What happened at Climate Week NYC? View Online [[link removed]] | Subscribe now [[link removed]]Powered byKnow better. Do better.Climate. Change.News from the ground, in a warming world

By Megan Rowling [[link removed]] | Acting Climate Editor

Summit no-show for big emitters

Fossil fuels were no longer the elephant in the room when "first movers and doers" on cutting emissions and adapting to a warmer world gathered at the U.N. Climate Ambition Summit last week. Instead, they were the elephant decidedly out of the room.

U.N. Secretary-General Antonio Guterres had set the bar high for governments and business to participate in his gathering, which meant many of the world's heavyweight emitters either didn't get an invite or didn't even try for one. Conspicuous by their absence were the leaders of the United States, China, India, Japan, Britain and France - to name but a few.

At the summit - where Guterres called out "the naked greed of entrenched interests raking in billions from fossil fuels" - some of the 34 nations selected to speak appealed for an end to coal, oil and gas use, while others demanded far more finance to secure a green transition and protect the vulnerable. Context calculated that collectively the countries in the room accounted for just 17% of total global emissions [[link removed]].

It was, however, a start, according to some veteran climate diplomats.

Activists mark the start of Climate Week in New York during a demonstration calling for the U.S. government to take action on climate change and reject the use of fossil fuels in New York City, New York, U.S., September 17, 2023. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Pacific island state of the Marshall Islands, said it was the first time she had been in a room "where I did feel this shift around the ability to say 'fossil fuel' [[link removed]] - and say (it) again and again".

Will that be the case at the annual U.N. climate conference, COP28 - this year hosted by the United Arab Emirates, a top oil and gas producer? There debate is likely to rage around whether and when fossil fuels should be ditched to keep alive the fast-receding possibility of limiting global warming to 1.5C. Read our explainer on how the world is doing [[link removed]] on that front.

The longer the foot-dragging by big polluters goes on - and the worse the damage from global warming becomes - the more frustrated those on the frontlines will get.

"Many of the poorest nations have every right to be angry [[link removed]]," Guterres told his summit before making a swift exit to attend the U.N. Security Council. It was clear what was topping the priorities of the most powerful countries in NYC last week, and it wasn't climate change.

The giant Buddha statue of Wat Paknam Phasi Charoen temple is seen amid air pollution in Bangkok, Thailand, February 2, 2023. REUTERS/Chalinee Thirasupa

Climate change is ‘killing us’

Nonetheless, there were encouraging signs, as our reporter David Sherfinski discovered at the myriad events that make up Climate Week NYC.

He heard investors - including some of the biggest banks, like HSBC - talking about the importance of making their funding for climate projects fit the needs of local communities [[link removed]], including women working on renewable energy in rural India and textile factory workers in China.

And the World Health Organization pushed forward with its mission to boost the importance of public health in the climate policy agenda, as COP28 prepares for its first health day. WHO officials didn't pull any punches, with its special envoy for climate change and health telling a Climate Week discussion: "Make no mistake: it is the use of fossil fuels that is driving climate change that is killing us [[link removed]]."

Over at the Climate Ambition Summit, the Pacific nation of Tuvalu unveiled a plan to reinforce its coasts [[link removed]] in a novel partnership with Australia aimed at helping the developing island state adapt to climate change and secure its future, as it faces "horrific" risks from a rising ocean.

The project will test a new U.N. blueprint under which one rich nation takes responsibility for raising funds to enable a climate-vulnerable country to roll out measures to cope better with extreme weather and higher sea levels, under which Dominican Republic is also teaming up with Spain.

An ice sculpture with Facebook’s logo embedded on the inside melts near the U.S. Capitol building, as part of a protest over Facebook’s role in the spread of climate misinformation online in Washington, U.S., November 4, 2021. REUTERS/Leah Millis

Controlling the climate narrative

Meanwhile, a new report released to coincide with the climate powwow in New York called for more political will to act on measures to curb the "spread of lies" that threaten climate action, revealing how tech giants are falling short on their pledges to rein in and combat climate misinformation on their platforms.

Climate Action Against Disinformation, a coalition of more than 50 advocacy groups and businesses, graded social networks on a set of metrics that included policy content, enforcement, advertising, transparency and privacy.

Of the five platforms, Pinterest fared the best, with a score of 12 out of a possible 21, followed by TikTok with nine, Meta eight, YouTube six and Twitter/X scoring only one (please check our piece for the behemoths' responses [[link removed]]).

Common tactics in the proliferation of online climate-related misinformation include casting doubt on the reliability of clean technology or positioning green energy as expensive and helping fuel the cost-of-living crisis, the report said.

It seemed an apt time to highlight this threat in a week when Britain's prime minister announced a series of delays to green policies [[link removed]] such as ending sales of petrol and diesel cars and gas boilers, citing what he called "unacceptable costs" on households from the energy transition – a move that sparked criticism from some business leaders.

See you next week,

Megan

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