What activists will be demanding on the sidelines of COP26
By Joyce Nelson | October 27, 2021 | Rabble.ca
As thousands gather in Glasgow, Scotland for the COP26 climate summit, environmental activists are hoping to convince the representatives from 197 countries to make some big changes. They want them to include at least three more sectors in the requirements for nations’ emissions reporting and cutting.
The first sector is the plastics industry, which the fossil fuel sector has fully embraced as its financial life-line; the second is militaries, which are currently exempt from having to report on emissions; and, the third is large hydro-dam projects, which are often touted as a climate “solution” but present their own substantial emissions.
As it turns out, each of these sectors contribute massively to greenhouse gas pollution, but so far have been left out of consideration.
Plastics: fracking and cracking
When most of us think of plastics pollution, we think of plastic trash littering beaches and oceans worldwide. But a new report from the Beyond Plastics program at Bennington College in the U.S. reveals that plastics production is on track to release more emissions than coal.
The program issued a new report on Oct. 21 titled The New Coal: Plastics and Climate Change, analyzes ten stages of plastics production, usage and disposal, and finds massive amounts of previously uncounted emissions.
According to the press release for the report, Judith Enck, president of Beyond Plastics (and a former EPA Regional Administrator) stated:
“The fossil fuel industry is losing money from its traditional markets of power generation and transportation. They are building new plastics facilities at a staggering clip so they can dump their petrochemicals into plastics. This petrochemical buildout is cancelling out other global efforts to slow climate change.”
Enck told The Guardian about a new development at fracking sites, where companies fracking for natural gas were accustomed to burning off ethane releases into the atmosphere 24/7 (called “flaring”), rather than capping them. Now, however, fracking companies are using the ethane for what is called “cracking.” She said:
“[They] capture the ethane, build new pipelines, send the gas to ethane cracker facilities, which is heated at very high temperatures and cracked, thus the name, and that becomes the major building block for single-use plastic. It uses an enormous amount of energy…all to give us more single-use plastic packaging.”
The World Economic Forum in 2016 predicted that global plastics production would triple by 2050. Four years later, the pandemic greatly increased the amount of single-use plastics for personal protective equipment (PPE) across the planet.
Enck told Environmental Health News that the leaders at COP26 will need to include plastics in their emissions reductions efforts. “Leaving out plastics is leaving out a giant piece of the problems,” Enck said.
“We would like the national leaders that are gathering in Glasgow, Scotland, to take the plastics issue just as seriously as they are taking transportation and electricity generation.”