COP26 Coal Reference

Subject – Environment

Context – Unfairly blamed for diluting COP26 coal reference: Official

Concept –

India said it was being “unfairly blamed” for getting a reference to a “phase out” of coal in the COP26 final agreement changed to “phase down”, claiming that all it had done was to borrow the phrase that was used in a US-China joint statement a few days earlier.
Among other things, the Glasgow Climate Pact, as the final outcome of the recently concluded two-week climate change conference was called, had called upon all countries to work towards the “phase-out” of unabated coal power.
India, and many other countries, were not very happy with this language, and moved an amendment at the last minute to get it changed to “phase-down” of unabated coal power.
This was the first time that a phase-out of coal had been explicitly mentioned in any decision of the climate change meetings, and was seen as one of the progressive elements in the Glasgow outcome.