Global

Even on its own terms, the outcome of the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow was catastrophic

The future was supposed to be copitalism: a new global economic paradigm where national governments work together through the United Nations (UN) Conference of the Parties (COP) process to limit emissions and prevent runaway climate breakdown – while leaving capitalism otherwise intact.

For decades, the fossil fuel industry ran a wildly successful and well-funded campaign to muddy the waters when it came to climate change. It denied the science, created false equivalencies and dumped billions upon billions of dollars into projects designed to protect profits. Then, a few years ago, this lie was exposed just as the impacts of climate change began to be felt widely around the world.

The world's oceans suck up a huge chunk of human-caused emissions, but their role in mitigation strategies and targets is largely absent from critical negotiations underway at the UN climate conference in Glasgow, Canadian scientist Anya Waite says.

A massive carbon sink, the oceans are doing much of the “heavy lifting,” sopping up as much as 40 per cent of our fossil fuel emissions over the past 200 years, said Waite, CEO of the Ocean Frontier Institute (OFI) at Dalhousie University in Nova Scotia.