Climate change victims are dying in an ‘epicentre of indifference’

If the horrifying state of the climate truly informed the politicians who lead us, you might have expected this week’s climate talks at the United Nations to have been a moment marked by declarations of urgent universal collaborative action.

You’d have been disappointed.

Rescuers and relatives search for bodies after flooding ripped through the city of Derna in Libya.Credit: AP

At the very same time as a Climate Action Summit hosted by the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres began at the organisation’s headquarters in New York, the United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak was back home this week, making a speech outlining his plans to overturn his own government’s ambitious climate policies.

Explaining he remained “unequivocal” about reaching net zero by 2050, Sunak said the effort must be conducted more “sensibly”, with a more “pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach”.

This included overturning a slew of policies his own government had previously introduced to meet that target, support for energy efficiency programs in housing and the delay of programs to phase out the use of carbon-intensive gas heaters and internal combustion vehicles.

It was a speech in tone and content that was “Morrison-esque” in its flagrancy, said one close observer of climate diplomacy, and it attracted a backlash that went beyond the usual climate advocates.

Former British prime minister Boris Johnson, author of some of the policies Sunak was scrapping, said in a statement, “The green industrial revolution is already generating huge numbers of high-quality jobs and helping to drive growth and level up our country”.

“We cannot afford to falter now or in any way lose our ambition for this country.”

Even before the speech was given, Sir Chris Skidmore, the Tory MP who signed net zero into law while serving as energy minister, described Sunak’s rumoured about-face as “potentially the greatest mistake of his premiership so far”.

Not even the car industry leapt to Sunak’s defence.

“The UK 2030 target is a vital catalyst to accelerate Ford into a cleaner future,” Ford UK chair Lisa Brankin said in a statement as the speech approached. “Our business needs three things from the UK government: ambition, commitment and consistency. A relaxation of 2030 would undermine all three.”

You can imagine how the speech was received at the UN HQ in New York.

“I’ve heard from many of my friends in the UK – including a lot of Conservative Party members, by the way – who have used the phrase ‘utter disgust’,” the former US vice president Al Gore told a reporter on his way into the talks.

Sunak’s speech might have attracted global attention, particularly given its timing, but in truth, it was emblematic of a greater and broader failure.

In his speech to the UN, Colombian President Gustavo Petro observed that over recent months climate change “has shown its teeth like never before”.

Canada is still feeling the effects of wildfires during its summer.Credit: AP

It is a reasonable point. The Northern Hemisphere has just survived its hottest summer on record. Canada is still reckoning with the cost of historic wildfires, Hawaii is still trying to identify all of its dead, and Libya has yet to even count the victims of flooding in Derna.

In this context, the Climate Action Summit was a moment for Guterres to extract even greater commitments for action.

Guterres invited what the UN called a “broad coalition of movers and doers” to attend the summit, but just 34 states and 7 institutions were asked to address its plenary session. Tellingly, the list did not include the world’s three greatest emitters; China, the United States and India. They simply did not meet the criteria of having new actions to announce.

Australia, which was represented by Foreign Minister Penny Wong and Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy Jenny McAllister, was not invited to attend the plenary session either.

Australia is no longer in what Prime Minister Anthony Albanese once called the “climate naughty corner” and the government’s domestic emission reduction policies are taken seriously. But our fossil fuel industry is attracting increasing criticism. We might not be legally responsible for the carbon emitted when our fossils are burnt overseas, but that argument is losing moral weight, says Barry Traill, who heads the Australian lobby group Solutions For Climate and was in New York for the conference.

He noted that the vast majority of speakers at the conference called for an end to the fossil era.

Frustrated by the global failure to act on climate even in the face of this year’s catastrophes, Guterres made a powerful case for the world to abandon its old fuels.

In his speech, he said the people of Derna “lived and died in an epicentre of indifference, as the skies unleashed 100 times the monthly rainfall in 24 hours, as dams broke after years of war and neglect, as everything they knew was wiped off the map”.

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