Many countries say that although they disagree with elements of the text, they are willing to support it
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The veteran climate activist Bill McKibben has written in today’s Guardian about how any progress that has been made is as a result of protest and citizens holding governments to account.
Copenhagen failed because there was too little movement building in the years preceding it, allowing a leader like Barack Obama to go home empty-handed and pay no political price. The global climate movement remedied that deficiency before Paris: many governments had no choice but to reach some kind of credible deal and hence a workable framework emerged, albeit without the actual pledges to make it capable of the task. Glasgow was supposed to be the place where countries lived up to the resolutions they’d proudly announced in France, and the decidedly mixed results reflect, at least in part, the difficulties activists have faced over the last few years.
“This text is still pretty good and one I hope that all countries can embrace. It continues to request countries to deliver more ambitious pledges next year.
“Countries will leave Glasgow painfully aware that collectively current pledges for emissions cuts by 2030 are not ambitious enough. They are not aligned with the goal of the Paris Agreement of holding the rise in warming to well below 2C degrees, and to pursue efforts to limit it to 1.5C. The draft text also still calls on all countries to accelerate efforts towards the phase-out of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.