- Absence of Key Players at UN Climate Meeting
- UN Secretary-General’s Call for Concrete Climate Action
- Impact of Missing Leaders on Climate Ambition Summit
On Wednesday, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres will preside over a climate meeting marred by the omission of speakers from the world’s two largest emitters, China and the United States.
Despite escalating extreme weather events and record-breaking global temperatures, greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise, and fossil fuel corporations continue to generate substantial profits.
Guterres has therefore billed the “Climate Ambition Summit” as a “no-nonsense” forum where leaders or cabinet ministers will declare specific actions that fulfill their Paris Agreement commitments.
The UN secretary-general made it clear that only leaders with concrete plans to attain net-zero greenhouse gas emissions would be permitted to speak from the podium.
The UN ultimately released a list of 41 speakers on Tuesday night, excluding China, the United States, the United Kingdom, Japan, and India, after receiving more than one hundred applications to participate.
“Tomorrow, I will welcome credible first movers and doers to our Climate Ambition Summit,” said Guterres on Tuesday.
Several prominent leaders skipped this year’s UN General Assembly in New York, including Chinese President Xi Jinping and British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, who claimed they were too occupied.
Joe Biden spoke at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday, sending his climate envoy John Kerry, who cannot speak.
“There’s no doubt that the absence of so many leaders from the world’s biggest economies and emitters will have an impact on the outcomes of the summit,” Alden Meyer of climate think tank E3G said.
He cited competing issues, including the Ukraine conflict, US-China tensions, and growing economic uncertainty, as the cause.
Meyer opined that the opposition to necessary transformational changes by the fossil fuel industry and other potent interests in many of these nations is also a factor.
Destination Zero executive director Catherine Abreu called it “possibly good news” that Vice President Biden would not appear at the gathering because the US is expanding fossil fuel projects while spending extensively in renewables.
She added, “I view this as a correction to previous summits, where leaders were allowed to take credit for climate leadership on the global stage while continuing to pursue plans to develop fossil fuels and exacerbate the climate crisis at home.”
While the United States will not occupy the podium, Governor Gavin Newsom will represent California. London Mayor Sadiq Khan will also attend from the United Kingdom.
Increasing rage
The event is the largest climate summit in New York since 2019, when Greta Thunberg’s “How Dare You” speech before the United Nations astonished the world.
The “March to End Fossil Fuels” in New York drew tens of thousands of climate activists, primarily younger individuals, who are becoming increasingly enraged.
Observers are eager however to see what Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau and European Union President Ursula von der Leyen say both on their objectives and financing commitments for the developing world.
The failure of advanced economies, which are responsible for the vast majority of historic emissions, to honor their commitments to the nations most adversely affected by climate change has long been a sensitive spot in climate negotiations.
The revelation that Colombia and Panama are joining the Powering Past Coal Alliance is encouraging, as Colombia is the sixth largest coal exporter.
The conference on Wednesday takes place weeks before the COP28 climate talks in the UAE, which aim to triple renewable energy by 2030 and stop producing fossil fuel energy not “abated” by carbon capture technology by 2050.
