just delivering net zero but enabling and setting up the frameworks and the clear guidance that brings in the industry and communities in a way that we can do this in a fair and just manner.
Matt: I completely agree with that. For me, COP26 will be a success if it normalises climate action. I think the big gap or big difference since 2015 with the Paris Agreement is I think that shocked the world in many respects that we need to take action now and this became parlance in many individuals’ vocabulary which they weren’t aware of before. They maybe weren’t quite aware of how important this was. I think the big difference in the intervening six years is that climate action is something that most people are aware of but we’re talking as targets and as ambitions. Now, action should just be normalised. We should just be seeing seismic, disruptive change and expect it to happen. We shouldn’t be shocked by it happening and unfolding.
Rebecca: But I think that action should become easy and the norm because I think about a lot of my family that don’t even really know about COP. They’ve never heard about it. If I wasn’t yabbering on about it half the time, they wouldn’t know what was going on at all. So I feel like there needs to be a way forward that enables action to occur without necessarily every single person having to step up and start thinking about things in perhaps new ways. It’s really challenging.
Matt: It’s about making the abnormal normal and I think Covid taught us that and most of us, the bulk of us, got on board with that. There was this sense of this is abnormal and this is a crisis. We all must react. I’m hoping COP26 takes that and translates it into climate action worldwide and your mum and dad, my mum and dad, friends, siblings or whoever... the man or woman on the street thinks this is just normal now. I’m really glad to see the BBC have actually got a really interesting string of stuff going on. I saw one thing tweeted the other day that there’s going to be a super soap episode and Eastenders, Coronation Street and Emmerdale, all the big hitters are coming together to deliver a climate change special. Now if that isn’t going to make the masses aware, what is? [Laughter] Fraser, I’m going to ping your question right back at you. What would you like to see?
Fraser: I think the main thing that I would like to see... and it maybe spins off the back of what Becky said about who we need to take action. Whose responsibility is this? We have world leaders, a lot of them, with historic responsibility or at least their economies and countries with historic responsibility and power to affect change here. They’re inside this room which is a very privileged position to be in while a lot of the people in communities in countries around the world, who feel the sharp end of this stuff, are completely excluded while feeling the worst of the impacts. So I think in terms of responsibility, should someone like Joe Biden happen to be listening to this, Nicola Sturgeon or whoever, remember that you have an added responsibility here to represent the interests and voices of people who have been living at the sharp end of this, who have seen their resources decimated and who have seen entire cultures, communities, spaces, land and all kinds of stuff already damaged or completely lost. Remember that it isn’t just your fight; it’s everyone’s fight. As we’ve cut a lot of people out of this discussion at the higher level, remember you have an obligation here to represent those perspectives as well.
Matt: Hear, hear.
Fraser: The second thing...
Rebecca: Oh, he’s on a rant, isn’t he? [Laughter]
Matt: Oh dear. He’s on a roll.
Fraser: I know. The second thing, once you’ve finished giving me that standing ovation... [laughter] the second thing that I would like to see is lots of our lovely and committed listeners come along to Local Zero live which is happening on the Saturday in the middle of COP in Glasgow.
Matt: Yeah, what we want is there to be real live, actual citizens like you and me there involved but also stakeholders not just from Glasgow, Scotland or the UK but internationally. So we want a real mix of people who can talk about how local action can unlock a just transition.
Rebecca: Gosh, if that doesn’t sell it, I don’t know what will [laughter].
Matt: I don’t know, yeah. That’s it. That’s the pitch. I should do those movie trailers. I just need a slightly deeper voice [laughter].
[Music flourish]
So I think, without further ado, we really ought to move to the final segment before we bring in our esteemed guest, Leo, and to talk about the good, the bad and frankly, the pretty weird. So who wants to go first? Maybe a good news story.
Fraser: Yeah, I would like to come in with a good news story. This was reported in The Guardian recently. Research commissioned by Scottish Power, amongst others, found that the UK public overwhelmingly supports serious climate action. They found that 94% of people in the UK support carbon tax at £75; 93% support better integrated public transport; 89% support raising flying costs; 82% support some restrictions on cars in city centres (that’s always a controversial one) and 77% support grants for homeowners to install heat pumps. The vast majority also said that this should be government responsibility to fix and not left to the markets alone. So big, big support for big, big, serious climate action.
Matt: That is surprising and very good news, right? I wasn’t expecting those numbers. I’m really happy to hear that. Any other good news? I have a good/bad news one. It kind of begins bad but gets good. It’s on the back of the International Energy Agency’s World Energy Outlook. Every year, they basically publish World Energy Outlook to look into their crystal ball and ask the question what does the future of energy look like? Of course, this year, we’ve got COP26 and an emphasis on those ambitions and the pledges that have come forward. The good news, I guess, in part of this is that a new energy economy is emerging as part of the ambitions and pledges that each of our governments is making for COP26. We’re starting to see a new energy economy emerging. We’re seeing or hoping that oil will peak by 2025, new coal plants are going fall off a cliff during the 2020s and renewables are going to go through the roof but (and it’s one hell of a but) these climate pledges that are currently in place will only limit global warming to 2.10C. Now, some of you will think, ‘That’s 20 (or 2.10 versus what we often hear which is 1.50 warming) and half a degree means nothing to me.’ Well, it can be absolutely catastrophic the difference in terms of extreme weather. Now, the issue is that there is a big gap between the pledges and the carbon emission reductions that these provide and what we need to get to is 1.50. The current climate pledges announced close less than 20% of that emissions gap between basically business-as-usual and where we need to get to for net zero. I’ll end on the good news which is that the bulk of that gap left between what we’ve pledged today and where we need to be for net zero can be achieved by cost-effective measures. We can do it. We’ve got the tech, it’s mature and we can implement it now. That’s the end of the good news story [laughter].
Fraser: That’s reassuring and it’s something that a lot of people have been screaming about as well that actually, there’s more stuff that we can do with what we have at our disposal right now than we’re already doing. As you’ve been talking about a lot, Matt, in the context of the energy prices and the wider crisis, we already know that it’s never been more urgent, not just for the planet but for the people who live here as well in terms of the impact, prices and everything that goes with it.
Matt: We’re not on track essentially but we can make the difference.
Rebecca: And, of course, Matt’s got a very helpful chart [laughter].
Matt: Oh yeah, we love a chart [laughter].
Rebecca: We’ll have to make sure we link that in [laughter]. It just adds to the story, doesn’t it? So come on, I’ll do the downer. I’ll be the depressing one today [laughter].
Matt: Oh, come on, Becky.
Rebecca: Why not? [Laughter] I guess our bad news story is focused on China. What we’re seeing is even though COP is just around the corner and we have a lot of reasons to be hopeful, China is going to be mining and burning more coal in the last three months of this year because of the energy crisis that they’re going through in the country at the moment. A big part of this is simply because of challenges around generating the amount of electricity that the country needs due to rises in energy prices and because of the price caps, it couldn’t be passed on to customers. If that confuses you, because it still confuses me, tune into our previous episode and listen to Jeff Hardy explain all about price caps. Very, very important. Much like we’re seeing in the UK, the lack of wind and the lack of rain has reduced renewable forms of generation, so they’re experiencing this perfect storm. What that means is that they’re going to be loosening restrictions on coal mining to deal with these blackouts.
Matt: The deep irony of this story is twofold and there are two layers of irony. The first is that this crisis was largely brought about by China trying to tackle their addiction to coal which, in a roundabout way, increased electricity prices because the renewables weren’t there to displace it and then they’re having to go back to coal. The other is, as you say, the effects of climate change are making extreme weather more common: drought; periods of anticyclonic stillness and lack of wind.
Fraser: Oh, that was a good word. Say that again, Matt. What was it?
Rebecca: I know!
Matt: Anticyclonic stillness.
Rebecca: This is the geographer in you coming out, isn’t it?
Matt: Weather geek here. Closet weather geek [laughter]. Basically, the effects of climate change are meaning that some countries are having to reach to fossil fuels which is just bonkers.
Fraser: This is the thing and a lot of the same arguments were being made here about that as well, weren’t they? Short-term, there aren’t a lot of options in the case of China just now but that isn’t an argument necessarily to regress and to keep depending on fossil fuels. It’s an argument to accelerate that electrification effort and to diversify our renewable supply as well.
Matt: Yeah, quite right.
Rebecca: And it’s about managing your grid in new ways, valuing storage and valuing flexibility and these are a lot of the same challenges that many other countries are facing at the moment. I don’t think anyone really has the answer to that but hopefully, the research and the innovation will continue to be pushed forward and we’ll start to find better ways of dealing with these shortcomings.
Matt: Yeah, and we must end on the weird, right? There are a couple of stories here. One of the places I want to visit on planet Earth more than any other is the Sequoia National Park in the US. I’m desperate to see it and see the redwoods. I’m kind of weirdly obsessed with trees and I really want to see General Sherman before I die... who isn’t a person, by the way; he’s a redwood [laughter], the tallest tree on planet Earth. They’re having to wrap these ancient sequoia trees with tin foil, basically, like a baked potato to protect them from the ravages of these wildfires. This could have easily been in the bad category. That isn’t good but there was something particularly weird about wrapping up a tree in tin foil. So that was my weird item for the day.
Rebecca: That is weird and I guess on the theme of trees, in honour of Her Majesty’s Platinum Jubilee, which is happening next year, people from across the UK are being invited to plant a tree for the Jubilee. Isn’t that nice? Rolls right off the tongue there [laughter]. So really encouraging that kind of endeavour into tree planting, whether you’re talking about scout and guide groups. I was never a girl guide. Matt, were you a scout?
Matt: I did a bit of cubbing. Didn’t make the grade for scouts, sadly. They didn’t want me [laughter].
Rebecca: Fraser?
Fraser: No, no. It wasn’t my thing I’m afraid [laughter]. Interesting stories, though. Interesting stories. There have been calls for much bigger action from the Royal Family and I get hired far too often by the BBC to say what I would like to say about this exactly but...
Matt: Yeah, well hold...
Fraser: Better than nothing?
Matt: ...hold your tongue, Fraser [laughter] and plant a tree for the Jubilee [laughter] is all I will say to that [laughter].
[Music flourish]
Right, I think, without further ado, we should get ready and introduce our special guest.
Leo: My name is Leo Hickman. I’m the editor of Carbon Brief, a specialist website and team of journalists focused on explaining climate change, both the science and also the policy response.
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Brilliant. So welcome, Leo, and thanks for joining us on Local Zero. It’s great to have you along and such an important topic. Of course, COP26 is just around the corner which I’m sure has been top of your mind for some time but maybe you could just kick us off by giving us a bit of an overview of why this is such a big deal. What actually is at stake at COP26?
Leo: I think COP26 is the biggest UN climate summit since the Paris COP back in 2015. Those six years in between have been pretty tumultuous. You’ve had obviously the Covid pandemic. You’ve had Donald Trump in the White House. It’s been a rollercoaster, to be honest, in terms of the global effort to reduce our emissions. COP26 has been in the diary for a long time as being quite a landmark COP because back in Paris in 2015, effectively, the world’s governments at that time agreed that they would enter into this thing called the Paris Agreement which was effectively a rolling mechanism of every five years, all the countries would come together, would pledge what they want to individually do and then there would be an assessment or what they call a Global Stocktake to effectively add up all of these pledges to see whether that is going to meet the agreed goal of keeping global warming... what they’ve described as ‘well below 20C’ and they added on at the last minute an aspirational kind of stretch goal of trying to limit it to 1.50C which over the past five or six years has become, particularly for climate campaigners, this very symbolic, totemic and key thing that we need to try to achieve as a species almost. We need to try and keep global warming below 1.50C. The reason why COP26 is the biggest such meeting since Paris is that we’re now at this stage where the countries have all come together again and are meant to be making fresh and updated pledges. Paris was very important because it introduced this thing called the ratchet mechanism which sounds very technical but effectively, it is that. Every five years, every country must ratchet up its ambition and its commitment to acting on climate change. So in totality, across all of the countries when you add them all up, we should, in theory, be getting closer and closer to delivering that 1.50C goal. This is our first big moment since Paris really to come together as humanity really. All the governments will come together to try and assess this.
Matt: To ratchet up ambition, essentially.
Leo: Mmm.
Matt: So with that, Leo, what are the big sticking points? What do you see as the talking points which will be grabbing the headlines over the next few weeks and months?
Leo: Well, it’s not by accident that this process has been described as 4D chess [laughter]. It’s incredibly complicated and it gives you a major headache just looking and thinking about all the issues that are in play. Like many UN processes, nothing is agreed upon until it’s all agreed and it’s a consensus process as well. So one country can just put their hand up in a plenary session and say, ‘Mr or Madam Chairman, I don’t agree with this,’ and that whole thing falls off the cliff. You need everyone to agree. There was a very famous moment at the end of the Paris COP in 2015 where the whole process was held up for about two to three hours because... off the top of my head, I can’t remember who it was. Forgive me. Some sort of Central American country basically said, ‘We don’t agree with this particular issue.’ The rumour was that Barak Obama was asked to phone the president to actually talk them down from this position because it was holding up the whole process.
Matt: Wow!
Leo: So that gives you a little insight into just how much mischief-making and brinkmanship can happen at these processes.
Matt: And the power of small countries there. Obviously, you’ve got small countries there being leant on by a big country there [laughter] but everybody matters. Every country matters in these negotiations.
Leo: It does matter and it can be a positive and a negative. Rightly, a smaller and more developing nation that’s more vulnerable to climate change could put its hand up and say, ‘We’re not going to survive global warming at these levels unless you do X, Y or Z.’ It can equally be held up, and has notoriously been held up in previous years, by petrostates saying, ‘Our vested interest in manufacturing and selling a lot of fossil fuels is going to be massively hurt by this process.’ It’s incredibly difficult and I think many people outside the process probably don’t fully realise just how tortuous and complex the negotiations are.
Rebecca: So what sorts of things are we talking about them agreeing on? Because obviously, one of the big agreements that you’ve already mentioned was this commitment to keeping global warming levels well below 20C but it sounds here like there are agreements around some of the finer details of this. Is it to do with specific actions or other more intermediary goals? What are the sorts of things that are really up for discussion in these agreements?
Leo: Well, you won’t be surprised to hear that it boils down often to money. You will hear a lot about climate finance and you will hear a lot about the $100 billion a year commitment that the richer developed nations effectively committed to this ten years ago and saying, ‘By 2020, we will be putting into a pot $100 billion a year.’ That’s a mixture of grants and loans and it’s all been a bit controversial about exactly what form of finance but anyway, it’s this kind of huge goal. A lot of the developing and more vulnerable nations agreed to that and said, ‘Okay, if you’re going to do that, then that’s great,’ but they’ve lost a lot of trust over that period since because that grand total of $100 billion has never quite got there. I think the last assessment that came out a couple of weeks ago was that it’s currently at about $80 billion and we’re a year later than when the target was. That is going to cause a big, big fight and, rightly in my view, a lot of angst and upset and will be used as one of the major leveraging and bargaining points within the talks. That’s huge because a lot of the poorer and more vulnerable countries are saying, ‘You guys, the developed richer nations have just spent 150 years developing your economies (US, Europe, etc) by burning an awful lot of fossil fuels. You’ve got us into this problem and you’ve developed at the same time. We now want to develop but we agree that we don’t want to do it in a dirty way. We’d like to do it in a clean way but we need finance and we need help to do that.’
Matt: It’s something we’re hearing a lot more of in a kind of domestic context here about the just transition but often when we’re talking about the negotiations and international climate justice or energy justice, which tends to be the watchword, what are the key issues here? You’ve mentioned lesser developed countries wanting to play catch-up and feel that they have, and rightly so, a right to that development. Are there any other key issues here around climate justice that you think are going to be centre stage of these negotiations?
Leo: At Carbon Brief, we’ve just published a whole week’s worth of content around this and effectively kicking off with an article which just tries to explain that concept. There’s a long history of that term and many different actors and many different parties have different interpretations of what climate justice means. It has become a bit more complicated since the early ’90s when it first became a big term. At the UNFCCC, as it’s called, or the UN body that oversees the climate talks, there was an agreement right back at the Rio Earth Summit back in the early ‘90s that, effectively, the world would be divided into two parts. It would be divided into the developed and the developing countries. That divide was convenient at the time but has caused a lot of problems since what they call CBDR, which is an acronym you’ll hear at COP26 which stands for Common But Differentiated Responsibilities; so this idea that different countries can go at different speeds and different routes to getting to decarbonisation because they’re at different stages of development. The big issue in the room now is countries such as China, which was in the developing nation portion, and you could now argue whether it’s a developing nation anymore. Is it a major developing economy? Is it developed? There’s a middle class of 300-400 million people who have salaries easily equal to many in the West. Turkey is another good example. It’s not entirely clear where they sit in this kind of differentiation. That muddies the water a bit on the climate justice debate but I think there’s the conventional sense that the vulnerable, low-lying island nations, the least developed nations in Africa and some in South America are definitely, unquestionably, at a very different place in their development than other ones.
Rebecca: So a big diversity of agendas and contexts coming together here at the conference. Do you think that there are certain countries that are going to be, perhaps, more influential in the negotiations in some capacity? Will it be the usual suspects or do you think that we might see a few surprises going on here?
Leo: There’s no getting away from the fact that the US and China, as the two biggest emitters, the two biggest economies and the two most powerful countries in the world, are absolutely key. The Paris Agreement would not have happened unless Xi and Obama met as they did a year before in 2014 and effectively agreed on a bilateral agreement between the two of them and that was the magic sauce that made the Paris Agreement happen. The dynamics are obviously different this time between the US and China. There are a lot more geopolitical tensions between them but China, a year ago, committed to its twin goals of carbon neutrality by 2060 and peaking emissions by 2030. That is a pretty big deal and when China says it’s doing something, it basically does it and so you can probably bet that it will actually more than meet those targets because it historically does tend to do that. Obviously, it’s a different form of governance than, say, Western democracies, to put it mildly. You’ve got very different dynamics going on but you’ve got complete wild cards suddenly cropping up in the middle of the run-up to COP26 like the energy price crisis going on around the world at the moment. No one probably would have predicted that maybe a month or two ago but that is unquestionably a factor. It’s about exactly how all that plays out and whether countries get distracted by that or whether they still see the long game and they play it for the decade ahead as opposed to the next few months or the winter ahead.
Matt: It’s interesting your point about that. We mentioned before you came on about the IEA’s (International Energy Agency) World Energy Outlook and an interesting part of that, one of the headlines, was that actually the transition to net zero for householder bills, and I guess they’re talking broadly and globally speaking, can be reduced quite significantly and the pain or the cost of those bills can be reduced, roughly, by 30% through that net-zero transition through efficiency and fuel switching. So I do wonder in these negotiations whether the energy crisis is going to be a force for good or evil in terms of pushing to net zero because I can kind of imagine different outcomes and maybe lapsing back into fossil fuels to get that security and get that low cost but also, obviously, the IEA is pointing to a different future entirely.
Leo: Yeah, and we saw a similar thing happen a decade or so ago before the Copenhagen Summit when we had the global economic crash and China, in particular, wanting to restimulate its economy through the rapid, short-term burning of coal. Structurally, it feels like a different economy now, perhaps, in China and so I don’t think that would play out in the same way in these post-Covid times with all this narrative about the Green Recovery and Build Back Better. It feels like many governments are at least paying lip service to it and saying that they want to not make those same mistakes that were made ten years ago and actually use this as an opportunity to restructure and rethink what the economic stimuluses should be and chase green jobs, etc. But it’s unpredictable and we don’t know how the Russias of this world will turn up at COP26 and what their own diplomatic and geopolitical play with gas prices is going to do. There is a risk that it’s going to spook the horses, to use an expression, and it will mean that some people fall back on predictable old habits. But as the IEA and others have pointed out, if you’re thinking longer-term, which climate change always is and it’s always a game of trying to avoid short-term temptations and thinking about the longer game, this crisis is actually highlighting just how vulnerable we are to fluctuating fossil fuel reliability and being effectively addicted to fossil fuels. We’ve got to break the habit. We’ve been saying this for decades but it’s highlighting just how addicted we are and that we’ve got to withdraw from that.
Matt: With breaking the habit, you don’t break the habit by consuming more of what you’re addicted to, right?
Leo: But it does require big, bold leadership across many key countries. Do we have those leaders in place at the moment? Open question. You could argue that the Paris Agreement was fortunate that Barak Obama was in the White House, Xi in China was in the place he was at the time and there were other interesting geopolitical dynamics. If it had happened when Trump had just been elected, obviously no chance. You have to ride your luck a little bit with the leaders you have at the time for some of these conferences. People are going in and out of elections. Macron in France is going into an election next year. You’ve got Germany just having had an election and kind of in a state of not really knowing what its actual leadership is and, therefore, that influences what the EU’s position is.
Matt: Given the fact that COP has been delayed by a year, Biden has been in the White House for a year and historically, the COPs have always been scheduled after the US elections so we know who the sitting president is and they can negotiate as such. Do you think there’s a difference now? You were talking about all the pieces of the jigsaw being in place and they need to be. You need to have those in place for successful negotiations to unfold. Does the fact that we’ve had Biden in the White House for a year make a difference this time around?
Leo: It does make a difference, unquestionably. If it had been a year ago, Biden would have just been elected but Trump would have still been in a wrecking-ball mode in terms of trying to screw up Biden’s legacy in his last dying days in the White House. So it’s definitely different but you’ve also now got Biden struggling to get the infrastructure package through Congress. Actually, I do think it’s quite important that that goes through Congress before COP26 which is looking really on a knife edge because it will weaken him, I think, if he comes to Glasgow doing all the big talk and saying, ‘America is back. America is going strong on climate action,’ and he’s just been seen to have not got this big landmark bill through Congress. The UN climate talks and US Congress have had an awful relationship for 30 years. Effectively, the UN climate process has almost been built around the fact that you’ll never get anything through Congress. It has to be down to the president of the day. The whole world is basically being held hostage by the unique system that the US has and the need for the Senate to pass stuff.
Rebecca: It always strikes me as just crazy, especially looking back over the past few years with Barak Obama followed by Trump and now Biden. It just shows you how much uncertainty there could be because of everything going on. With all of this uncertainty and lots of stuff happening in lots of countries that could affect the negotiations and the outcomes of the negotiations, how hopeful are you about a good outcome and what would a good outcome look like or a bad outcome if you’re not hopeful?
Leo: What does a good outcome look like has been, in effect, an unanswered question for more than a year I would say. The UK Government often holds media briefings for journalists and this has been a fundamental question that journalists have been putting to the UK Government. ‘Okay, you’re COP26 host. Fantastic. What do you actually want? What does success look like? What do those front pages of the newspapers look like on the morning after the gavel goes down and it’s concluded? What do you want?’ Effectively, the government have been really unable to answer that I would argue because you’ve heard Boris Johnson talking about cash, cars, trees and... whatever his slogan is but those are kind of aspirations for outside of the process. What we haven’t really unpacked yet is there’s a kind of inside-the-process and outside-the-process dynamic going on at the COP. There is the quite dry but incredibly important process of what is being negotiated at COP26 which are things like Article VI or what they call the Rule Book or instruction manual of how countries should operate the Paris Agreement. There is one key bit that hasn’t really been agreed on yet and it has been left unanswered for three years or more and it’s called Article VI which is effectively around carbon trading. If you don’t chop down your rainforest, I, as a richer country, will give you some money.’ That’s to simplify it. The rules on that have been tortuously delayed and it’s largely down to Brazil, to be honest. They just won’t agree to what most of the rest of the world is happy to sign up to. That is a very important bit of negotiation but that won’t make any headlines. The media is just not interested in that but that’s really, really important for the ongoing journey of the Paris Agreement in the years and decades ahead. You’ve then got outside the process. On the first Monday of the COP, you’re going to have Biden and all these other leaders rock up and jet in and helicopters landing with all the big razzmatazz and show of any of these kinds of things. They’ll come in, make a speech and announce what they’re doing domestically and say, ‘We’re doing this. We’re doing that. We’re investing so much in this,’ but that’s actually outside of the process in a way. They’re more political statements made by leaders and I think that’s what Boris Johnson is referring to more when he’s talking about cars, cash and trees because it’s going to be whole a bunch of corporations and companies making announcements. You’ll get Microsoft saying this, you’ll get Apple saying that and there will be all sorts of things going on but that’s actually got nothing to do really with the Paris Agreement in direct terms. You could say that indirectly it’s created this global environment for corporations, individuals, campaigners and countries all to sort of be saying their thing on climate change but there are some very dry and boring negotiations which will just not make headlines and that are actually, materially, the reason why everyone is meeting in Glasgow in two weeks’ time in terms of the UN and the bandwagon.
Matt: So, Leo, I think to wrap up, this pod is all about trying to translate the global climate crisis and try and translate these international developments into a language that everybody understands. For you, how can we translate this global climate crisis and then COP26 into local climate action? What kind of short and long-term impact do you think COP26 will have on UK citizens and communities? I’m trying to think about how these two weeks will play out in your life and my life over the next few weeks, months, years and decades.
Leo: I think COP26, in the UK context, is going to be unique. We’ve never held one of these. We’ve never hosted one of these before, just like we hadn’t hosted the Olympics for many, many decades and it was a unique moment to galvanise us as a nation and as communities to certainly think about climate change and hopefully, act on it. For example, there was the slightly extraordinary news yesterday that the three or even four leading soap operas in the UK, like Coronation Street, Eastenders and Emmerdale, are all going to, for the first time ever, synchronise their storylines for the first week and all be talking about climate change. That has been a Holy Grail. I remember having that discussion maybe 15 years ago with TV producers and campaigners saying, ‘The one thing that would be amazing would be to feature climate change on Eastenders.’ That’s never happened before and so now we’ve at this kind of amazing moment [laughter] where you’re going to have literally 30 million people watching TV soaps, if you add up all those viewing figures, and watching Phil Mitchell talking about the UN climate process [laughter].
Matt: NDCs, yeah [laughter].
Leo: It’s hard to believe but things like that are important I think in terms of the cultural poignancy of something like this coming to the UK shores and being hosted here. I think longer-term, it will all hopefully shine a light. I often get asked, ‘What should I do to help on climate change as an individual?’ We can eat less meat or make different choices about transport or whatever. There’s a whole host of things but fundamentally, our right to vote in the British democracy at the local level, the national level, referendums or whatever is so, so important. It goes back to my point being for this to work at the global level, we’ve got to have serious, sane, mature, long-term-thinking politicians in place. The only real lever of control we’ve got as individuals – meaningful, I would argue – over the longer term is our right to vote. It should, hopefully, shine a light and we’ll see a lot of climate campaigners at COP26 making their point.
Matt: And making reference to Phil Mitchell’s stance on climate change we hope [laughter].
[Music flourish]
Rebecca: Thank you so much for your thoughts and for your input. It’s been a really, really engaging discussion and I’m hoping that you will agree to stay on and play Future or Fiction? with us.
Leo: Yeah, it sounds fun [laughter].
Rebecca: Brilliant. In that case, Fraser, over to you.
[Music flourish]
Fraser: Thanks very much. Yeah, great discussion. Leo, love how you pretend that you don’t sit and watch the soaps every night [laughter].
Matt: He never said that [laughter].
Fraser: I could feel your brain working trying to pull Phil Mitchell out there [laughter]. Okay, for the uninitiated, Future or Fiction? is a game that we play at the end of every episode of Local Zero. I present our esteemed panellists and co-hosts with a brand new energy technology or innovation and they have to decide if they think it’s the future, i.e. it’s real, or if they think it’s fiction, i.e. I’ve just pulled it out of my backside. So today’s Future or Fiction? is called... Down the Tubes. That is Down the Tubes. There’s been a lot of controversy around public transport in Glasgow during COP26 with some of the most popular cycling infrastructure due to be closed around key areas of the conference for security reasons but how about this? To keep active travel alive and Glasgow’s green credentials alive, Glasgow City Council is planning to implement a series of makeshift plastic tunnels and protected cycleways staffed at each entrance to ensure security to encourage people to keep cycling to and from work and wherever they’d like to go during COP26. Do we think it’s real? Is it the future or is it fiction?
[Music flourish]
Matt: Wow! I feel like I should know the answer to this [laughter] but I should say to Leo that we’re on the 25th episode and it’s the 25th time I’ve done this at least and this isn’t actually the name of a programme or technology. Fraser has to remind me every episode and so take Down the Tubes with a pinch of salt. But, Leo, what are your first thoughts on this?
Leo: It feels like fiction to me. All that plastic that would need to be done. Why do you need guards at both ends? Why do you need to protect cyclists? Is it because of the Glasgwegian weather in November [laughter], or is it because of security on roads or the fact that Joe Biden might be flying over in a helicopter?
Fraser: More to do with making sure that cyclists aren’t sneaking by the venue and trying to assassinate anyone I think [laughter]. So it’s less for the cyclists.
Leo: Cycling assassins [laughter].
Matt: Cycling assassins, yeah.
Fraser: Yeah, nobody cares about protecting cyclists at the best of times. This isn’t for the cyclists.
Leo: I think I’m going to have to go for fiction [laughter].
Fraser: Matt and Becky?
Rebecca: Well, I just think about the makeshift cycle route down through Glasgow’s Southside that you’re probably all well too familiar with, Matt, as well [laughter]. I think a cycle route is a bit of an exaggeration, isn’t it? It’s some temporary bollards in between two lanes of the road so cyclists can go on one side of it [laughter]. I feel like if that’s setting the standard, that’s probably telling you something. My other worry about this and the other reason I’m erring towards the fictional side is because of Covid. The minute you put lots of people in a tube... I’m assuming that they’re not going to sort out lots of ventilation unless you’re just talking about some holes drilled every now and then and I think in the kind of environment that we are living in these days, that’s possibly a step too far.
Matt: It would probably be more like a wind tunnel to be fair [laughter]. It might be over-ventilated [laughter]. I don’t know. I know there is a problem or as far as I last read, there is an issue with cycle lane infrastructure connecting in, so that part of what you’re saying isn’t codswallop, Fraser. I know that the UN Zone has cut a lot of the arterial cycle lanes in half. There’s a really good commentator on this on Twitter called Thomas Cornwallis who is also a cycling advocate. I also know that they’re completely neurotic, I guess, about security. I think there are 10,000 UK policepeople who will be making their way from all around the country. They’ve had divers in the Clyde checking out the security. So yeah, I think on this basis, this could happen but I would take Leo’s point that a big plastic tube to stop the cycling assassins is probably not a good PR look [laughter].
Fraser: I mean when you put it like that...
Matt: I’m now more concerned about the assassins than climate change [laughter].
Fraser: When you put it like that, it sounds ridiculous.
Matt: I’m probably going to go fiction.
Fraser: Okay, Matt’s going fiction. Leo, I should say that Matt has a history of getting these wrong and so as a courtesy, we always come back to our guests and remind them that whatever Matt says, you have a chance to change their answer once he’s given his. So would you like to stick with fiction?
Leo: I’m going to stick not twist.
Fraser: Okay.
Matt: Thanks, Leo. I appreciate it.
Fraser: Becky? I know, the vote of confidence. Becky?
Rebecca: Oh, I don’t know now [laughter]. I was a little bit on the fence before. Go on, I’ll go with future just to make it a bit more interesting.
Fraser: Make it interesting. The answer is... of course, it’s fiction [laughter].
Matt: It’s nonsense, yeah. Completely.
Fraser: We’re not going to have new, plastic tubes like slides coming out the side of a swimming pool to get us around COP on bikes. What I would like to say though, while we’re on this and while I’ve been ranting at the start of the episode as well, is that in terms of public transport infrastructure and active travel, we are doing a lot of shutting stuff down all over Glasgow. When we talk about the legacy that Glasgow City Council and the Scottish and UK Governments want to have, there’s definitely a seed of resentment building with the general public and locals around here while delegates get free transport and all this kind of stuff. So I would say if anyone in Scottish Government or Glasgow Council is listening, please sort it out because it’s a chance to do something really, really good and really cool and get people into new habits but you have to support them to do it.
Matt: Yeah, I have to say I’m at a loss about how I’m going to get there. Do I cycle? I’ve got to navigate an entire motorway complex to do so. I should probably also say that policepeople isn’t an actual term [laughter]. I should have gone with just police before but we’ll put that down to exhaustion.
[Music flourish]
Well, I think that draws an end to our episode and a big thank you to Leo for all his insights. Really looking forward to COP and really looking forward to the Carbon Brief’s coverage of it. You’ve been listening to Matt, Becky and Fraser on Local Zero. If you want to follow us @LocalZeroPod on Twitter, please do so and you can keep up-to-date with all developments there. So until the next episode, thank you for listening and goodbye.
Rebecca: Bye.
Leo: Bye.
Fraser: Bye, bye, bye, bye, bye.
[Music flourish]
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