>> Do I think we started too late?

Yes, of course, this is COP26.

It's actually 27 years.

That's more than a quarter of a century.

That's completely not okay.

♪♪ >> Hello and welcome to "GZERO World."

I'm Ian Bremmer, and today we look at the global response to climate change.

Well, anything substantive actually come out of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow or will we see more of the same -- big commitments but little action from our world leaders?

I speak to Inger Andersen.

She's the Executive Director of the U.N.'s Environment Programme to find out if a G-Zero world can also become a net-zero world.

Then, the United Kingdom has already pledged to cut its carbon footprint.

But Britain's current gas crisis has nothing to do with climate change.

Don't worry, I've also got your "Puppet Regime."

>> I am not dressed as prisoner, you idiot.

I am just dressed as Russian opposition figure.

>> But first, a word from the folks who help us keep the lights on.

>> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by... >> If you've been paying attention to the climate fight, chances are you've heard of COP.

Greta's been.

Leo's been.

Al Gore's been a few times.

But what is COP exactly?

That acronym stands for Conference of Parties.

That's U.N. speak for a big annual meeting between 196 countries and the E.U., all of whom signed on to the Framework Convention on Climate Change back in the early '90s.

The first COP summit was held in Berlin in 1995.

The first big breakthrough, though, didn't come until the Kyoto Protocol two years later.

It was an agreement that committed rich, industrialized nations to either lower their emissions or pay for carbon-lowering projects in the developing world.

[ Cheers and applause ] And it failed.

The U.S. Senate refused to ratify the treaty, and Canada dropped out to avoid a $14 billion fine for not hitting its targets, and poor countries like China and India, they began to grow at such a quick pace that global emissions after Kyoto soared.

Further progress on climate policy wasn't made until 2015.

The Paris Climate Accords were seen as a groundbreaking deal, and nearly 200 countries agreed to limit global average temperature increases to below two degrees Celsius, preferably closer to 1.5 over pre-industrial levels.

And for a while, things were going better, at least initially.

More than 130 countries have committed or are considering reducing emissions to net zero by 2050, meaning they'll remove as much greenhouse gas as they put into the atmosphere.

Even the United States was on board with Paris.

But in 2017, then-U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris deal, leaving scientists to wonder whether it would even be possible to mitigate climate change's worst impacts without one of the world's biggest polluters being involved.

And although Joe Biden has brought the United States back on board, many still see the Paris Agreement as nothing more than hot air.

See what I did there?

Greta Thunberg, one of the world's most vocal climate activists, is skeptical that world leaders will be able to deliver.

>> Build back better.

Blah, blah, blah.

Green economy, blah, blah, blah.

This is all we hear from our so-called leaders.

Words, words that sound great, but so far has led to no action.

>> She's right to be worried.

Experts say with current policies in place, the world is on track for a global warming of closer to three degrees centigrade.

One irony, of course, is that even hosting one of these U.N. summits emits 60,000 tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, the same emissions as roughly 7,000 homes in a year.

The biggest reason is air travel.

Organizers say they will offset the emissions by planting trees, which is nice.

As for global cooperation, governments have so far failed to provide COVID vaccines to most of the world's poorest and most vulnerable people.

So is there any hope that we're going to do better on climate change?

U.N.

Environment Programme Executive Director Inger Andersen certainly thinks so, but it's going to take a lot of work and kind of fast.

Here's our conversation.

>> I want to start a little more personal because this is a topic that affects us all so directly.

There has been enormous progress.

There is all incredible peril.

You're devoting your life to climate and our environment.

How do you feel about where we are right now personally?

How does it affect you as a human being?

>> We have very little time to get something very big done.

So there are days when I'm overwhelmed, but then I see that these issues that I work on -- nature, pollution, and yes, climate -- that they are ever more central to everyone's agenda.

They're on the front pages of the newspapers, they are in the voting booths, they are in the school cafeterias, they're in the prime ministers' offices, they are on CEOs' agendas and they are certainly on activists' and scientists' agenda.

And you know what?

That gives me a bit of lift and a bit of hope because it is not -- it has not always been like that.

>> Leaders around the world now, not all of them, but a lot of them are certainly talking as if responding to our environmental emergency is the top priority they have.

What's the gap?

How are they actually acting in your view right now?

>> The G20, the largest 20 economies, are responsible for 78% of all carbon emissions.

So if these 20 countries make the requisite shifts, frankly, we are out of the climate crisis provided we provide fair finance to those where many countries and, as you know, UNEP and my headquarters -- I'm on the road right now -- but my headquarters is in Nairobi.

We have many neighboring countries where you have 20%, 30%, 40% access to energy, so they need to expand their energy, productivity and network, and they need to do it with a nonpolluting energy source.

So also financing need to be on the table.

But so you're asking what is the gap between fine words and fine deeds.

When we add all of this up, as you will have seen in the news, we are heading towards a 2.7-degree temperature increase Celsius.

>> Centigrade.

>> Yeah, centigrade, by the end of this century, 2100.

That is the situation we cannot fathom.

And so therefore taking action is needed and that is what we are pushing for.

If we include what is called the conditional elements of these, i.e.

where poorer countries saying, "Okay, yeah, we can do that if we have the technology or if we have the financing," the financing that was promised, actually, then it will take us down to I think it's 2.3 or thereabouts.

So still not where we want to be.

In the IPCC, which is the International Panel on Climate Change, which we host... >> That put out this massive report from the entire world saying, "Here's where we are right now."

>> "Here's where we are."

There are five scenarios.

One takes us way out to, you know, 7, 8 degrees.

And the most optimistic scenario takes us, yes, past 1.5, hitting 1.7 at around 2070, at which point we bend the curve because we have made this stretch, we have dealt with the three big sectors -- transport, energy, and buildings and construction -- and we brought down our energy and CO2 emissions.

So that's where we need to get to and that's what the Climate COP26 will be focused in on.

>> Now, right now, there are a lot of headlines around gas prices in the U.S. are as high as they've been in a decade.

Rolling blackouts, Lebanon out of electricity.

The Chinese with shortages everywhere and saying as a consequence, "Okay, we need to produce more coal right now."

Can we have capitalism as it exists today?

Is it compatible with an optimistic path in how we respond to climate?

>> Two things.

We cannot have capitalism in a collapsed world, first of all.

In a world where fires, inundations, floods, droughts, mass movements of people that will cause huge disturbance, that's actually the scenario we need to avoid, so that's just the first point.

That's not -- Then you would need to have not the free-market economy because it wouldn't work anymore because of the huge disturbance that we would see on food production, on water, on our coastlines and our infrastructure, and the burden it would have on the public purse in terms of the economy.

We've just come through COVID and we've seen the burden, what we borrowed to inject into the economy, for health and for sustaining the economy.

There are smaller economies, admittedly that have made significant transitions already, and frankly, they're sitting pretty, pretty well.

But it's important to recognize that coal-dependent countries, oil-dependent countries, that's not easy, but it will be about being smart about that transition.

And we're seeing even some hydrocarbon, big hydrocarbon producers making those moves into that next economic -- in that next economy that we need to reach.

And frankly, you know, innovation is going so fast.

If we had had this conversation five, six years ago, no one would have thought that concentrated solar or PV would be at the prices that we have today.

>> Now there's a lot of talk whenever we talk about climate change of 1.5 degrees centigrade, and again, we're not on a pathway to that.

We're not close.

The most optimistic scenarios don't get us there.

But what's the -- What was the magic behind 1.5?

Why was that such a significant place for the world to try to coalesce?

>> I think because over 30 years, the IPCC, this panel of climate scientists, have told us with ever greater precision what we, most of us can survive at in terms of the world as we know it.

And when we look at 1.5 even, we are beginning to understand because right now we are 1.2, isn't it?

And when we look at 1.5, we're beginning to understand that actually our world will change.

The fires we're seeing in California, the fires we saw in southern Europe, et cetera.

This is not normal.

This is the new normal.

But also understanding then at which point because sea level rise will happen, but happen slowly as the ice cap melts, as the sea ice melts.

So therefore, understanding at what point do countries as we know them and coastlines as we know them no longer retain the shape that we know and therefore we need to understand that much of the economic might of the world is actually coastal-based.

Think the U.S., think Europe, think Asia.

Where do we have our coast-- sorry, our economic muscle?

It is obviously harbor of ocean-facing cities.

So understanding that that is something that we need to take into account and then small lying, especially atoll states in the Pacific and in the Caribbean and elsewhere -- or not atolls in the Caribbean, but atolls in the Pacific, these countries disappear at below 1.5.

And so that has been the moral tone that was set since Copenhagen by the small island developing states, that they may be small in size and terrestrial size, and massive in terms of ocean size, but the moral lever of ensuring that that civilization does not disappear is very real too.

We in UNEP, we speak about these three planetary crises -- climate, nature loss, and pollution and waste, and we need to get at all three to get to a longer term, sustainable planetary existence on planet Earth.

>> Let me turn to those now.

And on biodiversity, we, of course, continue to see talk of this sixth great extinction, the first that is manmade, fully manmade.

And I -- One of the most depressing statistics I ever saw was that since I was born -- I'll date myself now -- back in 1969, about half of all of the species we know on the planet in terms of biomass are no longer with us.

That's kind of astonishing to think about, and it obviously is speeding up.

Most of the world's media attention has been on what we've been talking about so far, which is carbon emitted into the atmosphere.

Very little is about the rest of the species on the planet that don't have a voice, don't get a vote.

Talk to me a little bit about your view of that part of your remit.

>> Well, here's the thing, right?

On the climate change issue, it hits us more visually and more real in our economy, our job.

If you're a farmer or whatever you are, a fisherman, you see that things are changing.

The fish are no longer where they used to be.

They are further north or further south, depending on their climatic conditions.

And obviously, with all the floods, fires, et cetera, droughts, et cetera, so it's more visual.

And I think in the U.S. -- Katrina, Sandy -- some of these big, big storms were part of many people in the U.S. realizing that this is very real.

And of course, now the California -- the West Coast fires, I should say.

So that's more visible, whereas biodiversity, first of all, is a technical, difficult word.

It's nature, right?

It's nature.

[ Laughs ] And nature gives us the food we eat, the water we drink, the air we breathe, and, you know, most of the housing in which we live.

So understanding that is harder because one bird or one butterfly or one insect, what?

How does this affect me?

But nature is this amazing system where a species nests in one, eats another, migrates to live in a third, et cetera.

It's very interdependent.

Each species is woven in to the web of life, to the rest.

And we take it for granted.

It pollinates our crops.

You know, the massive hydrological cycle through which water is getting into the skies is because of what happened down in the biomass and how it evaporated back up.

These things where we assume that rain will follow, season will follow season, rains will come when they're supposed to be and harvest will follow harvest and the birds and the bees will do their job, this is not something we can assume is there when we are interfering with nature.

We have altered 76% of the terrestrial surface to land surface of our planet and 80-some percent on the sea bottom, if you like, by our activities, by our fishing and by our agriculture.

Now, we all need to eat.

So don't get me wrong, but we need to make sure that our interaction in agriculture is nature positive.

We have fragmented and and converted so much land that nature is being squeezed into little corners.

>> Are you optimistic with the technological fixes that are starting to come into play when we talk about biodiversity, about the genetically modified crops, about, you know, sort of gene mapping and tweaking of some of the species that are on the planet?

>> Some of these are indeed part of the negotiations under the convention, a convention that the U.S. has yet to ratify.

But most countries have done so.

And technology clearly will form a part of this, but as will just smart farming methods.

We can do a lot.

Two billion hectares of degraded land -- Do we need to continue to encroach into tropical forest areas?

Or should we invest in the degraded lands to make them part of the working landscapes that feeds us?

And and all of this and of course, how we produce it.

We don't need necessarily spatial expansion.

We can do vertical expansion and thereby use technology.

There are many, many solutions that are abound and it is entirely possible.

Go to feed this world with good diets while still ensuring that nature provides us what we expected to provide and what we will need for it to provide.

>> When I was a kid, I also remember the hole in the ozone and it was very immediate.

It was very targeted.

It wasn't a huge part of the global economy, and in relatively short order, everybody mobilized, did something about it.

We don't talk about it anymore.

And part of the challenge with climate is, as we've been discussing today, it's everything.

It's interconnected.

It's hard to know even where to start.

>> No, it is hard to know where to start.

But I think we have started.

Do I think we started too late?

Yes, of course, this is COP26.

It's actually 27 years.

That's more than a quarter of a century.

That's completely not okay.

And I'll tell you in the early COPs, because I was there, I was one of the voices -- "Don't talk about adaptation.

I don't want to talk about adaptation in any way.

Why?

Because we knew what to be done.

So to adapt was to accept that it was going to happen.

Right?

Now, I'm on the forefront of saying, "We need financing for adaptation."

So yes, we are too late.

But at least it is happening, and at least we are moving.

And so we are on that climate effort now, and we just have no alternative but success.

>> Inger Andersen, thank you so much for joining us on "GZERO World."

>> It's a pleasure.

♪♪ >> As the United Kingdom gears up for the biggest climate conference of the year, Britons have cut back on fossil fuels, but not on purpose.

A gas crisis across the pond has led to long lines at the pump with queues -- that's what they call lines over there -- lasting for hours.

Gas station owners have been attacked and brawls have even broken out as people attempt to fill their cars.

As the Brits would say, petrol is the new loo roll.

Gas is the new toilet paper.

I'm getting good at this.

And panic buying has quickly become everyone's favorite COVID pastime.

The situation has gotten so bad that the British military has even been called in to help.

So what gives?

Well, this situation wasn't caused by low supply but rather a shortage of lorry drivers.

Trucks, in the parlance.

Unfortunately for Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a post-Brexit Britain means that the freedom of movement once afforded to E.U.

workers has ended and many have packed up and left the U.K. for work back home.

In fact, the country has lost nearly 200,000 E.U.

nationals in a mass exodus last year, caused both by the pandemic and the country's bitter separation from the European Union.

The nation is now suffering its biggest economic dip in three centuries.

Industry leaders have been sounding the alarm for months and say the United Kingdom is currently facing a shortage of at least 90,000 truck drivers.

The British government has responded by extending 5,000 temporary work visas to foreign truck drivers and encouraging the shipping industry to offer more competitive pay and better working conditions to lure more British drivers behind the wheel.

And although gas tanks are filling up again, Boris faces more than just petrol panic this winter.

Labor shortages have carried it into other sectors, too, with British consumers experiencing empty shelves in many shops.

This combined with inflation, the end of a furlough program, and a tax hike on the NHS are all creating a cost-of-living squeeze, making things politically difficult for the prime minister's Tory government.

And the worst news of all -- many Brits will be without Christmas turkeys this year.

Poultry farmers blame Brexit and a lack of staffing for a big shortage of holiday birds.

[ Turkeys gobbling ] ♪♪ And now to "Puppet Regime."

World leaders can be scary sometimes, especially at Halloween.

>> Mr. President, we've learned that you have once again failed, failed to dress up for Halloween.

Is it because Senator Joe Manchin won't let you?

>> Nah, Jack.

I just couldn't think of a good costume.

>> Well, Mr. President, other world leaders certainly were able to think of some imaginative costumes like, for example, take Vladimir Putin with his cute little getup as a prisoner.

>> I am not dressed as prisoner, you idiot.

I am just dressed as Russian opposition figure.

>> Okay, well, I guess Brazil's Jair Bolsonaro had a more accurate costume.

>> Happy Halloween!

Here, have some hydroxychloroquine candies, you little communist punks!

[ Shouts indistinctly ] >> And even France's Emmanuel Macron had a costume, even if it's -- Wait.

What the hell is that?

>> Ja, hello, Europe.

Let's get it together, boys.

America won't help us now.

>> Uh, okay.

Macron is dressed up as Angela Merkel.

That's an interesting way to pretend he's the next leader of Europe, but -- >> Well, hell, what'd Xi Jinping dressed up as, huh?

>> I mean, I think he dressed up as the thing that seems to scare Americans most these days.

>> Trick or Taiwan, Mr. Biden?

Trick or Taiwan?

>> Yikes!

>> Well, it's a good one, Mr. President.

Now, were there any political figures that perhaps you thought of dressing up as?

>> Yeah, sure.

I was going to dress up as the last American president who people actually liked.

>> And?

>> Oh, come on, man, if I dressed up as my old boss, I'd get canceled.

>> "Puppet Regime"!

>> That's our show this week.

Come back next week, and if you like what you see and I hope you do because I mean, we talked about trucks and lorries and we can translate the U.K. for you right here, check us out at gzeromedia.com.

♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ >> Major corporate funding provided by founding sponsor First Republic.

At First Republic, our clients come first.

Taking the time to listen helps us provide customized banking and wealth-management solutions.

More on our clients at firstrepublic.com.

Additional funding provided by... ...and by...