Aurelia Butler

GLASGOW, Scotland (Reuters) -The president of the U.N. climate talks https://www.reuters.com/business/cop said on Tuesday there was still a mountain to climb towards a goal of capping the global temperature rise at 1.5 Celsius, as a research group said existing pledges would allow the Earth to warm far beyond that.Britain’s Alok Sharma told reporters that COP26 officials would soon publish the first draft of the so-called cover decision, which summarises the commitments of more than 190 countries, in a bid to focus minds in the three days remaining.Climate activists and experts will pore over the document looking for items such as timelines to phase out public subsidies of fossil fuels, or provide long-promised funds to help poor countries tackle climate change.These and a raft of other complex issues to be hammered out will determine whether the two-week Glasgow summit can succeed in keeping within reach the 1.5C ceiling considered vital to avoid catastrophic climate consequences.”We are making progress at COP26 but we still have a mountain to climb over the next few days,” said Sharma.The European Union’s climate policy chief, Frans Timmermans, delivered a similarly blunt message, telling reporters, “the honest truth is we’re not where we want to be, not even close.” The Climate Action Tracker (CAT) research group put a sobering number on the size of the task at hand, saying that all the national pledges submitted so far to cut greenhouse gases by 2030 would allow the Earth’s temperature to rise 2.4C from pre-industrial levels by 2100.Scientists say 1.5C – the aspirational goal set down in the 2015 Paris Agreement – is the most the Earth can afford to avoid an acceleration of the intense heat waves, droughts, storms, floods and crop failures it is already experiencing.RISING SEAS Underscoring the stakes for vulnerable nations, the tiny Pacific island of Tuvalu said it was looking at legal ways to keep ownership of its maritime zones and recognition as a state even if it is engulfed by rising seas.”We’re actually imagining a worst-case scenario where we are forced to relocate or our lands are submerged,” its foreign minister, Simon Kofe, told Reuters.British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who opened the COP26 eight days ago and attended the first two days, will return to the conference on Wednesday, his spokesperson said.To meet the 1.5C goal, the United Nations wants to achieve “net zero” – where no more greenhouse gases are emitted than can simultaneously be absorbed – by 2050.And it says that will be impossible unless emissions – mostly of carbon dioxide from burning coal, oil and gas – are cut 45% from 2010 levels by 2030.”Even with all new Glasgow pledges for 2030, we will emit roughly twice as much in 2030 as required for 1.5°C,” CAT said.China, the world’s largest emitter, says it will achieve net zero only in 2060, the same year as major oil and gas producer Russia. India, another large-scale polluter, has a target date ten years later.Moreover, CAT explicitly warned against assuming that longer-term “net zero” pledges would even be met, since most countries have not yet implemented the short-term policies or legislation needed.”It’s all very well for leaders to claim they have a net zero target, but if they have no plans as to how to get there, and their 2030 targets are as low as so many of them are, then frankly, these ‘net zero’ targets are just lip service to real climate action,” said Bill Hare, CEO of Climate Analytics, one of the organisations behind the CAT.Sharma acknowledged as much, saying: “The world needs confidence that we will shift immediately into implementation, that the pledges made here will be delivered, and that the policies and investment will swiftly follow.”WEAK DEAL OR NO DEAL?A key pillar of climate action is carbon pricing and trading – mechanisms that force polluters to pay a market price for their emissions, or pay others to offset them, by planting trees that bind carbon or investing in cleaner power.COP26 is supposed to create a global framework for carbon pricing, but the problem has defeated the last two climate summits, and is in danger of proving insurmountable in Glasgow too.”There’s a higher chance of getting a deal this time, but it could be very weak,” said Gilles Dufrasne, a policy officer with Carbon Market Watch. “Having no deal might hence be an acceptable outcome.”Many campaigners including Greenpeace oppose the use of carbon offsets under any circumstances, saying they lessen the incentives for polluters to change their habits, and risk paying for changes elsewhere that would have happened anyway.”Net zero does not mean zero,” warned Teresa Anderson, climate policy coordinator for ActionAid International. “In the majority of cases, these corporations … are planning to carry on business as usual https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/more-net-than-zero-do-carbon-cutting-promises-add-up-climate-2021-11-09″ for long periods, she added.But some say things could be worse, noting how U.S. President Joe Biden had promptly returned the world’s second-biggest greenhouse gas emitter to the Paris Agreement, from which his predecessor Donald Trump had withdrawn, and pushed a $555 billion climate package through Congress.Democratic U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez underlined the more constructive U.S. approach at the Glasgow conference on Tuesday.”We’re just here to say that we’re not just back. We’re different and we’re more just. And we are more open-minded to questioning prior assumptions of what is politically possible,” she said. More

The EU will have “no option” but to retaliate if the UK goes ahead with threats to suspend parts of the Brexit deal for Northern Ireland in the coming days, Ireland’s deputy prime minister has warned. Tánaiste Leo Varadkar said Ireland had begun to “dust down” contingency preparations in case London acts unilaterally to suspend some parts of the so-called Northern Ireland protocol, fuelling concerns that disagreements over Brexit may spark an EU-UK trade war.Relations between London and Brussels have soured rapidly as the UK seeks to rewrite the post-Brexit trade deal for Northern Ireland which left the region in the EU’s customs union and single market in order to prevent the return of a north-south trade border in IrelandThat arrangement, which the UK now says is “not sustainable”, was agreed to preserve the landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement, which ended three decades of sectarian conflict. All of the region’s mainly Protestant Unionist parties have rejected the protocol, saying the arrangements undermine their place within the UK.London says concessions made last month by Brussels to reduce the impact of checks on goods travelling between the Great Britain and Northern Ireland across a new customs border in the Irish Sea do not go far enough.Varadkar told RTÉ radio on Tuesday that if Britain triggered Article 16 clause of the protocol to unilaterally suspend key parts of the deal, the European Commission could be forced to scrap the post-Brexit Trade and Cooperation Agreement.However, that hardline stance has split EU member states. Countries like France and Ireland are pushing for tougher measures, but EU officials and diplomats have played down talk of pre-emptive measures against the UK. “We are not there yet,” said one official. Brexit commissioner Maros Sefcovic will brief EU ambassadors and MEPs on Wednesday ahead of a meeting with Lord David Frost, the UK Brexit minister, on Friday. “I don’t think anybody wants to see the European Union suspending the Trade and Cooperation Agreement with Britain, but if Britain were to act in such a way that it was resigning from the protocol, resigning from the withdrawal agreement, I think the European Union would have no option other than to . . . respond,” Varadkar said.Legal experts said a UK decision to suspend parts of the deal on Northern Ireland would undermine the basis on which the EU had agreed the zero-tariff, zero-quota trade deal.“If the UK is pulling the plug on substantive provisions of that withdrawal agreement, the EU could argue it gives them grounds to terminate [the TCA],” said Catherine Barnard, professor of EU law at Cambridge university.Frost has said since July that the threshold has already been reached to justify using Article 16 because of the economic and political disruption the protocol has caused.One diplomat described a meeting last week between Frost and Sefcovic in Brussels last week as “cold” and “their worst ever . . . They’re just talking past each other”.Senior EU diplomats said there was a growing consensus among member states that it could not be “business as usual” if the UK resorted to Article 16. “No short term measures have been decided but there will be talks about potentially suspending the TCA,” said one EU diplomat. More

Seán FitzPatrick, the banker who came to symbolise Ireland’s Celtic Tiger boom-and-bust, has died of a heart attack aged 73.The blunt-speaking financier, who built Anglo Irish Bank into a financial juggernaut that spectacularly crashed after reckless loans and dubious accounting practices, was rushed to hospital last week after suddenly taking ill. He died on Monday, according to his family.FitzPatrick remained unrepentant about his role in precipitating a crisis that plunged the banking sector into a €64bn bailout after the global financial crisis exposed a colossal liquidity crunch.“He went from being the poster boy of the Celtic Tiger to the whipping boy of the country’s crash,” Simon Carswell, author of Anglo Republic, Inside the Bank that Broke Ireland, told the Financial Times. “He was the emblem of Ireland’s banking-driven boom and bust.”FitzPatrick — known as “Seánie” to his friends and “Fitzie” behind his back at work — joined what grew into Ireland’s third-biggest bank in 1974. He swiftly rose to the top as the bank expanded, running Anglo Irish Bank Corporation as chief executive from 1986 to 2005 and chair from 2005 until leaving in disgrace in 2008 as the bank fell apart.He had championed a speedy loan approval model that saw Anglo Irish Bank, then the country’s third biggest institution, behind AIB and Bank of Ireland, rocket from a valuation of about €600m in 2000 to more than €13bn in 2007 at its peak.Property developers, whose flashy projects were transforming Ireland from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s in a period that earned the country the Celtic Tiger moniker, became the bank’s biggest customers. Anglo Irish earned a reputation as the developers’ favourite institution as the nation’s economy skyrocketed.But his success speedily unravelled. It emerged that FitzPatrick had for several years been concealing tens of millions of euros in personal loans by shunting them off the books — a practice that was deemed immoral, but not illegal. Unlike his successor as chief executive, David Drumm, and other senior banking figures, FitzPatrick was never convicted or jailed.He was acquitted in 2017 after a 127-day trial of criminal charges relating to allegedly misleading auditors.

Patrick Honohan, former central bank governor, said in 2015 it was “unwise, rather than criminal” actions by bankers that precipitated the crisis, and that their “unrestrained and reckless” behaviour had been behind Ireland’s economic crash.When the financial crisis bit, Anglo Irish’s reckless lending caught up with it and it was losing €1bn a day, Carswell said, prompting the government to step in. FitzPatrick had by then made a fortune amassing stock in the bank, though he was declared bankrupt in 2010.The Irish Times newspaper said the bank “lost money the old-fashioned way by making one crappy loan after another”. It needed a €29.3bn bailout — nearly half the total that was pumped into the nation’s banks to stop them from going under.But FitzPatrick told an interviewer in 2011 he could not “say sorry with any sincerity or decency” for a banking collapse he blamed on global problems.A rugby player in his youth and an avid golfer, FitzPatrick kept a low profile in recent years. Many figures in the Irish financial world declined to comment for fear of speaking ill of the dead. Ultimately, “he was an almost tragic figure, for himself and the country”, said one.This article has been amended to reflect the fact that Patrick Honohan’s tenure as central bank governor began in 2009 More