First Fossil of the Day Award goes to the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia<\/strong> Human Rights and Loss and Damage are not a footnote for countries to remove from text First Fossil of the Day Award goes to the United Kingdom and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia For the first Fossil of the Day in this second week of COP, we have a tie between Saudi Arabia and the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":17147,"parent":0,"template":"","tags":[1054,274,234],"can_resource_type_tax":[15,11,12],"can_campaign_tax":[1053,226],"can_region_tax":[],"can_topic_tax":[],"can_body_tax":[86],"can_event_tax":[90],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n
For the first Fossil of the Day in this second week of COP, we have a tie between Saudi Arabia and the UK for their sterling efforts in securing a weak new Work Programme on Action for Climate Empowerment (ACE) which we\u2019re now going to be lumbered with for the next decade!
First of all the UK Presidency appears to have been eager to finish work early on Friday. They dispensed with making the shaping of the text inclusive, instead pushing all parties to come to an agreement that evening, dashing the hopes of civil society organisations and youth groups, who had worked so hard, of having more time to help shape the text.
Not that it may have made any difference anyway – Saudi Arabia gets their first Fossil for manipulating the rushed and restrictive decision-making process, to keep the words \u201chuman\u201d and \u201crights\u201d out of the final text. ACE!
As if by magic, or maybe by maintaining a hardline position, \u201cHuman rights-based approach\u201d disappeared from the guiding principles. We think we can guess why those oil kings think the next generation doesn\u2019t need a robust climate education\u2026.
Second Fossil of the Day Award goes to Mexico
<\/strong>Mexico has worked hard to earn its Fossil of the Day award. Ranked as the 13th largest emitter of CO2 in the world, it\u2019s not exactly spearheading energy transition. Its government is pumping more, not less, money into the fossil fuel industry, building oil refineries and delaying policies aimed at carbon emissions reductions.
And this is coming from a country where, in 2020 alone, at least 101,000 people were forcibly displaced because of natural disasters, according to the annual report of the Internal Displacement Monitoring Center. Then they turned up in Glasgow with out of date NDCs from 2015, previously rated as \u2018insufficient\u2019 to achieve the 1.5C degree goal and with no loss and damage or emissions mitigation data. And surprise, surprise, they also failed to support the recent \u2018Global Coal to Clean Power Transition\u2019 Statement which championed a just and inclusive transition to prevent loss and damage and human rights violations they\u2019ve been linked to.
They\u2019ve now fallen even further behind with a rating of \u201chighly insufficient\u201d on their climate policies. How much further can this country slide?
Third Fossil of the Day Award goes to the Czech Republic
<\/strong>When the Czech Prime Minister Andrej Babi\u0161 used the COP26 World Leaders’ Forum to brand the EU Green Deal “ideology, not a deal”, it appeared he had mistaken the Glasgow event for a climate change deniers\u2019 conference.
And we can see why – his country has the third highest GHG emissions per capita in the EU and emissions levels going up rather than down. Alongside avoiding mitigation activities at home, it has sidestepped helping the most vulnerable and impacted countries abroad and hasn\u2019t provided a single koruna to the Green Climate Fund.
Mr Babi\u0161 has also been known to point the finger of climate responsibility outside the EU whilst his minions in the Senate of the Czech Republic have recently attempted to reject seven parts of the EU\u2019s Fit for 55 package. For these national and international efforts to avoid climate responsibility you\u2019ve truly earned your fossil.
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