Climate baby steps

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi addresses the COP26 U.N. climate summit Tuesday in Glasgow, Scotland, proclaiming “America is back” in the effort to slow global warming. Officials say “some serious toddler steps” have been made as the summit nears its end, but admit progress has been limited.

GLASGOW, Scotland — The United Nations climate summit in Glasgow has made “some serious toddler steps” toward cutting emissions, but far from the giant leaps needed to limit global warming to internationally accepted goals, two new analyses and top officials said Tuesday.

And time is running out on the two weeks of negotiations.

The president of the climate talks, Alok Sharma, told high-level government ministers at the U.N. conference to reach out to their capitals and bosses soon to see if they can get more ambitious pledges because “we have only a few days left.”

This month’s summit has seen such limited progress that a United Nations Environment Program analysis of new pledges found that they weren’t enough to improve warming scenarios. All they did was trim the “emissions gap” — how much carbon pollution can be spewed without hitting dangerous warming levels— a few tenths of a percentage point, according to the review released Tuesday.

The analysis found that by 2030, the world will be emitting 51.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide each year, 1.5 billion tons less than before the latest pledges. To achieve the limit set in the 2015 Paris climate accord, which came out of a similar summit, the world can emit only 12.5 billion metric tons of greenhouse gases in 2030.

A separate analysis by independent scientists found a slight decrease in future warming, but one still insufficient to limit the warming of the planet to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. The planet has already warmed 1.1 degrees (2 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times.

“There’s some serious toddler steps,” U.N. Environment Program Director Inger Andersen said in an interview with The Associated Press. “But they are not the leaps we need to see, by any stretch of the imagination.”

In Glasgow, officials touted advances, but not necessarily success.

“We are making progress,” Sharma said, “but we still have a mountain to climb over the next few days, and what has been collectively committed to goes some way, but certainly not all the way, to keeping 1.5 within reach.”

Andersen acknowledged that none of the three main U.N. criteria for success for the two-week climate talks has been achieved so far. They are cutting greenhouse gas emissions by about half by 2030; securing $100 billion a year in aid from rich countries to poor nations; and committing half of that money to developing nations adapting to global warming’s worst harms.

The second analysis by Climate Action Tracker, which for years has monitored emission-cutting pledges, said that based on the submitted targets the world is now on track to warm 2.4 degrees Celsius (4.3 degrees Fahrenheit) since pre-industrial times by the end of this century.

That’s a far cry from the 2015 Paris climate deal overarching limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees) and its fallback limit of 2 degrees Celsius.

That’s “still catastrophic climate change and far, far away from the goals of the Paris Agreement,” said climate scientist Niklas Hohne of the New Climate Institute and the Climate Action Tracker.

DEMOCRATS AT SUMMIT

U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and nearly two dozen other House Democrats barnstormed the global climate talks Tuesday, claiming that “America is back” in the effort to slow global warming, even as their party remains divided over a $1.85 trillion budget bill on which their climate agenda depends.

Pelosi noted that a record number of lawmakers were attending a U.N. climate summit and said they had flown to Glasgow “ready to take on the challenge, to meet the moment.”

The Democrats’ stalled legislation includes $555 billion in tax credits and incentives to promote wind and solar power, electric vehicles, climate-friendly agriculture and forestry programs, and a host of other clean-energy programs.

Those measures would take the country about halfway to President Joe Biden’s goal of cutting the country’s greenhouse gas emissions by 50%-52% from 2005 levels by 2030.

Pelosi said it would be “the most ambitious and consequential climate and clean-energy investment of all time.”

She said House lawmakers intended to pass the bill next week, but a handful of moderate Democrats have raised concerns about its price tag. Meanwhile, the legislation has been held up in the Senate largely because of objections of one Democratic senator, Joe Manchin of West Virginia. Manchin’s state is a coal and gas producer, he has personal financial ties to the coal industry, and he has said he opposes policies that would harm fossil fuels.

Pelosi noted that last week Congress approved a $1.2 trillion infrastructure bill that includes billions of dollars to help fortify communities against the impacts of climate disasters. But the money and policies to cut the emissions that are causing global warming are embedded in the legislation that has yet to pass.

In a series of meetings and speeches, lawmakers said they felt the weight of expectations from the rest of the world.

Of all nations, the United States has pumped the most carbon dioxide, methane and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere — pollution that is trapping heat and driving up average global temperatures.

It has also promised to act on climate change, only to fall short several times over the past decades. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., among the lawmakers traveling with Pelosi, said other countries should hold the U.S. accountable for its promise to significantly reduce emissions from the burning of coal, oil and gas.

“We have to actually deliver to get the respect internationally,” Ocasio-Cortez said. “We have to draw down emissions in order to get credit for being committed on climate change.”