Inequality Writ Large: Covid and the Climate Conference

Greta Thunberg has declared COP26 — the Glasgow climate conference — a “failure” after its first week. Her frustration is based upon watching world leaders use the same tired phrases meant to project hope, all while continuing to fall short of promised climate targets, such as the as-yet unmet 2009 pledge of $100 billion in climate financing for developing countries. But the conference can be considered a failure in another important way.

On Twitter on Thursday, Thunberg called the conference the most “excluding COP ever.” She’s hardly alone in that feeling.

Many people from developing countries did not make it to the U.K. because of inequality — the ubiquitous kind of disparities that leave poor people behind when it comes to the climate crisis, health outcomes, and pretty much anything else you can think of. In this case, the lack of attendance by representatives from the Global South is specifically related to the inability of their countries to access Covid-19 vaccines. While the conference made various allowances for the unvaccinated to attend the conference, including the opportunity to receive a shot, lengthy quarantines and finances got in the way.

Dipti Bhatnagar, a climate justice and energy co-coordinator for Friends of the Earth International, said she knows of no one who actually got the vaccine this way, and that she was told she’d have to pay for her own hotel while quarantined.

Bhatnagar agreed with Thunberg that the event is exclusionary. She was unable to travel from Mozambique to Scotland because she is from a country where just 8 percent of people are fully vaccinated. “The people who need to be there, who need to hold people accountable, are not going to be there,” Bhatnagar told Democracy Now! on Monday.

Between the cost of travel and a lack of access to Covid vaccines, people from the countries most affected by climate change have been shut out of the conference.

“No one who is actually important is here,” Raeesah Noor-Mahomed from South Africa told The Washington Post. “The people who are actually important are back at home.”

Only 2.5 percent of people in low-income countries have received at least one vaccine dose — compared to nearly 70 percent of people in the world’s wealthiest countries. On top of that, G7 countries have bought more than a third of the world’s vaccine supply, BBC reported, even though they make up just 13 percent of the global population.

The hoarding of doses by wealthy countries mirrors their excessive use of fossil fuels and unwillingness to curb emissions.

From 1990 to 2015, the wealthiest 10 percent of the world’s population released 52 percent of the world’s cumulative carbon emissions, according to Oxfam. In the same period, the poorest 50 percent were responsible for just 7 percent.

It’s a common enough refrain within progressive climate action circles: The fight to stop global warming is the fight to stop inequality. Nothing has made that more clear than the first week of the Glasgow climate summit.