The countries that could spoil global climate negotiations

Published 22 Oct,2021 via Bloomberg Markets - More than 190 countries signed on the dotted line of the Paris Agreement in 2015, forming a new global consensus on the imperative to halt rising temperatures. The collective results since then haven’t been enough. Overall planet-warming emissions have gone up, turning COP26 into the prime venue for asking countries to do more. But some attendees stand out for their reluctance to do almost anything at all. This is a guide to the holdouts who arrive in Glasgow, Scotland, without significant plans to curb their enormous emissions.

Russia

A common link between several holdouts is their abundance of fossil resources, and that’s certainly the case for Russia. There’s a lot of coal, oil and gas the country intends to sell. President Vladimir Putin is so confident even the dirtiest fossil fuel still has a future that he’s spending more than $10 billion on a railroad to ramp up coal exports to Asia. He announced a net-zero goal of 2060 ahead of COP26 without providing details of how that could change Russia’s short-term targets. Officials have instead talked up Russia’s vast forests, but climate experts don’t agree that the trees can stand against all the pollution.