India has its way in Glasgow Climate Meet, Coal “Phase Down” Replaces with “Phase Out”

· Commits Zero Emission only by 2070

GLASGOW — Diplomats from nearly 200 countries on Saturday struck a major agreement aimed at intensifying global efforts to fight climate change by calling on governments to return next year with stronger plans to curb their planet-warming emissions and urging wealthy nations to “at least double” funding to protect poor nations from the hazards of a hotter planet.

Most major economies have now pledged to reach net zero emissions by a certain date, essentially a promise to stop adding greenhouse gases to the atmosphere. The United States and European Union said they would do so by 2050, China by 2060. At Glasgow, India joined the chorus, saying it would reach net zero by 2070.

“It’s meek, it’s weak and the 1.5 Celsius goal is only just alive, but a signal has been sent that the era of coal is ending,” said Jennifer Morgan, executive director of Greenpeace International, of the climate deal. “And that matters.”

In the final hours of talks Saturday night, negotiators clashed over wording that would have called on countries to “phase out” coal power and government subsidies for oil and gas. Fossil fuels have never been explicitly mentioned in a global climate agreement before, even though they are the dominant cause of global warming. In the end, at the urging of India, which argued that fossil fuels were still needed for its development, “phase out” was changed to “phase down.”

Switzerland’s representative, Simonetta Sommaruga, assailed the change: “We do not need to phase down, but to phase out.”

Going into the summit, world leaders said their ultimate goal was to prevent Earth from heating more than 1.5 degrees Celsius, or 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit, compared to preindustrial levels. Past that threshold, scientists have warned, the risk of deadly heat waves, destructive storms, water scarcity and ecosystem collapse grows immensely. The world has already warmed 1.1 degrees Celsius.

Yet many others said the deal failed to meet the moment, in a year of deadly heat in Canada, devastating floods in Germany and New York, and raging wildfires in Siberia and incessant rain in South India. At the start of the two-week summit, leaders, including President Biden and Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain, framed the meeting as the world’s last, best chance to save the planet.

The final deal is “not in line with the urgency and scale required,” said Shauna Aminath, environment minister of the Maldives, an archipelago of low-lying islands in the Indian Ocean that has been inhabited for thousands of years but could be inundated within three generations because of rising seas.

But even as countries vowed to step up their climate efforts both before and during the Glasgow summit, they are still falling far short.

The detailed plans that governments have made to curb fossil-fuel emissions and deforestation between now and 2030 would put the world on pace to warm by roughly 2.4 degrees Celsius this century, according to analysts at Climate Action Tracker, a research group.

“Countries still don’t seem to understand that we’re in an emergency situation and we need to cut emissions much faster this decade, or else any hope of staying at 1.5 degrees will be lost,” said Niklas Höhne, a German climatologist and founding partner of NewClimate Institute, which created the Climate Action Tracker.

The new agreement in Glasgow asks countries to come back by the end of next year with stronger pledges to cut emissions by 2030. Though the agreement states clearly that, on average, all nations will need to slash their carbon dioxide emissions nearly in half this decade to hold warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, it leaves unresolved the question of exactly how the burden of those cuts will be shared among nations.

It remains to be seen if countries will follow through; there are no sanctions or penalties if they fail to do so. Ahead of Glasgow, some governments like the United States and European Union did step up their climate pledges under the Paris Agreement. Yet others — like Australia, China, Brazil and Russia — barely improved on their short-term plans.

Money, meanwhile, remained a huge sticking point in the talks.

A number of swiftly industrializing countries, such as India and Indonesia, have said they would be willing to accelerate a shift away from coal power if they received financial help from richer countries. But so far, that help has been slow to arrive.

A decade ago, the world’s wealthiest economies pledged to mobilize $100 billion per year in climate finance for poorer countries by 2020. But they are still falling short by tens of billions of dollars per year.

Separately, negotiators in Glasgow announced a major deal on how to regulate the fast-growing global market in carbon offsets, in which one company or country compensates for its own emissions by paying someone else to reduce theirs. One of the thorniest technical issues is how to properly account for these global trades so that any reductions in emissions aren’t overestimated or double-counted.

On the sidelines at the talks, clusters of countries announced initiatives they were undertaking on their own. More than 100 countries agreed to cut emissions of methane, a potent planet-warming gas, by 30 percent this decade. Another 130 countries vowed to halt deforestation by 2030 and commit billions of dollars toward the effort. Dozens of other countries vowed to phase out their coal plants and sales of gasoline-powered vehicles over the next few decades.

Activists noted that those promises were voluntary and often didn’t include major emitters like China or Russia. But others argued they could pressure heads of state and titans of industry to do more.

“If you tried to get every single country to agree to get rid of internal combustion engines through the formal U.N. process, you’d get nowhere,” said Nigel Topping, who was chosen by the United Nations as its “high level climate action champion.” “But if you get a bunch of countries and major automakers to stand up and say, ‘we’re doing this,’ it starts forcing the market, and pretty soon more and more companies start signing on.”

When Climate Action Tracker looked at these additional promises, it estimated that the world could conceivably limit global warming to 1.8 degrees Celsius by 2100, although, so far, most countries haven’t put policies in place to get there.

Calculations like that persuaded many politicians and environmentalists that the dream of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees might yet be in reach, as long as governments can be pressured to follow through on what they’ve promised.