Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: COP26 (and the G20) kick off

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We start today with the United Nations Climate Conference (COP26), which begins Sunday in Glasgow, Scotland.

Shelley Inglis writes for The Conversation about the expectations for COP26.

The Paris Agreement requires countries to report their NDCs, but it allows them leeway in determining how they reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. The initial set of emission reduction targets in 2015 was far too weak to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

One key goal of COP26 is to ratchet up these targets to reach net zero carbon emissions by the middle of the century.

Another aim of COP26 is to increase climate finance to help poorer countries transition to clean energy and adapt to climate change. This is an important issue of justice for many developing countries whose people bear the largest burden from climate change but have contributed least to it. Wealthy countries promised in 2009 to contribute $100 billion a year by 2020 to help developing nations, a goal that has not been reached. The U.S., U.K. and EU, among the largest historic greenhouse emitters, are increasing their financial commitments, and banks, businesses, insurers and private investors are being asked to do more.

Other objectives include phasing out coal use and generating solutions that preserve, restore or regenerate natural carbon sinks, such as forests.

The Conversation also provides this graphic tracking the global lack of action on climate change.

Matthew Taylor of the Guardian warns that COP26 will be very white and very privileged.

[T]he Cop26 Coalition – which represents indigenous movements, vulnerable communities, trade unionists and youth strikers around the world – says that up to two-thirds of those it was helping to travel to Glasgow have given up, overwhelmed by a combination of visa and accreditation problems, lack of access to Covid vaccines and changing travel rules – as well as “scarce and expensive” accommodation.

Rachael Osgood, director of immigration at Cop26 Coalition, said: “This event, because of multiple combining factors, most of which fall under the responsibility of government, is set to be the most elite and exclusionary Cop ever held.”

She said that, while it was difficult to put a precise figure on the numbers of observers, campaigners and civil society groups from the global south who had been prevented from coming, the impact on the negotiations would be significant.

“What we know for certain is that thousands of people from the global south are being excluded, and they represent tens of millions of voices from those right on the frontline of this crisis which are not going to be heard … We are looking at global north countries making decisions with minimal accountability to those least responsible and most affected, and that goes against everything Cop should stand for.”

Bob Berwyn of Inside Climate News says that social and economic inequalities (exemplified, perhaps, by attendance at this year’s summit) will probably be reflected in the levels of urgency paid to various climate issues.

Since that first IPCC report in 1990, emissions have increased 60 percent and the average global temperature has climbed about 0.75 degrees Celsius, contributing to rapid increases in deadly heat waves, tropical storms, droughts and sea level rise on every continent. According to the United Nations Emissions Gap report released Oct. 27, the most recently updated climate pledges shave about 7.5 percent off 2030 emissions, while a reduction of 55 percent is needed to meet the target of the Paris agreement. That puts Earth on track to heat 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, a dangerous amount of warming well beyond the Paris agreement target of 1.5 degrees Celsius.

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Progress at the upcoming COP26 climate talks in Glasgow could hinge on whether negotiators talk seriously about the inequality of emissions and climate impacts, said Isak Stoddard, an Uppsala University climate researcher and the lead author of a new study that asks why world governments haven’t managed to bend the emissions curve downward, and what they could do differently.

“The wealthiest 1 percent of the world’s population emits twice as much as half the human population, and the top 10 percent more than half of all global emissions, which is so wrong in so many ways,” he said.

High emitters have the most power in global climate talks and, at the same time, often feel less vulnerable to climate impacts, which weakens their incentives to cut emissions. Those least responsible for the pollution warming the climate often suffer the worst impacts, yet have little leverage at climate talks, Stoddard and the international team of researchers wrote in the paper, published in the Annual Review of Environment and Resources.

John Rennie Short of The Conversation writes about the dangers that climate change represents to the world’s increasingly urbanized areas.

Around the globe, cities will face a much higher probability of extreme weather events. Depending on their locations, these will include heavier snowfalls, more severe drought, water shortages, punishing heat waves, greater flooding, more wildfires, bigger storms and longer storm seasons. The heaviest costs will be borne by their most vulnerable residents: the old, the poor and others who lack wealth and political connections to protect themselves.

Extreme weather isn’t the only concern. A 2019 study of 520 cities around the world projected that even if nations limit warming to 2 degrees Celsius (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial conditions, climate zones will shift hundreds of miles northward by 2050 worldwide. This would cause 77% of the cities in the study to experience a major change in their year-round climate regimes.

For example, the study authors predicted that by midcentury, London’s climate will resemble that of modern-day Barcelona, and Seattle’s will be like current conditions in San Francisco. In short, in less than 30 years, three out of every four major cities in the world will have a completely different climate from the one for which its urban form and infrastructure were designed.

This weekend, there’s also a G20 summit taking place in Rome. Jim Tankersley and Alan Rappeport of The New York Times report that a major agreement has been reached that may prevent corporations from shifting profits to avoid taxes.

The announcement in the opening session of the Group of 20 summit marked the world’s most aggressive attempt yet to stop opportunistic companies like Apple and Bristol Myers Squibb from sheltering profits in so-called tax havens, where tax rates are low and corporations often maintain little physical presence beyond an official headquarters.

It is a deal years in the making, which was pushed over the line by the sustained efforts of Mr. Biden’s Treasury Department, even as the president’s plans to raise taxes in the United States for new social policy and climate change programs have fallen short of his promises.

The revenue expected from the international pact is now critical to Mr. Biden’s domestic agenda, an unexpected outcome for a president who has presented himself more as a deal maker at home rather than abroad.


Leaders hailed the agreement, which was negotiated by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development with nearly 140 countries signing on. It would impose a minimum 15 percent corporate tax rate in nearly every country in the world and punish the few holdouts who refuse to go along. The O.E.C.D. estimates the accord will raise $150 billion per year globally from tax-fleeing companies.

Paul Krugman of The New York Times explores how, in many respects, the Republican “establishment” has become cowardly.

When we talk about the G.O.P.’s moral descent, we tend to focus on the obvious extremists, like the conspiracy theorists who claim that climate change is a hoax and Jan. 6 was a false flag operation. But the crazies wouldn’t be driving the Republican agenda so completely if it weren’t for the cowards, Republicans who clearly know better but reliably swallow their misgivings and go along with the party line. And at this point crazies and cowards essentially make up the party’s entire elected wing.

The falsehoods that are poisoning America’s politics tend to share similar life histories. They begin in cynicism, spread through disinformation and culminate in capitulation, as Republicans who know the truth decide to acquiesce in lies.

Take the claim of a stolen election. Donald Trump never had any evidence on his side, but he didn’t care — he just wanted to hold on to power or, failing that, promulgate a lie that would help him retain his hold on the G.O.P. Despite the lack of evidence and the failure of every attempt to produce or create a case, however, a steady drumbeat of propaganda has persuaded an overwhelming majority of Republicans that Joe Biden’s victory was illegitimate.

And establishment Republicans, who at first pushed back against the Big Lie, have gone quiet or even begun to promote the falsehood. Thus on Wednesday, The Wall Street Journal published, without corrections or fact checks, a letter to the editor from Trump that was full of demonstrable lies — and in so doing gave those lies a new, prominent platform.

John Nichols of The Nation thinks that it’s time that those members of Congress who aided and abetted the Jan. 6 insurrectionists should be investigated and, if necessary, expelled from the legislature.

Congress should identify, investigate, and expel members of the House and Senate who aided and abetted the insurrectionists who stormed the US Capitol in an effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. That is the constitutionally appropriate and practically necessary response to a coup attempt that now appears to have involved not just violent right-wing extremists from across the country but also Republican representatives who swore an oath to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.”

The identification process has been jump-started with Rolling Stone’s exclusive report, published Monday, revealing that congressional investigators had met with two planners of the January 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, at which former President Donald Trump incited insurrectionists to storm the Capitol. Those planners disclosed to the committee that they had meetings with House members or staffers as they planned rallies protesting the results of the 2020 election.

“This is the first report that the committee is hearing major new allegations from potential cooperating witnesses,” explained Rolling Stone, in its report on interviews with two of the January 6 protest planners. “While there have been prior indications that members of Congress were involved, this is also the first account detailing their purported role and its scope.”

Kristin Rowe-Finkbeiner of CNN writes about the necessity of the paid family/medical leave policy that was ultimately excised from the reconciliation bill.

We are in the midst of a deadly pandemic, in a jobs and care crisis, as the only industrialized nation in the world without some form of national paid family/medical leave. We need it badly. This life-saving and economy-boosting policy should not be delayed.
Paid family/medical leave is a policy that makes it possible for people to recover from childbirth to bond with a new child, or to take care of themselves or a close loved one if a serious health crisis strikes. The fact that right now, in a pandemic which has taken more than 730,000 lives in the US, paid leave is on a political ventilator is outrageous, unconscionable, indefensible and wrong. It's a measure of how broken our political system is right now.
The situation is critical. Going into the pandemic, while a small percentage of people had this policy through their work or due to state law, our nation guaranteed zero weeks of paid family/medical leave, while all other countries on average have 26 weeks of paid leave. That -- combined with our failure as yet to build a care infrastructure with quality, affordable childcare, living wages for care workers, a commitment to continue the Child Tax Credit expansion and home- and community-based services for people with disabilities and the aging -- has had devastating consequences.

Paul Krugman (again!) writes for The New York Times that many economic trends are global and not national, with their current and eventual impact still an unknown.

In other words, the problems that have been crimping recovery from the pandemic recession seem, by and large, to be global rather than local. That’s not to say that national policies are playing no role. For example, Britain’s woes are partly the result of a shortage of truck drivers, which in turn has a lot to do with the exodus of foreign workers after Brexit. But the fact that everyone seems to be having similar problems tells us that policy is playing less of a role than many people seem to think. And it does raise the question of what, if anything, the United States should be doing differently.

Many observers have been drawing parallels with the stagflation of the 1970s. But so far, at least, what we’re experiencing doesn’t look much like that. Most economies have been growing, not shrinking; unemployment has been falling, not rising. While there have been some supply disruptions — Chinese ports have suffered closures as a result of Covid outbreaks, in March a fire at a Japanese factory that supplies many of the semiconductor chips used in cars around the world hit auto production, and so on — these disruptions aren’t the main story.

Charlotte Hampton and Israel Tribe write for the Los Angeles Times that Generation Z, which consumes an unparalleled amount of social media, needs to learn how to identify all of the misinformation and lies on social media platforms.

We’re coming of age in the looming shadow of the climate crisis, political unrest and a pandemic from which previous generations failed to protect us. As we expand our political voice, we need to act swiftly and strategically — an increasingly difficult task in a country that can’t agree on basic truths, and where we’re bombarded by false information on social media.

In a world already dominated by Apple and Instagram, we consume media in a way that has never been seen before. At our age, our parents were watching TV and reading newspapers; we’re scrolling through Twitter and TikTok, spending hours immersed in constantly updating information. The difference is social media is riddled with misinformation and disinformation, favoring content designed to provoke. According to a 2020 Pew Research Center study, people who rely on social media for their news are actually less politically informed.

There are many reports on the ramifications of the spread of false information via social media. Yet, there is little that helps young people spot and understand what they’re seeing. We’re not going to be able to address global problems unless we’re united on the facts.

Ross Ramsey of The Texas Tribune analyzes the political impact of Texas state representative Matt Ramsey’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum “inquiry” into a list of 850 books in Texas public school libraries.

But as a political wedge, a ban on books — or the insinuation of one, such as an “inquiry” into what books are available to public school students in Texas — can be powerful. It’s not just a shot at the books, but at the people who work in close proximity to books and ideas, like teachers and librarians and other brainy, nerdy types. A nice, fresh controversy about which books they’re feeding into children’s undiscerning little minds amplifies current culture debates about critical race theory and transgender student athletes, masks and vaccines.

Matt Krause, a state representative from Fort Worth, is running for attorney general. He’s also the head of the House General Investigating Committee, and in that role, sent a letter to the Texas Education Agency, along with a list of about 850 books, saying he is “initiating an inquiry into Texas school district content.”

He’s got a funny way of fighting cancel culture.

Kate Wells of Kaiser Health News writes that hospital emergency rooms have now become increasingly swamped with patients with serious health problems other than COVID-19.

Except for initial hot spots like New York City, in spring 2020 many ERs across the country were often eerily empty. Terrified of contracting covid-19, people who were sick with other things did their best to stay away from hospitals. Visits to emergency rooms dropped to half their typical levels, according to the Epic Health Research Network, and didn’t fully rebound until this summer.

But now, they’re too full. Even in parts of the country where covid isn’t overwhelming the health system, patients are showing up to the ER sicker than before the pandemic, their diseases more advanced and in need of more complicated care.

Months of treatment delays have exacerbated chronic conditions and worsened symptoms. Doctors and nurses say the severity of illness ranges widely and includes abdominal pain, respiratory problems, blood clots, heart conditions and suicide attempts, among other conditions.

But they can hardly be accommodated. Emergency departments, ideally, are meant to be brief ports in a storm, with patients staying just long enough to be sent home with instructions to follow up with primary care physicians, or sufficiently stabilized to be transferred “upstairs” to inpatient or intensive care units.

Finally, David Scharfenberg of The Boston Globe tackles an interesting study that utilizes cell phone data to illustrate that racial segregation is not simply a matter of where people live.

To understand segregation fully, we need to understand that movement. We need to know not just where people are from but where they go.

Until recently, it was difficult to track mobility at scale. But the cellphone location data that has transformed mapping, marketing, and media is opening up new possibilities in the social sciences too.

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Sampson and his co-authors found that while there is little difference in the number of places people from white, Black, and Latino neighborhoods visit, there are big differences in where they go.

And these racial differences are so powerful they can wipe out class considerations.

Everyone have a great day!