World leaders love to put on a performance. At the Conference Of Parties 26 (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, representatives from countries are once again showing off their acting chops.
COP26 hosted representatives from more than 200 countries to discuss reducing their emissions. While it’s great to see world leaders take responsibility for their carbon emissions, it’s hypocritical that they aren’t talking about the real culprits of the climate crisis: businesses.
In 2015, world leaders met for the first time to discuss solutions to the climate crisis at a conference known as the Paris agreement, according to an Oct. 25 BBC News article.
They agreed to prevent the global temperatures from rising and to review their respective emissions in 2020, which was delayed until November this year because of the coronavirus pandemic, according to the BBC News article.
This year’s event was also attended by activists including Greta Thunberg and thousands of protesters, according to a Nov. 6 NPR article.
But what did they avoid talking about? Big businesses and their executives, who watched world leaders let them get away with further polluting the planet.
There was barely any conversation about how to regulate businesses including Chevron, which is responsible for 43.35 tons of carbon dioxide emissions alone, according to an Oct. 9, 2019 article by The Guardian.
Chevron CEO Mike Wirth and other big oil company leaders did testify in front of the House Oversight and Reform Committee on Oct. 28, just days before the COP26 summit, according to an Oct. 28 CNN article.
They were being investigated as major culprits of spreading climate denial and spending millions of dollars lobbying the federal government to continue using fossil fuels, according to the CNN article.
Lobbying is one of the biggest issues perpetuating the climate crisis because many will go directly to representatives to get their taxes reduced, find loopholes in climate change laws and garner mass support for polluting the environment.
At COP26, 503 delegates out of 40,000 total attendees had connections to the fossil fuel industry including three lobbying for the oil company BP, according to a Nov. 9 BBC News article.
BP is responsible for 34.02 tons of carbon dioxide emissions from 1965 to 2017, according to an Oct. 9, 2019 article by The Guardian.
Oil and gas company leaders are too scared to come to the climate summit themselves so they send in delegates to lobby on their behalf. They cower at the face of 18-year-old Thunberg and other climate activists who rightfully prove that large corporations are the real enemies of the climate crisis.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos did show up to the conference and offered 2 billion dollars to be put toward restoring nature, according to a Nov. 2 New York Times article.
That amount is a penny in an ocean for Bezos, who has a 204.3 billion dollar net worth, according to Forbes.
Companies including Amazon shouldn’t be a part of the conversations happening at COP26 but world leaders need to talk about how to regulate them. The issue is that they aren’t.
They announced plans to end deforestation, send money to developing countries to help them transition to clean energy and reduce coal usage, according to a Nov. 15 BBC article.
This might sound great but many are frustrated with the decision to change the final agreement to only “phase down” coal instead of “phase out,” according to a Sunday article by The Guardian.
World leaders couldn’t even come to a decision to absolutely reduce coal usage, one of the largest contributors to the climate crisis.
The agreement also didn’t address the way oil businesses have spread climate disinformation and how social media platforms including Facebook contribute to that crisis.
They didn’t talk about big businesses avoiding taxes which makes it easier for them to continue pursuing oil. They didn’t discuss the possibility of making them pay restitution for their contributions to the climate crisis.
As Thunberg said, COP26 was a “two-week-long celebration of business as usual and blah, blah, blah,” according to a Nov. 5 CNBC article.
It’s clear that young activists need to be a bigger part of the discussion since they are the only ones who seem to understand the gravity of climate change while CEOs including Bezos play around with gravity in space.
