In discussing COP27, this year was especially interesting because of the extreme weather issues that have been occurring world wide and in this case the US. 6 years ago, the Paris agreements were set in place and were looking toward keeping the global warming trend to 1.5 degrees celsius. The president of the UK however, declared that this is still alive but “with a weak pulse”. The media coverage on the COP’s and especially COP27 has been, from what I can tell negative. At this point, it is hard to expect that anything significant will come to fruition at these conferences because of how divided the world is all together, and how divided each and every countries views are. There was a news clip posted on YouTube responding to the conference and the caption says “will climate promises be kept?”. Just from this title alone, you can see that a lot of hope for progress is constantly in doubt due to the back and forth nature of climate change, and the still countless amounts of doubt that is coming from world leaders who see it as a political cover to obtain more hegemony.
When looking at how aljazeera covered COP27 they went into depth about how Ukraine is being affected. Because of the war in Ukraine, and the fact that the war was waged by Russia with whom is a major gas supplier and brought up the term “energy security” which was a highly used term in conferences and in EU politics. EU politics is also getting affected by Russia’s war with the EU commission president saying that Europe is “at a critical juncture for the security and stability of the European continent”. Based on these news reportings, the tone in COP27 seems to be, similarly to last years, slightly negative. The fear that I seem to notice is that we will continue to delay really fixing climate issues until it is too late, and until a cataclysmic climate event occurs that really opens our eyes, we won’t do anything.
On the bright side, Aljazeera reports that markets are increasingly benefiting from secondary sources of energy such as wind, solar, and nuclear. These forms of energy due to technological advances a have become more mainstream including electric cars helping out the carbon footprint. The US has earmarked billions of dollars for nuclear nenergy projects even with Russia being out of commission due to the war. This is important because Russia provides a large amount of the enriched uranium that is needed for nuclear use.