President Biden arrived in Scotland on Monday on a mission to restore U.S. credibility on a crucial issue for both his administration and for the planet. Along with the leaders of other countries that signed the 2015 Paris climate agreement, Mr. Biden was in Scotland for COP26, the United Nations climate change conference in Glasgow.
It’s the 26th time world leaders have met to try to limit global warming. The conference was postponed for a year due to the coronavirus pandemic, but the extra year of preparation doesn’t seem to have improved its chance of success.
The high-stakes summit has been called a last chance for countries to come together to stop catastrophic global warming. Almost 200 nations sent high-level delegations. They hope to strike a deal to put the world back on track to meet the goals set in Paris, including reducing global carbon emissions to zero by 2050, and limiting the planet’s overall warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit.
Scientists calculate that to do that, planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions need to be halved by the end of this decade. As it stands now, they’ll continue to rise. Experts warn that time left to take action to achieve the Paris goals is quickly slipping away, and the consequences of failure would be catastrophic for humanity.
Under the Paris agreement, governments were supposed to make increasingly larger cuts in their greenhouse gas emissions. But the required cuts haven’t been made. The wildfires, storms, heatwaves, melting of polar ice and rising sea levels we’ve seen already are just a taste of what could come.
“Everything that science had actually looked at was underestimated,” former U.N. climate chief Christina Figueres, who is widely credited with banging heads together to make the Paris deal happen, told CBS News ahead of COP26. “In terms of the degree of heating, the impacts, the human misery cost, the infrastructure cost… it’s all happening faster than we ever thought.”
President Biden has put climate change front and center on his agenda. He arrived on Monday fresh from the G20 economic summit in Rome, where he said his personal relationships with other leaders allowed them to make real progress.
But as he and other world leaders showed up to try to get the world back on track, there were some notable absences. President Xi Jinping of China and Russia’s Vladimir Putin were not attending COP26.
Before his arrival, Mr. Biden said the focus should be on what countries like China, Russia and Saudi Arabia are not doing to address climate change, and he called it “disappointing” that those nations “basically didn’t show up, in terms of any commitments to deal with climate change.”
“Anyone that goes to COP26 to expect that we’re going to guarantee a pathway to 1.5 [degrees temperature cap] is simply not seeing the reality of things,” Figueres told CBS News. “We’re just not going to get there.”
Instead, she said the conference should be about “getting healthily close to 1.5 degrees.”
Even that may prove a mighty challenge.
Follow the latest news from the COP26 conference below.
