Allowing climate change to continue unchecked is equivalent to “digging our own graves”, says Antonio Guterres. Rising temperatures will “bake” the Earth, in the words of Joe Biden, or “kill” the planet, according to Emmanuel Macron. Political leaders are not short of dramatic metaphors when it comes to the potential impacts of global heating, but they are generally unable to find an equivalent register for ambitious action.
After the apocalyptic rhetoric of world leaders in the days leading up to Cop26, the final Glasgow Climate Pact was a masterpiece of “constructive ambiguity”, a well-known trope of climate diplomacy. The pact calls for “accelerating efforts towards the phasedown of unabated coal power and phase-out of inefficient fossil fuel subsidies”. Many criticised the weakening of the language from “phase-out” to “phasedown” of the dirtiest energy source, but equally problematic is the lack of detail about when these changes should happen and what is meant by “inefficient”. Meanwhile, recent research is showing how ambiguous language contributes to the failure to take global action against climate change.
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