Digging for the future

UN chief António Guterres has been using an apocalyptic tone to talk about climate damage for some time now, to see if we finally get cold feet and do something radically necessary to free ourselves from our current mode of production and consumption. 

As he said at the opening of COP26 in Glasgow, it turns out that the last six years since the Paris Agreement was signed have been - precisely - the hottest.

Guterres has once again stressed the sense of collective responsibility through "the last call" to carry out more aggressive actions to reduce all polluting emissions and protect biodiversity because time is running out and "we have to make a difficult decision, either we finish with it or it finishes with us".

"Enough of mistreating biodiversity. Enough of killing ourselves with carbon, enough of treating nature like a toilet... enough of all the burning, drilling and ever-deepening mines," he insisted.

And although he stepped up the call for attention by asserting that "we are digging our own grave", this COP26 that began on 31 October and will conclude on 12 November is turning out to be more politicised than ever after the inflammatory rhetoric of a Joe Biden who has even blamed China and Russia for their lack of commitment to climate change.

The disdain for global warming once shown by former US president Donald Trump is now being resurrected by the green commitment of Democrat Biden, whose presidency is rapidly eroding.

While nothing has changed in the US's anti-Chinese and anti-Russian stance in recent years, Biden is seeking Western allies in order, through multilateralism in international organisations, to promote a series of alliances aimed primarily at creating a vacuum for both the Chinese and Russian giants. If this sentiment was already felt at the last NATO, G7 and G20 meetings, it was also present at COP26.

In Biden's participation, on several occasions he alluded to the two clear absences at COP26: both the Chinese leader, Xi Jinping, and his Russian counterpart, Vladimir Putin.

Both actively and passively, Biden accused both of a lack of interest and real commitment to curbing climate change with a feared rise in global temperature that, in the worst-case scenario, could reach 2.7 degrees Celsius by the end of the 21st century, which, in the opinion of scientists, would be catastrophic for all living beings.

The clashing of statements between the American and Chinese delegations has overshadowed the Climate Summit, which, despite its good intentions, is once again being criticised on the streets with multiple protests in Glasgow; the thousands of activists chanting with the support of the young Greta Thunberg, who has become the youth spokesperson for ecology.

If Biden accused China of being one of the biggest emitters of CO2 in the world and of polluting with its excessive production and lack of interest in making more serious commitments to a more sustainable model, it was Zhang Jun, China's permanent representative to the UN, who defended his president.

If for Trump the climate issue was a "tall tale", as he wrote in 2016 on his closed Twitter account, a pretense invented by China to "undermine the competitiveness of American industry", for Biden it is an opportunity to further punish China, pointing out that it is the world's biggest polluter and the least responsible for global warming.

The new occupant of the White House continues to play the game of cornering the Beijing government on all fronts, and Guterres had already put the cherry on the cake by urging those present at the climate conclave to take more concrete and effective action to reduce global emissions by 45% by 2030.

As early as COP3, the Kyoto Agreement emerged in 1997 as a commitment among industrialised countries to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, primarily carbon-based.

Now, 24 years later, Biden together with European leaders have negotiated a new pact that has been extended to other countries aimed at reducing methane emissions by 30%, one of the gases that contributes most to rising temperatures and has a strong greenhouse effect. China, Russia, India, Iran and India did not sign up to the new agreement... after all, this is pure and simple geopolitics; the climate issue is for the climatologists.