November, 08 2021, 12:51pm EDT
Glasgow First Draft Text Is "Exceptionally Weak" With No Mention of Fossil Fuel Phaseout
This glaring omission comes despite the fact that experts at the International Energy Agency have made clear there can be no new fossil fuel projects, beyond those already underway this year, if we’re to deliver the goal of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C.
WASHINGTON
The first draft of the Glasgow final decision text at COP26 completely fails to mention fossil fuels, despite expert consensus on the need to end new coal, oil and gas immediately to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement 1.5C goal.
Thanks to blocking by fossil fuel interests, the first version of the official text, published by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, fails to acknowledge that fossil fuels are driving the climate crisis, nor does it make any commitment to tangible actions to end global reliance on coal, oil and gas. The text is just 850 words long.
Campaigners are gravely concerned because ordinarily, the first draft of a COP text is relatively ambitious, and becomes weaker over the second week as countries work in caveats for themselves. For the first draft to be so weak does not bode well.
This glaring omission comes despite the fact that experts at the International Energy Agency have made clear there can be no new fossil fuel projects, beyond those already underway this year, if we're to deliver the goal of keeping global temperature rise to 1.5C. And after the most recent IPCC report the UN Secretary General has said that the latest climate science must sound a "death knell for fossil fuels" and that countries should end all new fossil fuel exploration and production.
Campaigners are calling on negotiators to stand up to fossil fuel producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Australia, which have blocked fossil fuel reduction even being mentioned in the last 25 COP texts and are crippling ambition in the negotiations at Glasgow. The key markers of success for the week ahead are as follows:
- Glasgow talks must limit global temperature rise to 1.5C, or leaders will be signing a death notice for many countries, not a climate pact.
- The text of the agreement must commit to the phaseout of fossil fuels, or it will not achieve the 1.5C goal.
- Getting there means: no cheating, no loopholes, no offset scams, and no greenwash.
- Governments must isolate Saudi Arabia, Australia and Brazil, a loophole champion, and climate vulnerable countries must be supported.
Jennifer Morgan, Executive Director of Greenpeace International, has been to every COP and every time the mention of fossil fuels has been blocked by the same countries. She said: "What's very concerning here in Glasgow is that the first draft of the climate pact text is already exceptionally weak. Usually the text starts with some ambition, which then gets watered down. "To keep 1.5 alive, four words must be added: 'fossil fuels phase out', and countries must come back next year to close the gap."
Edwin Namakanga, aged 27, from Uganda is a climate activist from Fridays for Future, Most Affected People and Areas, who arrived at COP on board the Greenpeace Rainbow Warrior ship last week, with a message for world leaders: stop failing us.
Edwin said: "In my lifetime I've seen first hand the destructive impact of the climate crisis, which everyone knows is driven by fossil fuels.
"The result from Glasgow must be the end of new fossil fuels, and there must be proper financial support for countries in the Global South. We need solidarity and just transition to renewable energy, because anything less is a death sentence for whole peoples, countries and areas."
Kate Blagojevic, Greenpeace UK's head of climate, said: "The UK Presidency has let the most vulnerable nations down by supporting such a weak first draft text. Alok Sharma can still fix this and insist world leaders up their game through stronger commitments on phasing out fossil fuels and significantly increasing pledges on adaptation finance in the next draft. And that action can start in the UK today by ruling out all new fossil fuel projects, including the Cambo oil field, and making sure the UK's climate finance contributions don't eat into the aid budget."
Negotiators at COP26 have just five more days to reach an agreement which will inform how countries tackle the climate crisis, and will seek to nail down a final text for countries to sign.
At the halfway point of the talks, countries have so far announced a string of voluntary agreements that contain vague language and big loopholes.
Last week the Taskforce for Scaling Voluntary Carbon Markets, put forward by UN Special Envoy on Climate Action and Finance, and former Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, was widely criticized as a greenwash operation, including by Greta Thunberg. On Wednesday Greenpeace activists staged a protest to disrupt the launch event, and ensure the Taskforce does not press ahead unchecked.
Over the weekend, Saudi Arabia came under fire for trying to block the creation of any 'cover decision' for the final text whatsoever, for deleting references and for trying to block efforts to achieve progress on adaptation. A key pillar of the Paris Agreement, adaptation is the effort to help millions of people around the world cope with the impacts of rising temperatures. Lack of progress on adaptation would make it difficult for vulnerable countries, including the African block of nations, to embrace any final agreement, making success at COP26 less likely.
And the Saudi government has already tried to influence the wording of a landmark UN climate science report, due out in March next year. The BBC and Unearthed revealed that representatives from the Saudi oil ministry pushed the authors of the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report on mitigation to remove a reference to published literature that found fossil fuels need to be phased out if we're to avoid the worst effects of climate change. The Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is one of the world's biggest oil exporters.
And today [MON] Global Witness revealed that there are more delegates at COP26 associated with the fossil fuel industry than from any single country. Fossil fuel activists outnumber the UNFCCC's official indigenous constituency by almost two to one.
Given that the next two conferences will be held in Egypt and then the United Arab Emirates, campaigners fear that it's crunch time for getting the COP text to commit to fossil fuel phaseout.
Arshak Makichyian, aged 27, is a Russian activist who is attending COP26. He said: "It is astonishing to me that in all these years that world leaders have had to deliver the big solution to climate change - over my whole life - not once have they mentioned the cause of the problem. My future is resting on just 850 words - but we need four more: phase out fossil fuels.
"What the hell have they been doing? We are out of time. Glasgow must mean a total and immediate fossil fuel phaseout. That's it."
Greenpeace is a global, independent campaigning organization that uses peaceful protest and creative communication to expose global environmental problems and promote solutions that are essential to a green and peaceful future.
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'Insane This Is Legal': Bettors Make Huge Profits From Suspiciously Timed Wagers on Iran War
"Reminder that Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket's advisory board and his firm invested double-digit millions into the platform last year."
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Bloomberg reported that six accounts on Polymarket, all newly created this month, "made around $1 million in profit" by betting on the timing of the US attack on Iran. The accounts, according to Bloomberg, "had only ever placed bets on when US strikes might occur," and "some of their shares were purchased, in some cases at roughly a dime apiece, hours before the first explosions were reported in Tehran."
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Rep. Mike Levin (D-Calif.) wrote that "prediction markets cannot be a vehicle for profiting off advance knowledge of military action" and demanded "answers, transparency, and oversight."
"Reminder that Donald Trump Jr. sits on Polymarket's advisory board and his firm invested double-digit millions into the platform last year," Levin wrote, referring to the president's eldest son. "The [Justice Department] and [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] both had active investigations into Polymarket that were dropped after Trump took office."
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Polymarket currently allows users to bet on when Iran will have a new supreme leader, when the US and Iran will reach a ceasefire agreement, and when the US will invade Iran.
The celebrity news tabloid TMZ reported Saturday that "a group at a Washington, DC restaurant was talking openly in the bar area Friday afternoon about a national secret that was about to literally explode hours later—the bombing of Iran."
As journalist David Bernstein noted, that—if true—leaves open the possibility that "these 'insider' bets have been placed by any rich person with good ears in DC."
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"What they posed as the threat they were trying to preempt—an attack by Iran against US forces—is so extremely implausible, it is also laughable," said one analyst.
Mar 01, 2026
Senior Trump administration officials attempted during a briefing with reporters on Saturday to make their case for the joint US-Israeli military assault on Iran that has so far killed hundreds and plunged the Middle East into chaos.
According to experts who listened to the briefing, which was conducted on background, the justification for war was incredibly weak. Daryl Kimball, president of the Arms Control Association, told Laura Rozen of the Diplomatic newsletter that the administration's argument was "the flimsiest excuse for initiating a major attack on another country without congressional authorization, in violation of the UN Charter, in many decades."
During his early Saturday remarks announcing the attacks, President Donald Trump claimed that "imminent threats from the Iranian regime" against "the American people" drove him to act. But Kimball said that administration officials "provided absolutely no evidence" to back that assertion during the briefing.
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Following the start of Saturday's assault, which Trump explicitly characterized as a war aimed at overthrowing the Iranian government, unnamed administration officials began leaking the claim that Trump feared an Iranian attack on the massive US military buildup in the Middle East, prompting him to greenlight the bombing campaign in coordination with Israel and with a nudge from Saudi Arabia.
Kimball, in a social media post, took members of the US media to task for echoing the administration's narrative. "Reporters need to do more than stenography," he wrote in response to Punchbowl's Jake Sherman.
"The American people were lied to about Iraq. The American people are being lied to again today—and once again, it is ordinary people who will pay the price."
Trump and top administration officials also repeated the longstanding claim from US warhawks that Iran is bent on developing a nuclear weapon, something Iranian leaders have publicly denied—including during recent diplomatic talks. Neither US intelligence assessments nor international nuclear watchdogs have produced evidence indicating that Iran is moving rapidly in the direction of nukes, as claimed by the administration.
Rozen noted that some remarks from administration officials during Saturday's briefing "suggested Trump’s negotiators"—a team that included Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff—"may not have had the expertise or experience to understand the Iranian proposal to curb its nuclear program." Rozen reported that one administration official kept misstating the acronym for the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the UN nuclear watchdog.
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Experts said it should be obvious—particularly given Trump's decision to ditch the previous nuclear accord—why Iran would not trust the US to stick by such a commitment.
The administration's inability to provide a coherent justification for war tracks with the rapidly shifting narrative preceding Saturday's strikes—an indication, according to some observers, that Trump had made the decision to attack Iran even in the face of diplomatic progress and left officials to try to cobble together a rationale after the fact.
In a lengthy social media post, Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted war was necessary because Iran "refused to make a deal" and because the Iranian government "has targeted and killed Americans," hardly the claim of an imminent threat push by the president and other administration officials.
Brian Finucane, a senior adviser to the US Program at the International Crisis Group, noted in response that the Trump administration has "sidelined anyone who could articulate... a coherent argument, partly because expertise is deep state and woke and partly because they just don't care."
The result is another potentially catastrophic war that runs roughshod over US and international law, puts countless civilians at risk, and threatens to spark a region-wide conflict.
"President Trump, along with his right-wing extremist Israeli ally Benjamin Netanyahu, has begun an illegal, premeditated, and unconstitutional war," US Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement on Saturday. "Tragically, Trump is gambling with American lives and treasure to fulfill Netanyahu's decades-long ambition of dragging the United States into armed conflict with Iran."
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"As we plunge headlong into another catastrophic war, Sen. Schumer and Rep. Jeffries’ throat-clearing and process critique only serves Trump and the war machine."
Mar 01, 2026
The top Democrats in the US Congress, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, faced backlash on Saturday over what critics described as tepid, equivocal responses to President Donald Trump's illegal assault on Iran—and for slowwalking efforts to prevent the war before the bombing began.
While both Democratic leaders chided Trump for failing to seek congressional authorization and not adequately briefing lawmakers on the details of Saturday's attacks, neither offered a full-throated condemnation of a military assault that has killed hundreds so far, including dozens of children, and hurled the Middle East into chaos.
Schumer (D-NY)—who infamously worked to defeat the 2015 nuclear deal that Trump later abandoned during his first White House term, setting the stage for the current crisis—said he "implored" US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to "be straight with Congress and the American people about the objectives of these strikes and what comes next."
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Jeffries (D-NY), a beneficiary of AIPAC campaign cash, said in his response to the massive US-Israeli assault that "Iran is a bad actor and must be aggressively confronted for its human rights violations, nuclear ambitions, support of terrorism, and the threat it poses to our allies like Israel and Jordan in the region."
"The Trump administration must explain itself to the American people and Congress immediately, provide an ironclad justification for this act of war, clearly define the national security objective, and articulate a plan to avoid another costly, prolonged military quagmire in the Middle East," said Jeffries.
The Democratic leaders' responses bolstered the view that their objections to Trump's attack on Iran are based on procedure, not opposition to war.
This is a disgusting and cowardly statement handwringing about process and the need for a briefing.
No you idiot. This war is a horror and a disaster and must be directly opposed. Any Democrat who can’t say that needs to resign and ESPECIALLY the ones in leadership. https://t.co/CdZoEyNkOy
— Krystal Ball (@krystalball) February 28, 2026
Claire Valdez, a New York state assemblymember who is running for Congress, said that "as we plunge headlong into another catastrophic war, Sen. Schumer and Rep. Jeffries’ throat-clearing and process critique only serves Trump and the war machine."
"Democrats should speak clearly and with one voice: no war," Valdez added.
Schumer and Jeffries both committed to swiftly forcing votes on War Powers resolutions in their respective chambers. But reporting last week by Aída Chávez of Capital & Empire indicated that top Democrats worked behind the scenes to slow momentum behind the resolutions, helping ensure they did not come to a vote before Trump launched the war.
"The preferred outcome of many AIPAC-aligned Senate Democrats, according to a senior foreign policy aide to Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer, is that Trump acts unilaterally, weakening Iran while absorbing the domestic backlash ahead of the midterms," Chávez wrote.
Neither Schumer nor Jeffries backed legislation last year aimed at forestalling US military intervention in Iran.
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Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), who has been floated as a possible 2028 challenger to Schumer, said Saturday that "the American people are once again dragged into a war they did not want by a president who does not care about the long-term consequences of his actions."
"This war is unlawful. It is unnecessary. And it will be catastrophic," said Ocasio-Cortez. "This is a deliberate choice of aggression when diplomacy and security were within reach. Stop lying to the American people. Violence begets violence. We learned this lesson in Iraq. We learned this lesson in Afghanistan. And we are about to learn it again in Iran. Bombs have yet to create enduring democracies in the region, and this will be no different."
Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.), a vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, was more blunt.
"Congress must stop the bloodshed by immediately reconvening to exert its war powers and stop this deranged president," she said. "But let’s be clear: Warmongering politicians from both parties support this illegal war, and it will take a mass anti-war movement to stop it."
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