All of us students started out our day attending the COP24 opening ceremony, in which the Polish president, the mayor of Katowice, the leader of the World Bank, the prime minister of Fiji, and other high level officials spoke to the importance of COP24 and what it needs to accomplish. The opening plenaries made clear the main goals of COP24: to create a rule book for implementing the Paris Agreement and to ramp up climate action efforts. Many leaders cited the IPCC report as evidence that climate action efforts need to be taken seriously.
The President of the World Bank made some bold commitments in their opening speech, such as including climate change as a factor in all of their decision making, implementing a shadow price on carbon, and doubling their budget toward mitigating climate change. I was surprised that there didn’t seem to be a huge initial reaction to these commitments, so I’m hoping to hear more about them throughout the conference.
(Executive Officer of the World Bank, Kristalina Georgieva.)
The president of Poland also used the opening plenaries as an opportunity to share what Poland has been doing to combat climate change and why Katowice is a great city to host COP24. He explained how the conference center where COP24 is being held is in the same site as a shut down coal mine. Amos, Shauna, Marianne, and I debated whether or not the Polish President’s argument was convincing, as he did make a good case for how Poland has been reducing emissions. Still, many of these reductions have still come from a supposedly ‘cleaner’ coal, and many climate activists would agree that clean coal is not really possible.
The opening plenaries raised many issues I can’t wait to follow throughout the conference!
(President of Poland, Andrzej Duda.)
I’m personally quite appalled by the opening plenaries being used to sell “clean coal.” This seems so brazen, given the crisis we all face. Just sayin.
Thanks for the summary of the plenary – interesting. When you say you were surprised not to see more reaction, did you mean in the room itself (it conversations afterward)? Or in the press coverage of it?
Maybe the Polish president should sit through my lecture on hydrocarbons. He apparently needs to learn something about coal.