What happened on the fourth day of Cop27?
And so we’re edging towards the end of the first week. Friday, tomorrow, is decarbonisation and industry day, so the events will be themed around that topic.
The US president, Joe Biden, is heading to Egypt and Asia right now. He’s expected to drop into Cop27 tomorrow before going on to the East Asia Summit in Cambodia and then the annual G20 in Indonesia. It will be interesting to see how that galvanises the discussions.
Significant developments today included:
Khaled Ali, the lawyer of the imprisoned hunger striker Alaa Abd el-Fattah, has said he went to the prison where his client was being held but was denied access to visit him.
More than 50 of the poorest developing countries are in danger of defaulting on their debt and becoming effectively bankrupt unless the rich world offers urgent assistance, Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Development Programme has warned.
There is a record number of fossil fuel lobbyists at Cop this year. There are 600 of them, an increase of more than 25% on last year and they outnumber any one frontline community affected by the climate crisis.
Obviously, protesters are not happy about this and called for the “criminal” fossil fuel representatives to be booted out of Cop.
Some UK politicians made the rounds, with net zero tsar Chris Skidmore fitting in no less than six events. The business secretary, Grant Shapps, was there too, answering questions about UK oil and gas exploration, and the Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, addressed a couple of panels.
Our colleague Damian Carrington brought us two pieces of good news: first that Israel, Lebanon and Iraq have teamed up to reduce emissions, and that Norway is shutting down plans for a large oilfield.
The US speaker, Nancy Pelosi, made some rather extraordinary comments in which she said Republican politicians believe climate breakdown is a “hoax”.
Slovenia is the latest in a long line of European countries to quit the energy charter treaty, which gives energy companies the right to sue governments.
Guardian reporter Nina Lakhani spent much of the day with protesters, who were wearing white in solidarity with murdered and jailed environment defenders around the world. Egypt is responsible for a few of those imprisonments, notably the hunger striker Alaa Abd el-Fattah.
We’ll be blogging again bright and early tomorrow – see you then!
Updated
There is widespread cynicism that the high-level negotiations between dignitaries at Cop27 will lead to significant progress on tackling the climate crisis, new polling suggests.
According to a survey of 4,800 people in 12 countries, 86% agreed there was a need for urgent action to address the crisis, but only 22% believed anything would be achieved at Sharm-el-Sheikh.
As diplomats, dignitaries, activists and executives from around the world gathered in Egypt, the pollsters at Kantar interviewed people in the UK, Egypt, USA, Spain, Italy, India, Germany, France, Colombia, China, Brazil and Australia to find out their feelings about and expectations of the summit.
They found that two out of three people had heard of Cop, but that only a third of people were really familiar with the aims of the meeting. Four out of five people said global, collective and concerted action was important to tackle climate change.
Of the themes on the COP27 agenda, renewable energy and energy transformation was regarded as most important, Kantar said, followed by sustainable water resource management, adaptation and agriculture, and biodiversity.
