Good morning. Last year, the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow kept alive the target of holding global temperatures to 1.5C above pre-industrial levels; but, conference president Alok Sharma said, “its pulse is weak”. The vital question for the Cop27 summit at Sharm-el-Sheikh in Egypt, which began yesterday, is whether it will prove to be an emergency room or a hospice.
If Cop27 is to have any chance of renewing global commitments after a year of extremely limited progress, the work of the negotiators who will take over once world leaders have departed at the end of today will be crucial. I spoke to the Guardian’s environment correspondent Fiona Harvey about the fascinating, byzantine, surprisingly dramatic and extremely nerdy process of climate diplomacy – and why, as deeply frustrating as it might be, it matters so much.
That’s after the headlines. And a quick note to say that I’m off the rest of this week – Nimo and recurring guest star Dan Milmo will be in your inbox.
Five big stories
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Economy | Jeremy Hunt will announce £25bn worth of tax rises and £35bn in spending cuts at the autumn statement, the Guardian understands. The scale of the measures has grown significantly after the Bank of England’s dire forecasts last week of the longest recession since the 1930s.
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Ukraine | The Biden administration has reportedly warned Kyiv that allies’ “Ukraine fatigue” could worsen if Volodymyr Zelenskiy continues to be closed to negotiations with Russia.
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Climate crisis | An assessment by Carbon Brief has found the US, UK and Canada have fallen billions of dollars short of their “fair share” of climate funding for low-income countries. This comes after the UN’s World Meteorological Organization said the past eight years were the eight hottest ever recorded, putting the internationally agreed 1.5C limit for global heating “barely within reach”.
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Politics | Rishi Sunak is facing further questions over his political judgment after it emerged he was made aware of a complaint against his political ally Gavin Williamson before appointing him. Sunak was said to have been unaware of the contents of hostlile texts sent to former chief whip Wendy Morton.
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Housing | More than 138,000 properties in England and Wales are owned by offshore companies. In London the offshore holdings are worth as much as £55bn.
In depth: ‘It’s awful and frustrating – but you can’t solve the climate crisis without Cop’
There are “periods of intense activity and huge longueurs” at climate summits, says Fiona Harvey in Sharm-el-Sheikh; happily, I reach her during one of the longueurs.
She emphasises that this is not a “decision summit” like Glasgow. Instead, the focus will be on holding countries accountable for their commitments last year against the backdrop of the global energy crisis brought about by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. In this piece from May, UN climate adviser Rachel Kyte describes the task as “implementation, implementation, implementation”.
“We won’t get an agreement or a new treaty at the end of it,” Fiona said. “But it’s incredibly important we see progress.” This piece explains why it’s looking so tough, while this one sets out the vital importance of “loss and damage” financing for developing nations – which was finally confirmed as part of the agenda for the talks after “fractious” discussions that dragged late into the night and delayed the opening of the conference proper.
In the Guardian’s Down to Earth newsletter (sign up here for twice-weekly updates throughout Cop27), Fiona writes: “This year’s Cop will be arguably the hardest yet.” The only path to success is through the endless minutiae of negotiation – “a lot of horrible absurdity”, Fiona said. “People arguing in rooms for hours.” Here’s how it works.
What is the framework for the summit?
“The first two days are about world leaders being there and having their photos taken and talking,” Fiona said. “After that, the negotiators get on with it. In the second week, next Tuesday, we get the ‘high-level segment’ – that’s when ministers join the talks.”
All Cop summits take place under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, a treaty agreed almost 30 years ago. Everything that happens in Sharm-el-Sheikh – “the fact of the meeting, setting the agenda, the texts agreed at the end of it” – is a product of the UNFCCC.
“It was a massive achievement,” Fiona said. “It is full of frustrations, but you can’t redraw it now – you just wouldn’t get people to sign up to it. The important thing is that it means that once things are agreed, countries have a legal obligation to see them through.”
Who are the negotiators?
Countries are represented individually, but blocs of nations with common interests – like the Africa Group, the Least Developed Countries, and the Small Island Developing States – seek to increase their negotiating power by clubbing together.
“The big countries have teams of negotiators who do nothing all year round but these talks,” Fiona said. “They will have someone in every workstream, in every room. The poorer ones can’t do that – they will send one country to one event, another to another, and compare notes.”
For a sense of what it’s like negotiating on behalf of those most vulnerable to the impact of the climate crisis, see this riveting fly-on-the-wall account of the work of Giza Gaspar-Martins, chair of the Least Developed Countries group at the Paris summit in 2015. He dashes from meeting to meeting across the impractically vast site, pausing only to “talk to my wife” (smoke a cigarette) and “do the things I cannot delegate” (go to the loo).
What do they negotiate over?
“It’s hilarious on one level, awful on another,” Fiona said. “It just sounds incomprehensible to anyone outside of this bizarre bubble. There are non-papers, ‘informal informals’, acres of square brackets, rows about the placements of semicolons. They sit for hours hammering it all out.”
But these arcane points really matter. As Giza Gaspar-Martins says of a draft of the final Paris agreement: “We need to do some detective work. Some good brains have been working hard to hide things in here.”
Also in Paris, a last-minute row over whether a “shall” ought to have been a “should” was only resolved with the dubious claim that a “typographical error” had been made, allowing the US to overlook a stronger commitment than it wanted on mitigation efforts in the final text. (Here’s a terrific account of that drama by the Guardian’s then-environment editor John Vidal.)
In Glasgow, Alok Sharma fought back tears as he apologised to delegates over a late change, forced by China and India, changed a commitment to “phase out” coal to the looser promise to “phase down” its use. “Did I appreciate we had to adjust one thing tonight in a very unusual way?” John Kerry said afterwards. “No. But if we hadn’t done that, we wouldn’t have a deal.”
How do these agreements get reached?
The country holding the presidency – Egypt this year – will assign countries responsibility for managing negotiations over particular areas. “There’s an ‘ad hoc working group’ for every key part of the process that will meet in their own little rooms,” Fiona said. “So the Cop president will say on climate finance, for example, let’s have one developed and one developing country go away and convene other countries for talks.”
Also helpful, Fiona added, is the way the summit allows for accidental interactions of key players. “This is the only forum which puts the developing countries on a somewhat level playing field,” she said. “They can catch a minister from an EU nation in a corridor, and say, with moral authority, ‘come on, mate’. That’s important.”
None of this is very glamorous. Pictures abound from previous Cops of windowless shoeboxes with uncomfortable looking chairs shoehorned around a table covered in cold pizza and heavily annotated drafts. But it’s necessary work ahead of the final stage of discussions in the plenary session, which all countries attend.
How does the text get finally agreed?
One criticism of the consensus model of the Cop summits – which sees the text agreed in a final session involving every country – is that it enforces the “will of the laggards”: the argument is that is easy for countries that are reluctant to adopt crucial climate change measures to put a spanner in the works.
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“That’s not really fair,” said Fiona. “They don’t get their own way all the time – they didn’t in Glasgow or Paris. Saudi Arabia and Russia are happy to be the people in closed rooms making criticisms, but they don’t want to put themselves out there like that. So the process of consensus can force the laggards to catch up, and it outs those who won’t agree.”
She points to the example of Durban 2011, where the treaty that became the Paris agreement was born. “Everyone was on board except China and India, and the EU forced a showdown – the talks went on for days, and in the end the EU called out China and India, and said, are you going to stand up? And they didn’t.”
Does all of this add up to a process that meets the vast crisis already under way? Hardly. “You sit there and you talk about five-year review processes – we haven’t got five bloody years,” Fiona said. “But while Cop won’t solve the climate crisis, you can’t solve the climate crisis without Cop. It’s awful and inadequate and frustrating, but it’s still essential. These discussions are incredibly important because they’re the only discussions we’ve got.”
What else we’ve been reading
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Aaron Carter, the teen heartthrob of the noughties, was just 34 when he died this Saturday. Emma Garland explores how the dysfunctional 90s Hollywood culture of hedonism and excess is still impacting people’s lives. Nimo
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Joe Stone had never eaten cucumber, mushrooms, eggs, onions... the list goes on. His account of taking on his fussy eating is a joy. As are the pictures. Archie
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It’s been over a week since a man perpetrated a firebomb attack on a migrant centre. Counter-terrorism police concluded that the attack was an act of terrorism motivated by the far right. Miqdaad Versi asks: why has this crime been met with relative silence? Nimo
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Michael Hogan interviewed comedian Tom Allen. They talk Bake-Off, the complexity of grief and his new book Too Much. Nimo
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Azadeh Moaveni’s LRB diary of two weeks of protest in Tehran is a superb piece of reportage, and is especially interesting on whether sympathetic Iranians yet to take to the streets will ultimately do so. Archie
Sport
Football | Liverpool beat Tottenham Hotspur 2-1 to further dent Spurs’ title hopes, after Arsenal returned to the top of the table with a 1-0 win at Chelsea.
Gymnastics | Great Britain’s Jessica Gadirova won floor gold on the final day of the Gymnastics World Championships making her world champion for the first time.
World Cup 2022 | Ben Fisher casts an eye over Wales’s chances in Qatar, with the latest of the Guardian’s team guides.
For more, sign up for the Fiver, our daily football newsletter
The front pages
“Revealed: UK and US fail to pay ‘fair share of $100bn climate fund” is the lead story in the Guardian print edition this Monday morning. In answer the Daily Mail has “Red Ed: UK must pay climate change damages” – the red one being Ed Miliband. The Telegraph says “Britain opens door to climate reparations”. “Billions more spent in UK will count as foreign aid” – that’s the Times today, while the Financial Times has “US hatches plan for companies to pay for switch from fossil fuel energy”. The Daily Express says “Keeping triple lock is ‘matter of Tory principle’”, which is what senior Tories are telling Rishi Sunak. The i’s top story is “Biggest-ever nurses strike ‘would hit A&E patients’”. The Metro has “Bonfire night of mayhem” after the fifth of November saw a boy killed by fireworks and “gangs of yobs run riot”. The Daily Mirror’s front page is a glorious bolt from the blue: “Pic of Aussie OAP EXACT match for Lucan” – but the pensioner’s face is “blurred for legal reasons”, next to the familiar moustachioed fugitive ex-peer. The Sun covers what matters: “Rishi raps celeb Hancock”.
Today in Focus
Who is robbing Lebanon’s banks?
A spate of bank robberies has hit Beirut in recent weeks but they are heists with a twist: people are demanding – at gunpoint – that staff hand them their own money. Michael Safi reports
Cartoon of the day | Edith Pritchett
The Upside
A bit of good news to remind you that the world’s not all bad.
Islington council and the NHS have invested £1.6m in a programme designed to support young black men and boys with their mental health and to improve their aspirations and chances in life. Barbershops have always been a place of solace and community for many black men and boys, so one part of the Young Black Men and Mental Health program has been launching a course that trains barbers on how to speak with customers about mental health and point those who might be struggling towards professional support. “The barbershop has always been a hub for black men,” said Mitch Momod, a British-Nigerian barber.
Sign up here for a weekly roundup of The Upside, sent to you every Sunday
Bored at work?
And finally, the Guardian’s crosswords to keep you entertained throughout the day – with plenty more on the Guardian’s Puzzles app for iOS and Android. Until tomorrow.