The latest UN climate summit avoided even naming fossil fuels, while mounting evidence shows climate damage accelerating – from melting glaciers to declining ocean life.

Brazil’s “COP of Truth” underwhelms

Anyone who has bothered to pay attention to the media coverage of the recently finished COP meeting in Brazil will probably have concluded that, despite the face-saving protestations of the Pollyannas, it didn’t achieve much. Bathetic is a succinct summary.

Principal among the many disappointments for those wanting more action to control greenhouse gas emissions (which included many nations, not only climate activists) was the absence in the meeting’s final communiqué of any mention of a plan to transition away from fossil fuels, or indeed any mention of fossil fuels at all. It seems that 88 countries wanted the COP to agree to develop a roadmap to end fossil fuels but this was vetoed by several petrostates led by Saudi Arabia, Russia and India.

“A climate decision that cannot even say ‘fossil fuels’ is not neutrality, it is complicity. And what is happening here transcends incompetence,” said Panama’s climate negotiator Juan Carlos Monterrey.

Sir David King, chair of the UK’s Climate Crisis Group and previously the UK government’s Chief Scientific Advisor, said the COP’s decision failed “the most basic test: does it secure a manageable future for humanity? A credible pathway to phase out fossil fuels must be at the heart of any outcome here. As we move deeper into climate overshoot, the world cannot expect the most vulnerable countries to carry the burden while finance and support keep shifting out of reach.”

Simon Stiell, Executive Director of the UNFCCC (the position held by Christiana Figueres in Paris 10 years ago), made, perhaps inadvertently, the most damning condemnation of the meeting: “I’m not saying we’re winning the climate fight. But we are undeniably still in it, and we are fighting back.”

Really? That’s the best that the champion of the whole UN system for tackling climate change can muster? Thirty-three years, 30 COPs, dozens of preparatory meetings, millions of hours of negotiations, countless scientific reports, truckloads of agreements, pacts, frameworks, protocols, roadmaps and accords, and we’re still not winning? Staggering!

Two dim lights did flicker at the end of two weeks in Brazil. The final communiqué included an agreement to establish a just transition mechanism (the Belém Action Network or BAM) that........

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