Starmer can help shape the future of the world at Cop30. He can’t let fear of Farage stop him | Michael Jacobs

NO Sooner, Keir Starmer has reworked his cabinet, pronounced on the racist policies of the reform and delivered his party conference speech, that another key decision comes to him. But this concerns the future of the world. The question is whether the Prime Minister attends the United Nations climate summit in Brazil next month.

You may think it would not require too much reflection. Two years ago, Starmer attacked Rishi Sunak so as not to have gone to a much less important climate meeting and said that if the Prime Minister would certainly assist it.

The Summit of COP30 leaders in the Amazonian city in Belém on November 6 to 7 is the most important since the historic cop in 2015. But the latest reports suggest that Starmer’s political aid does not want it to go. They apparently think that the reformist voters of labor do not care much about the climate crisis and think that it spends too much time abroad. Meanwhile, Starmer’s foreign policy advisers underline Donald Trump’s refined attack on climate change and policies in the UN last week and say it would seem terrible to stay away.

Kemi Badenoch having promised to suppress the 2008 law on climate change – one of the greatest achievements of the government of work, copied all over the world – Starmer cannot afford to become gentle on the often expressed climate commitments.

President Lula of Brazil deliberately called the top of this manager a few days before the conference start, in order to bring governments to renew their commitment to multilateral climate action.

Lula knows he has a problem. COP30 is one of these moments once over five years under the Paris Agreement when countries have to bring their new climatic targets, so-called contributions or the NDC determined nationally. But we already know that the NDCs are not strong enough to achieve the objectives of Paris to maintain global warming at 1.5 ° C or 2C above the pre-industrial levels.

Last week, the largest carbon polluter in the world, China, announced its new targets. President Xi Jinping said that China would reduce its emissions by 7 to 10% of peak levels by 2035. But this is far from a decrease of 30% compared to the 2021 levels which, according to analysts, are consistent with a world path to the zero net after 2050. For the EU, Ursula von der Leyen, president of the European Commission, confirmed that the EU – confirmed The opposition, but the opposition to the opposition somewhere between 66% and 72% out of 1990 of the Member States left it incapable of engaging in the upper figure.

The British NDC was announced a year ago at COP29 by Ed Miliband. Aimed at reducing the emissions produced at the national level by at least 81% on the levels of 1990 by 2035, the objective of the United Kingdom is one of the few who, according to analysts, is in accordance with a global route of 1.5 ° C.

After COP30, the UN will publish an official evaluation adding all NDCs. But after the announcement of China, we know that the world will head for much more than 2 ° C of warming – probably closer to 2.5 ° C. And we know that at these temperatures, there will be catastrophic impacts on species extinctions, elevation of sea level, water shortage and extreme weather events.

COP30 therefore has a huge task: to bring the world back on the right track to 1.5 / 2C. The only problem is that he can’t do this. The Paris Agreement was a compromise between the collective agreement on climatic objectives and “contributions determined on a national level” to achieve them. The index is in the name: these are not subject to a meticulous examination or to criticism by anyone. The “broadcast of emissions” will not even be on the official agenda of the conference. China, India and Saudi Arabia insist that the Paris Agreement prohibits negotiators from discussing.

This is why the summit of leaders is so crucial. Lula and the UN secretary general, António Guterres, want leaders to recognize that their NDCs are not collectively sufficient.

Lula has specific proposals. He wants to create a more rationalized United Nations climate council. He presented an innovative program to finance a tropical deforestation stop. His team is working on an “roadmap” not mandated to show how an annual 1.3 TN (950 billion pounds sterling) climate funding for developing countries can be achieved by 2035. None of this will happen if the leaders do not even attend at the top.

Trump put a glove in his UN speech. Presenting a vision of American power without a curriculum, he avoided the principle of the multilateral cooperation of the United Nations to tackle the shared problems. However, action on the climate crisis perhaps requires this principle most. Not only because global warming knows no limits, but because the Paris agreement is one of the few examples of a successful action by the United Nations.

Before COP15 in Copenhagen in 2009, the world was on the path of around 6 ° C of warming. Due to the commitments that were made there, by COP21 in Paris in 2015, this was around 4C. Since then, after 10 years of amazing reductions in the cost of solar and wind energy and electric vehicles, it is now closer to 2.5 ° C. It is enormous progress – because countries follow the decisions they make together in the United Nations system and because a global green energy transition is already underway. It is not enough for progress – but it is quite wrong to say that the United Nations system does not work.

But he now faces his biggest challenge. Time is exhausted quickly to return to a path of 1.5 ° C / 2C. If world leaders cannot agree in Belém, it will not only be a diplomatic disaster. The world’s business and financial leaders will conclude that governments are not after all about climate action. They will therefore reduce their decarbonization plans, just as they did after the perceived failure of Copenhagen in 2009. The programs reductions will slow down. All global efforts to stop the climate change process, painfully built during the last quarter of a century, could start to decline.

Trump will not be in Belém. But you can be sure that he will publish messages on social networks throughout the summit. If the leaders do not arise, he will happily boast that without even being there, he defeated the Paris Agreement and all the “idiot” woke up the so-called climate crisis. It would be strange that Starmer decides to support him by also staying away.