5 ways to sort substance from spin in climate politics

Our planet is changing. So is our journalism. This story is part of a CBC News initiative entitled Our Changing Planet to show and explain the effects of climate change and what is being done about it.

It might sometimes feel as though you need a PhD to sift through the "blah blah blah" of political rhetoric around climate change, as activist Greta Thunberg calls it, but as negotiations at the COP26 summit continue, policy experts say there are ways to ignore the spin and figure out what leaders are really saying. 

Earlier this week, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau stood behind a podium at COP26 and encouraged the world to follow Canada's lead to limit warming to 1.5 C, the target set under the Paris Agreement.

The prime minister pointed to the example set by his government's carbon pricing framework and announced that Canada would also start capping oil and gas sector emissions because "what's even better than pricing emissions is ensuring that they don't happen in the first place."  

The problem, climate experts point out, is that since Trudeau's plan doesn't cap oil and gas production and exports, that policy won't actually prevent emissions from happening.

It's just one of many ways that leaders have a tendency to cherry pick and paint themselves in the best light when it comes to tackling climate change. 

Kathryn Harrison, a political science professor at the University of British Columbia who specializes in climate policy, has been attending the summit in Glasgow, an annual meeting of the Conference of Parties (COP), the global decision-making body set up in the 1990s to implement the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and subsequent climate agreements.

She also noticed how Saudi Arabia and Kuwait were dressing up their "already-unambitious" targets with language such as "circular economy." 

A circular economy aims to tackle climate change and pollution by reusing and repurposing existing products as much as possible.

"That sounds good," Harrison said. "Except their plan for carbon capture and sequestration, essentially injecting waste underground, is not consistent with the idea."

CBC  asked Harrison and other experts for some advice on how to sort substance from spin:

Taryn Fransen, an international climate policy expert and a senior fellow with the World Resources Institute, said her main advice is to pay attention to what independent climate analysts are saying.

"There are a lot of independent experts out there who will give you their unvarnished view about how ambitious the target is," she said.

"All politicians want to paint their performance in the best possible light."