Events over the past week do not augur well for next month’s Cop30 Climate Change conference in Brazil. Led by the US, many countries seem to be moving environmental priorities down their agenda.
To take one example, there is the shipping industry. Over the past few years, the International Maritime Organisation (IMO) has been negotiating a legally binding agreement that would require all ships with a volume exceeding 5,000 tonnes to reduce their greenhouse gas emissions by 30 per cent by 2035 and 65 per cent by 2040. Shipping is a carbon intensive sector, so the policy would have been an important move in cutting emissions.
However, Donald Trump, the US president, has successfully led an 11th hour intervention to delay the deal by twelve months. Trump described the initiative as a “climate change scam” and part of a broader net zero “destructive agenda”. He has vowed to scupper the initiative entirely over the next year. In response, Greece, for which shipping is an important sector, insisted that support for the deal was removed from an EU position paper for the summit.
The US president has linked climate change measures with the “woke” agenda and has spent much of his first year in office unwinding many of the policies introduced by the Biden administration.
RM Block
He is at the vanguard of a global populist right movement that is climate change sceptic. Others are joining in. In the UK, the Conservative Party has pledged, if it forms the next government, to abandon efforts to reach “net zero” by 2050 because, it claims, it would mean higher energy bills for consumers than would otherwise be the case.
These policies are reckless and short-sighted. They risk accelerating climate change to levels that are irreversible and will have a devastating impact on the earth’s eco-system.
Every effort must be made at Cop30 in Brazil next month to make meaningful progress. Those attending should follow the science – and not the dubious claims of the US president.
