Damascus (ST): After arduous negotiations at the “COP 26” climate conference, which concluded in the Scottish capital, Glasgow last Saturday, the disappointments came to the extent of the disaster, as recommendations were limited to accelerating the pace of combating global warming without ensuring that it was kept within the 1.5 degree Celsius ceiling and completely ignoring requests for assistance from poor countries.
Disappointments were reflected in the statements of the President of the World Climate Conference Alok Sharma, who said after the final agreement reached by the countries participating in the conference, “We deeply regret the changes that the participants made at the last minute in terms of drafting.”
What Sharma said was acknowledged by British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who said, “There is a kind of disappointment in the results of the conference, as he had hoped that countries would go further to limit climate warming.”
In the context of the major industrialized countries giving priority to their economic interests by relying on various sources to generate the appropriate energies for the operation of their factories, including gas and oil, at the expense of developing countries, the conference came out with a new agreement stipulating the reduction of the use of coal in energy production and the reduction of dependence on fossil fuels, prompting the Indian Energy Minister Bhupendar Yadav to question how developing countries can stop using coal as a source of cheap energy at a time when small countries suffer from the consequences of dealing with development requirements and getting rid of poverty, stressing that developing countries have the right to their share of the global carbon budget and the rational use of fossil fuels.
After the end of the conference, the alarm bells about the global warming catastrophe continued even from the highest levels, as United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres warned in a statement after the end of the conference that the climate catastrophe still exists and that the time has come to take urgent steps, describing the measures taken during the conference as: “Insufficient,” criticizing the weakness of the political will of the participating countries in overcoming the deep contradictions between them. “The texts that have been adopted are a settlement of the opposite of interests.. and contradictions are the state of the current political will in the world.”
“Results that do not rise to the scale of a real catastrophe.” The phrase in which Swiss Environment Minister Simonetta Sommaruga expressed her disappointment with the findings of the conference “What we wanted with regard to preventing the use of fossil fuels was not adopted because of the opaque negotiation process, and what was agreed upon makes achieving the goal of reducing the rate of temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius more difficult.”
The disappointment that the Swiss environment minister spoke about was not enough for the coordinator of the climate justice group, Sarah Shaw, who described what happened at the Glasgow conference as scandal and betrayal, saying, “The demands to keep the average temperature below 1.5 degrees Celsius were nothing but a meaningless word in the agreement, but on the contrary, it gave the green light for the developed countries to continue their activities that pollute the environment.”
K.Q.