The Guardian

Watered-down coal pledge and climate financing shortcomings temper optimism over Glasgow deal

World leaders and environmental experts have broadly welcomed a UN climate deal that for the first time targeted fossil fuels as the key driver of global warming, while some criticised the agreement for not going far enough.

While the agreement won applause for keeping alive the hope of capping global warming at 1.5C, many of the nearly 200 national delegations wished they had come away with more.

If Australia wants to stop being seen as a climate ‘wrecker’ it needs to increase its 2030 emissions target, phase down coal power and cut fossil fuel subsidies. Will it?

• Greg Hunt refuses to say if government will update 2030 emissions target
• ‘Still on the road to hell’: what the British papers say about Cop26
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The Glasgow climate pact is not enough to solve the climate crisis but it includes steps that could help bridge the gap between rhetoric and action.

What does it mean for Australia? Here are five key questions the Morrison government must now answer.

As the climate summit in Glasgow wrapped up with a last-minute deal, the front pages of Britain’s papers told very different stories

After days of painful wrangling, the Cop26 summit finally delivered a watered-down climate deal on Saturday night. While some activists were firmly unimpressed with the result, Sunday’s papers delivered verdicts ranging from “Still on the road to hell” to a more sanguine “Climate deal for the world”.

The story found its way on to most front pages. The Observer splashed on Boris Johnson offering to help Jennifer Arcuri’s business, with a smaller story on Cop26 reporting that a deal had been struck after last-minute drama.

Countries still lack the radical ambition to avert disaster – this accord goes nowhere near far enough

On Glasgow Green, there lies a stone that commemorates the spot where the engineer James Watt in 1765 conceived the idea for a separate condenser for the steam engine. It is Watt’s invention, which revolutionised the efficiency of the steam engine, that means Glasgow can lay claim to be the place from which the Industrial Revolution sprang.

Just over a quarter of a millennium later, delegates from all over the world meeting in the same city have agreed the text of a critical international agreement to try to bind countries into the action required to slow the catastrophic global heating that the Industrial Revolution set in train.

Invasive species that wreaks havoc on land found on vessel after trip from Indian Key to Marco Island

A python sneaked aboard a sailboat in the Florida Keys and lurked undetected until the boat finished a near-100-mile voyage, police said.

The crew found the 7ft snake in the boat’s shower after docking on Friday at Marco Island, on the south-west Florida Gulf coast, after a trip from Indian Key, a distance of about 95 miles around the southern tip of the state.

Critically endangered North Atlantic right whales are dying in alarming numbers after getting caught in lobster trap ropes

A fierce fight is being waged in the Gulf of Maine between lobster fishers desperate to maintain their way of life and conservationists who argue that the waters are a vital haven for the threatened North Atlantic right whale.

Last month, a federal judge in Maine rejected a federal ban on lobstering in a section of the Gulf of Maine that is meant to protect the whales.

Glasgow Climate Pact adopted despite last-minute intervention by India to water down language on phasing out dirtiest fossil fuel

• Cop26: the goal of 1.5C of climate heating is alive, but only just

Countries have agreed a deal on the climate crisis that its backers say will keep within reach the goal of limiting global heating to 1.5C, the key threshold of safety set out in the 2015 Paris agreement.

Alok Sharma, the UK cabinet minister and Cop president, said the deal was “imperfect” but showed “consensus and support”. He said: “I hope we can leave this conference united having delivered something significant for people and planet together as one.”

Countries who take this crisis seriously must seize the initiative, and make the rest pariahs

Where now? Governments have agreed a weak climate deal which gets us a smidgen closer to holding temperatures to a rise of 1.5C. But as regards all the most important pledges to phase out coal, reduce subsidies and protect forests, Glasgow failed.

The fossil fuel lobby, led by India, held its line, dramatically succeeding in watering down – at the last minute and without due, transparent process – the move to ‘phase out’ coal power, pledging instead to ‘phase down’. The poor came away with next to nothing, there was little urgency and we are still heading for catastrophe. Any chance of halving fast-rising emissions by 2030 – the declared aim of the talks – is now negligible.

At least 1,000 long-flowered mistletoe seeds, a key breeding source for the species, will be planted into host trees in the Tomalpin Woodlands

So few of Australia’s regent honeyeaters remain, its distinctive mating song is slowly being lost to its dwindling population.

Its staccato burst of pips and squeaks, a “funny sort of call”, was passed down to young males from “uncles” when honeyeaters, a nomadic species, still travelled in flocks.

At a time when international travel has been mostly out of reach, BirdLife Australia is turning the spotlight on some of the country’s mightiest and most threatened migratory birds in its 2022 calendar

• BirdLife Australia’s Birds on the Move 2022 calendar is available for A$19.95.

Demonstrators say Cop26 talks failed and call on City banks to stop funding fossil fuel projects

Police arrested Extinction Rebellion protesters who blocked the lord mayor’s show in central London on Saturday.

Footage shared on social media showed officers dragging demonstrators out of the road after they disrupted the procession. Environmental activists could be seen blocking the route in the City of London, while forcing riders on horseback and the new lord mayor’s golden state coach to stop.

Red lines, negotiations and walkouts as the climate summit in Glasgow continues

A new alliance of financial institutions is committed to funding the changes necessary to avert climate catastrophe

Six years ago, in Paris, countries reached an historic agreement to limit the global temperature rise to less than 2C, targeting 1.5C. In finance, we launched the task force on climate-related financial disclosures so that companies would disclose their climate-related risks, allowing finance to measure what matters.

Despite these breakthroughs, in the years that followed, action didn’t match ambition. Few countries pursued the necessary policies, and business investment in decarbonisation was limited. Too many in finance thought that the climate crisis was someone else’s problem.

Mark Carney is UN special envoy on climate action and finance and former governor of the Bank of England

Latest version of text, which asks nations to return next year with stronger emissions targets, will now be scrutinised by delegates

A third draft of the outcome of the Cop26 climate summit retained key resolutions to pursue greenhouse gas emissions cuts in line with holding global temperature rises to 1.5C.

Nations will be asked to return next year to strengthen their targets on emissions cuts, which are so far inadequate, and to accelerate the phase-out of coal power and fossil fuel subsidies. The text was not substantially weakened overnight, but there is a long process still to go through on Saturday, and perhaps Sunday, in which some countries are likely to attack some of the key provisions.

After passing the original deadline on Friday night, a new draft text is expected on Saturday morning

Welcome to the Guardian’s coverage of day 13 of the Cop26 climate summit.

Negotiations were supposed to end at 6pm local time last night, but to nobody’s surprise they have overrun into Saturday. You can read our latest news story on the state of play here:

A trip down London’s famous waterway reveals many signs of life – but is this another false dawn?

The Thames shark hunt begins on a swirling golden brown river, where high above Battersea power station soars a speck that may be another awesome predator: a peregrine falcon.

“I haven’t seen a shark but I’ve seen porpoises up the Thames and there were a couple of whales last year,” says Alfie Gardner, captain of one of the Thames Clipper Uber Boats that whisk commuters and tourists up and downriver. “We see a lot of seals. Near enough every day.”

Deadlock stretched climate summit past its scheduled end with hopes leaders will reach agreement by Saturday

• See all our Cop26 coverage

Cop26 climate talks were closing in on a global deal aimed at limiting devastating global warming, with UK organisers hoping for a final agreement to the marathon negotiations on Saturday.

Delegates from nearly 200 nations are tasked with keeping alive the 2015 Paris goal of limiting temperature rises to 1.5C, as warming-driven disasters hit home around the world.

Thank climate activists for the fact that any progress was made in Glasgow. Unless we push hard, powerful interests don’t budge

It was inspiring to watch activists – especially young people and those from the global south – as this Glasgow Cop limped towards its mushy end. They were on top of every twist in the text, and they won significant concessions from the big polluting countries. At the time of writing, it looks as if the phasing out of coal and subsidies for fossil fuels will be mentioned in a Cop document for the first time, and that there will be more money for nations of the global south to “adapt” to the climate crisis. The activists’ anger echoed through the halls, and was heard in whatever parts of the world were listening. To the extent that this Cop worked at all, it’s a tribute to their perseverance and creativity.

But was this a sea change in the way we deal with the global climate crisis? No –Glasgow moves us down the track a little and boxes in national governments a little more, but it has changed not nearly enough. After 26 iterations, the truth about these Cops is pretty clear: the results are largely determined before they even begin. Yes, there’s an endless succession of concerts, marches, seminars, negotiating sessions, speeches, ultimatums, declarations, photo-ops; and yes, everyone works hard to build a sense of drama (the media especially). But history would suggest that the parties rarely go beyond what they’d intended to do before they arrived.

Bill McKibben is the Schumann distinguished scholar at Middlebury College, Vermont, and leader of the climate campaign group 350.org

The modelling was delayed until the final Friday of COP26 to avoid embarrassment. But it’s even worse than expected

In April this year, Australia’s prime minister, Scott Morrison, said that “we will not achieve net zero in the cafes, dinner parties and wine bars of our inner cities”. This explains why he turned to the salt-of-the-Earth hard-workin’ rural folk at McKinsey – one of the biggest billion-dollar multinational consulting agencies on the planet – to produce the Australian government’s long-awaited modelling explaining the pathway to “net zero by 2050”.

In some parallel universe, the task may have gone to Australia’s chief science agency, the CSIRO (a former employer of mine). But it was revealed at Senate estimates a few weeks back that despite the CSIRO applying for the tender, the government rejected them and paid McKinsey $6m to model the changes Australian society must go through to decarbonise within 30 years. This choice makes sense in the context of recent leaks to the New York Times that revealed McKinsey has advised 43 of the 100 biggest corporate polluters, including “BP, Exxon Mobil, Gazprom and Saudi Aramco”. 1,100 of its employees signed an open letter pleading the consultancy reveal the carbon impacts of its clients.

After two weeks of negotiations, protests and climate action, the deadline for the Cop26 climate summit in Glasgow came and went with leaders continuing to negotiate over the final details of a potential deal. The Guardian spoke to activists on the ground to find out their verdicts on the historic climate conference

• Cop26 in extra time as leaders warn of the deadly cost of failure