Well the year is finally upon us in which we will see a Turtle Mountain Brewing taproom come to fruition! I was lucky enough to be able to talk to head brewer David Pacheco about all things beer and owner Nico Ortiz about the forthcoming taproom and future plans to boot for our annual Look Back/Look Ahead Series.

Solo: So, how are things?

David: Well, we’re not dead yet. I guess this time around for this quarantine we are a little bit more prepared. I kind of had an inkling that I knew that the numbers weren’t going to be good going into the holiday season. It just wasn’t portending very well for how beer movement was going to be, so I just kept some space in my cold room and I’m glad I did. I was just barely able to get everything from fermentation side to the server room with just managing lagers here and there. But, we are in good hunker-down mode.

The last one (shutdown) was just awful. I was dancing between fermenters just trying to find a place for my beer when the numbers weren’t there. They each come with different challenges. We were seeing way more beer movement in the first quarantine rather than this one, where we are probably selling a little over half as much beer. We are only a couple of weeks into the second one.

Solo: Here’s hoping it doesn’t last too long.

David: I suppose this is kind of the narrative for most of the breweries you will end up talking to. It’s certainly much harder for those who don’t own their own building. Thankfully for Turtle, our biggest expense is labor. When the brewery is able to get into hunker-down mode, we can have very little impact on that, and generally then the kitchen is the biggest portion of that. We were working quite a bit during the initial quarantining, but this time around it’s way different in that sense. I’m pretty much limiting my assistant’s hours, as much as I hate to do it.

Solo: Yeah, you have to do it, unfortunately. That’s just the case across the brewing industry and restaurants across the board right now. It’s heartbreaking, but survival is the imperative here, hunker down as you said, and get through. Hope to get some sort of semblance of business back in a couple of months. On the beer front, what sorts of things did you do recipe wise?

David: This was like my first year, really, being a head brewer and the guy in charge. I found that I was mainly a session guy. I really like sippers, something that I can constantly drink. Especially during the quarantine, there were weeks where I didn’t have really all that much to do, so I wanted a nice session beer at my desk at home to do whatever I did need to do, and then enjoy what I wanted to do afterwards. So I wanted to provide something like that, not too heavy. I did a lot of session IPAs. I came out with kind of my take on the Shiner Bock, which I’ve heard described as a Texas bock, which is a nice term for it, but the official category would be an international dark lager.

Solo: Kind of a paler, less hearty version of a traditional bock.

David: Not so alcohol heavy. I was still wanting to imbue lots of strong good flavors in there and keep it as “craft” as we all would like to do. I came out with one of these and it was a hit. It’s kind of nice having such a good beer over a quarantine, it might be a little selfish of me since I get to have it to myself for all this time, but on the other hand, I don’t have the demand so it’s not moving and it’s messing up with the flow overall. I’ve got to try and look at the bright side of things.

Solo: Oh, definitely.

David: So I tried to do a lot of session beers, light lagers, and to varying degrees they were hit and miss. Now I think certainly revisiting certain ones and making them better, adjusting them is what I will be doing. Though I can’t really have a brown during the summer, you know, so marking the progress over time as the seasons change and enter new seasonalities is something I’ll be looking at.

Solo: It’s one of the most fun parts about brewing in general is that cyclical nature of styles and such. It can be a little constraining at times for a professional brewer, but you can’t really have a Russian imperial stout in June, alas.

David: There is certainly a following for the heavy stouts among my friends, and there will be drinkers for that style. There are certain styles that I would really like to brew for myself, but I’m not quite sure they would sell. For instance, like a dunkelweizen, we have an English mild on right now called AgriCola, and it’s a very delicious beer, but it is just that. It’s a mild and I don’t think it really excites people or gets their interest, but in its own right it is a very good beer. So I’ve been trying to do a British or English stint. I did a British gold, which was popular. We did our mild and a bitter; the bitter went a lot better than the mild and I think that’s literally just in the nomenclature. We all know not to label things as mild because it’s not appealing, for whatever reason.

Solo: To the American palate, anyway.

David: It’s easy to forget that a lot of these original styles of the craft brewing movement came from all of these English ales, for instance. The bitter ended up turning into a pale ale. You’ve got to know your roots. It’s kind of my own journey, too. I want to see how I can produce these with any extent of ease. I want to test my mettle. There are certain styles that I still haven’t been able to produce to my own standards. We’ve been trying to do a hazy for a while, but we just still haven’t been able to get that haze suspension to work out properly. After a while in cold temperatures it just tended to drop out. We’ve only tried it once, but we feel the pressure, man, we know what’s in. It’s a lot of time and attention. You have to be there during your initial fermentation, throwing hops in there.

A lengthy discussion then followed about the challenges of brewing hazy IPAs before we got back on track.

David: This is certainly a style that lends itself to the explosion of interest in beer in the last 20-30 years. But yeah, we’ve been trying to brew that and I’d say we’re close. It’s just a matter of getting more unprocessed proteins in there, even more hops. That style was pretty much all of my troubles on the brewing side of things.

As for the troubles of this year, I feel like I was mainly a reactionary brewer. It was hard to dictate what the demand was going to be next month, and if I was going to have room to move that beer into the cold room, and so on and so forth. It was really hard for me to plan things. I do hope that I can get some more consistency towards the latter end of next year, to where I can have a more fluid plan rather than just being highly adaptive. That is a trait and a necessary skill for a lot of breweries out there. It’s not an environment that I want to be in, or a trait that I want to have constantly because then I’m always on edge and super tense.

Solo: And, nobody wants that. The great Charlie Papazian’s “relax, don’t worry, have a homebrew” or a brew in general, that’s the ethos that we want. But, times such as these dictate dealing with a lot of challenges we didn’t expect to face. Any other thoughts on going forward this next year, apart from more of the same process you have been describing?

David: The beers and their further enhancements, tiny nitpicking and adjustments to just make it a better pint of beer is of course always going to be my objective for the forthcoming year. Really, my whole other objective here has been trying to bring this brewery into this modern age. Tim (Woodward), who is now at Bosque, did the groundwork here, standardizing a lot of fittings and making sure it all fluidly went smooth here. Mick (Hahn) added on to that with various installations and whatnot. Now, I’m faced with various tasks like getting a keg washer installed, which certainly has not been an easy feat, getting power routed properly and getting my air compressor in. Making sure everything is the right size, these are things I never imagined doing a little over a year ago.

I’ve found my strengths in the stagnant times. We’ve been able to do a lot of things physically to the brewery (that) would’ve, to be quite frank, been really hard if we had the same kind of demand that we did last year before all of this happened. Sometimes things break and you have damages to deal with. You almost thank your lucky stars that, oh wait, you’re in quarantine now so it’s not a big deal. You can take your time with all of these installation projects, getting things back up and running. I think I dodged some land mines, which (while) I condemn the pandemic every day, but there have been some benefits to the lull in demand in terms of being able to get a lot of things done.

Solo: Certainly having time to focus on getting the brewery in the best shape as possible and doing some of those other things that have probably been on the back burner, or in the back of your head done, that’s a very good point. When things somewhat do normalize we ought to see even smoother sailing then.

David: We’ll be able to do it. We will be able to hit the ground running.

Solo: Hopefully you will be able to focus on even more fun beers and the act of creation.

David: As a head brewer, the beer is obviously your show, for sure, but you have a whole consort of other things and worries that you have to keep in check. You’ve got to make sure all of your equipment is running as efficiently as possible, and I still have a long way to go in that regard. You’re only limited to your own capital, really. If we’re not bringing any money in, it’s going to be really hard to justify some really big installations. It’s hard to be in that grey area.

Solo: Yeah, you’re kind of, well, we can do some things with what we have on hand, but certainly not a time to be buying a bunch of new tanks and brew kettles and all of that.

David: It’s been interesting seeing my own personal courage in attacking these projects and through that I’ve become a better brewer. I have a better swath of experience under my belt, and I can then take that forward into perhaps even crazier times.

Solo: Owning your equipment rather than looking at it and thinking, well, is this going to do what I want it to do or not. Having that change in relationship is incredibly important.

David: It was a really interesting ascendency from assistant to head brewer, where I have all of these worries about the mechanics of my brewery, rather than just getting in there and getting my job done transferring beer, etc.

Solo: It’s an awful lot more responsibility.

David: Times are good until your glycol pump goes out, which definitely did happen to us in the summer. But, we were in quarantine during that time, so it wasn’t the worst or as bad as it could have been, but it definitely gave me some lessons on yeast-keeping skills and yeast management. It became all the more apparent to me that yeast is a very delicate ingredient.

We then got a little nerdy about yeast, so let us skip ahead as I turned my ear to Turtle’s owner Nico for his reflections on 2020 and all things 2021.

Solo: Quite a year, huh? Not what any of us expected at all.

Nico: I echo the saying that I’m sure a lot of other people have told you that January and February were record numbers. We were up like 15 percent, the numbers were just huge. We have not seen that ever. We were going into March with our 21st anniversary already planned, and I was thinking this might be the year that we finally break sales records and everything. Of course, March came and went and I should’ve known better. I was not a pessimist, but I always get concerned when things are going so well, far above normally well.

Overall, things weren’t bad. Our sales for the year thus far were probably down about 15 percent, so instead of being up 15 percent like they were in the first two months of the year, they’re down 15 percent. So we swung 30 percent, which is pretty dramatic. Things could certainly be a whole lot worse. We could be on the closed list. So I’ve taken full advantage of every grant and loan program that’s been put out there. I’ve applied for and received everything, I’m not shameful about that. I’ve put enough money into the tax system that I might as well get some back out again.

Solo: Absolutely. Thoughts on what you’ll be doing this next year? Is a taproom still in the works?

Nico: Yeah, 2021 I will say that I’m guardedly optimistic, which is what I say to make sure and not jinx myself. I am guardedly optimistic that 2021 will be the 2020 that we did not have. We signed a lease on a taproom. We’ve done this twice before in the east mountains from ’03 to ’05, and then we did it up in Mariposa ’13 to ’14. Anyway, we’ve tried this twice before and it has not worked out for a variety of reasons. I’ve learned from my mistakes on those two previous efforts to, A. not go off the beaten path, and B. if you’ve got to go all in, you’ve got to go all in.

So I signed a lease on a 7,400-square-foot inside and 4,200-square-foot outside patio, full-on restaurant out in Enchanted Hills, which is right in the middle of tens of thousands of people, right on the main drag (Highway 528). So we’re in the process of getting the liquor license submitted. We’ve finalized the design for the interior of the place, so we’re working on plans for a building permit. Depending upon how long it will take to get the liquor license approved, I was thinking six months, so best case scenario we will probably open up in May. That’s as long as I can get the applications in and they don’t take longer than five or six months. So late May/June time we should be open.

Solo: Fantastic! That is great news. It’s been a long time coming for you, too, so I’m very happy to hear that.

Nico: Yeah, well, we can’t let Bosque have all the fun over there, can we? Obviously in our previous Look Back/Look Ahead we didn’t have a whole lot of look ahead; things were kind of in lock down for a while. We’re taking advantage of all of the cheap and or free money available through all of these programs to squirrel away some, and be able to hopefully largely fund this expansion through either grants or low-interest loans. So we’re going to do the government one better, instead of preserving jobs we’re actually going to create more jobs, and I figured that that is certainly the better part of the intent of a lot of this money of not just preserving, but actually creating.

We will be sure to keep you all informed with any updates on the forthcoming Turtle Mountain taproom!

Solo: That’s such great news. People can certainly use some good jobs going forward. Any other thoughts on what you might be up to this next year with everything kind of in limbo?

Nico: Well, I’m not sure what David had said about his plans, but I know he as been frustrated with every closure comes our lack of ability to sell that much more beer, so he just kind of has beer hanging out in the back. 2020 has been brutal on his ability to actually do any kind of like specialties, just because our throughput is so minimal. A 10-barrel batch of beer will last months.

He and I are both looking forward to having a new big outlet for being able to sell a bunch of beer. That way he can get them off serving tanks and we can transfer them to the new cooler, and it’ll lead to significantly more throughput of beers through the system because (of how) the brewhouse is set up in a location in this building. We have six fermenters (and) we’ve got 15 serving tanks, but that’s it. We can’t put any more fermenters, we can’t put any more anything in there. I know David’s kind of champing at the bit to get some new beers through the pipeline. His directive from me (in) 2021 is to get a hazy, figure out that hazy because he did one and it dropped out. It was a good IPA, but it turned out juicy, not hazy. We need to get a hazy because we are the only damn brewery around that doesn’t have a hazy IPA. But, they’re not the easiest beers to make.

Solo: Yeah, we talked a bit at length about the hazies and the difficulties and the popularity and all of that sort of thing.

Nico: So we are definitely game on getting a wider variety of beers through the pipeline. I’d like to get a place where we can stick some barrels (in there) and we can do some, not bourbon barrel aged, but maybe some rum or other kind of barrel-aged beers. Our little brewery here, the space that did have two barrels now has a keg washer, which is a significantly more important thing to do than have barrels back there. We’ve got one last barrel-aged beer that we transferred into a couple of kegs. It’s a black currant Baltic porter which is about two years old. It’s a mixed legacy, a robust Baltic porter with sort of a dark fruit that I tasted and I thought it was pretty good. So we transferred it into some stainless, and we’re going to let it sit and carbonate and then we’ll actually hove an honest-to-god beer release for it, like we should be doing.

Baltic porter certainly piques our interest (we’ve only maybe done a few collaborations in that style) and our tastebuds eagerly anticipate this release when it happens!

Nico: We do want to do some more beers, but right now for a lack of throughput I’m just kind of hunkered down on lagers since you’ve got plenty of time to lager beer.

Solo: And, they tend to just get better with age.

Nico: Yup. As far as what 2021 is going to bring, we’re going to toast 2020 being gone and focus on putting it behind us. But, the big focus is going to be opening up a monster facility like we are going to is going to take a lot of money and a lot of time, so the first six months of 2021 is going to be spent getting this new place online, and make sure that this, the original place, keeps on going. So 2021, knock on wood that we don’t have any big resurgence of the pandemic or anything like that, we’re going to run with two places, and I’d like to look at the possibility of getting a production brewery of sorts out here in Rio Rancho where we can actually put in a canning line. The canned product on store shelves is kind of glut at this point, but all of these can releases with Ex Novo and La Cumbre especially, damn they make money with these can releases. You don’t even really need to put this beer on store shelves, you can mostly just have a can release and people will come out and buy it.

Solo: That cuts your costs, too, not paying a distributor to put it out there. You build the hype and the people will come.

Nico: 2021, once we get this new place opened and stabilized, then maybe in 2022 for next year’s Look Back/Look Ahead we’ll be talking about putting up a steel structure. Bosque’s on the north side of Rio Rancho, but my longevity and name recognition is still strong, and I’ve got to try to capitalize on that like Second Street did up in Santa Fe.

Solo: Absolutely. They’ve been coming up with great can releases, too, up in Santa Fe, so it’s nice to see that, for sure.

Nico: Turtle’s kind of like that old brewery, we don’t make the news too often as far as having all kinds of crazy barrel-aged or hazy releases or any of that kind of stuff, and I’m OK with it. We’ve really depended on the restaurant side of things to keep us afloat during this pandemic. Beer and food is great, but a lot of people just come in for food, not for beer. So we’ve had to lean on the food service not at the expense of the beer, but David is doing what he is doing without having a lot of throughput. So we’ve been in kind of stasis a little bit. He’s certainly looking forward to hopefully getting out of red and yellow into the green not too far into 2021 so we can have some throughput, because a tank of beer lasting for months is just frustrating for him and for me.

Solo: It certainly is.

Nico: But, we’re still trucking along. I’m happy to be in a position where I’m doing an awful lot better than a lot of other breweries. We’re still here, we’re still going to be here in 2021 and do the best we can and put out the best product that we can, just fight the good fight as much as we can. The new place is being designed with full COVID experience as far as the placement of the tables, the distance, a monster outdoor patio. You name it, anything that we’ve learned from the restrictions in 2020 have been incorporated into the design of this place. So if and when the next time it hits, we’re going to be ready. We’re not going to have to modify all that much. We are just looking forward to more good beers in 2021, and hopefully a return to business as usual as can be.

Solo: I think the asterisk, as usual as can be, is pretty much our whole lives right now.

Nico: Turtle has been very fortunate. We still have 40 of our 60 employees employed, so we’ve managed to keep an enormous amount of people employed. We’re doing the best we can.

* * * * *

Here’s hoping the cautious optimism bears fruit as we move into 2021 from an incredibly difficult 2020 on so very many fronts. The future does seem bright for the Rio Rancho institution that is Turtle Mountain, with the forthcoming taproom expansion and future plans for a production facility, to boot. On the beer front, let us hope that the pandemic will allow us some measure of normalcy so that the creativity of David can be brought to bear in full. If our conversation hinted at anything, he’s got quite a few cards to play in the deck, so to speak.

So until then, stay safe, stay thirsty, order some takeout, grab a growler or two, and enjoy everything Turtle Mountain has to offer.

Prost!

— Franz Solo

The biggest climate conference in history was a tiny step toward solving a gargantuan problem.

GLASGOW, Scotland — The high-stakes COP26 climate change talks in Glasgow concluded on Saturday evening with the strongest government commitments to fighting climate change in history. Yet they’re still not enough to meet the ambitious targets of the Paris climate agreement and stave off some of the worst consequences of global warming.

It was not the massive course correction for the climate that activists — some of whom staged a “die-in” outside the COP26 venue — were clamoring for.

“I hope you can appreciate that where I live, a 2 degree [Celsius warmer] world means that a billion people will be affected by extreme heat stress,” Vanessa Nakate, a climate activist from Uganda, told attendees. “I hope you can understand why many of the activists who are here in Glasgow and millions of activists who could not be here do not see the success that is being applauded in these halls.”

But unlike so many climate meetings in recent years, the negotiations in Glasgow did not collapse or produce only a tepid statement of consensus.

After working through the night on Friday, past the scheduled close of 5 pm, negotiators made progress on some crucial unsolved problems, like how countries can trade emissions credits and pledging more money to deal with the staggering costs of climate change in developing countries.

The final agreement, dubbed the Glasgow Climate Pact, was endorsed by nearly 200 countries and functions as a set of principles and goals for action on climate change. While there is no enforcement mechanism, the agreement serves as a lever for international political pressure.

For the first time, UN climate negotiators specifically called to draw down fossil fuels, which scientists say is necessary to meet climate targets. Many countries and corporations have fiercely resisted ending their reliance on oil, gas, and coal — the dominant sources of greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere.

More than 130 countries also said they will zero out their impact on the climate in the next half-century, and most countries strengthened their pledges to cut emissions. India announced at the beginning of the two-week conference a target of net-zero emissions by 2070. That means the world’s three largest greenhouse-gas emitters — China, the US, and India, accounting for nearly half of global emissions — are now aiming to stop contributing to climate change completely in the coming decades. India, however, weakened some of the language on ending coal power in the final hours of the meeting.

“This is the moment of truth for our planet and it’s the moment of truth for our children and our grandchildren,” said COP president Alok Sharma. “These decisions I believe set out tangible next steps and very clear milestones to get us on track to meet the goals of the Paris agreement.”

Ben Stansall/AFP via Getty Images

But other key topics like setting up a system to pay for damages wrought by climate change, a high priority for countries facing sea-level rise and more extreme disasters today, were still unsettled.

“It is not perfect, it is not without fault, but it does represent real progress,” said Tina Stege, climate envoy for the Marshall Islands. “There is work to do on loss and damage … and we know and we commit to focusing on this in the coming year to find actual solutions.”

Glasgow also showed how much UN climate events have evolved in line with the urgency of the issues. What were once sleepy affairs with hundreds of bureaucrats have become carefully stage-managed international festivals. The COP26 meeting, with 39,000 registered attendees across the sprawling Scottish Event Campus along the River Clyde, was the largest climate meeting in history.

In addition to world leaders like President Joe Biden and former President Barack Obama, celebrities, artists, musicians, authors, and 3,700 reporters attended. The venue included massive meeting halls, a huge showroom where countries brought exhibits, and Instagram-ready art pieces. COP26 ads greeted travelers at every major airport in the United Kingdom proclaiming “the world is looking to you” and banners hung in major cities across the country.

However, the true test of the negotiations will be the actions that countries take to make their pledges real — not just in terms of reducing emissions, but also restoring ecosystems, switching to clean energy, and addressing the historic injustices around climate change.

Countries came to the table rattled by a year of disasters worsened by climate change — like flooding in China, flooding in India, flooding in Germany, heat waves in the US, wildfires in Russia — illustrating just how much is at stake. A major new scientific report also came out this summer and found that rising temperatures are causing irreversible “widespread and rapid changes” in every inhabited part of the world.

In stark white meeting rooms, island nations sat directly across from major polluters. Outside, environmental campaigners chanted and clapped, calling for climate justice and definitive actions to keep warming in check.

By itself, COP26 was never likely to bring the world fully in line with the goals of the 2015 Paris climate agreement, limiting global warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius this century, with a second target of staying below 1.5°C. The process is slow and tedious; the latest iteration did not deliver a decisive victory and left few happy. But it’s a small bit of progress.

What COP26 actually accomplished

When 196 parties adopted the Paris climate agreement in 2015, their individual promises were far too modest to limit global warming in line with the goals they set. If those pledges were fulfilled, the world would be on course to warm by roughly 2.7°C by 2100. And those pledges were not being fulfilled. In fact, greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise in the years since.

But countries also agreed to ramp up their commitments, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), over time. So far, 150 countries have agreed to step up their goals. More than 130 have pledged to reach net-zero emissions by 2050.

Estimates vary, but the sum of the new NDCs plus net-zero commitments — if they are met — would put the world on course to warm by roughly 1.8°C, though there is a wide range of uncertainty around this number.

Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

Here are some of the most important elements of the agreement forged in Glasgow.

1.5 is (sort of) the new 2

The world has already warmed up by about 1.1°C. Greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere are still rising, which will trap more heat for years to come. To stay below 1.5°C, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found in 2018 that the world would have to cut greenhouse gas emissions roughly in half by 2030, and the world is further off-course than ever.

Still, for many negotiators at COP26, particularly representatives from countries most vulnerable to the effects of climate change, the slogan of the climate talks has been “keep 1.5 alive.”

“The difference between 1.5 and 2 degrees is a death sentence for us,” said Aminath Shauna, environment, climate change and technology minister for the Maldives.

The more the planet warms, even incrementally, the worse the impacts of things like sea-level rise and extreme weather. Small changes in global average temperatures can fuel deadly heat waves and can make large storms even more severe. So everything done to avert fractions of a degree in global warming can save lives and livelihoods.

But fossil fuel-producing countries like Saudi Arabia and Russia resisted making 1.5°C the new de facto target since it implies a much more aggressive phaseout of coal, oil, and natural gas.

The Glasgow pact “resolves to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C” and “recognizes that limiting global warming to 1.5 °C requires rapid, deep and sustained reductions in global greenhouse gas emissions.”

It’s still not an official target, but the greater emphasis on it means that NDCs and other climate goals put forward by countries will be evaluated based on how close they hew to this goal.

“As uncomfortable as we all are with the text, as imperfect as it is, it does bring sufficient enough balance for us to move forward, and it does provide us with the best chance at this time to keep 1.5 alive,” said Grenada’s Minister for Climate Resilience Simon Stiell.

The Glasgow pact also calls for countries to come back to the table next year with stronger and more detailed plans for cutting their emissions by the end of the decade and by the middle of the century.

Fossil fuels are directly in the crosshairs

The COP26 declaration for the first time calls for the end of fossil fuels, but some of the language was watered down at the last minute. Draft text called upon countries to accelerate “efforts towards the phase-out of unabated coal power and inefficient fossil fuel subsidies.” India, however, asked for “phase-out” to be changed to “phase-down,” implying reduction, but not elimination. Historically, major coal, oil, and natural gas producers have opposed any mention of fossil fuels at all.

The word “unabated” in front of coal implies that there is wiggle room for countries to use technologies like carbon capture to keep coal-fired power plants running, and “inefficient” before “subsidies” may allow some subsidies for dirty fuels to persist.

But it’s a shift from past COPs, where agreements focused solely on the goalposts and not on the tactics for reaching them.

There are now rules for international carbon markets

Under Article 6 of the Paris climate agreement, countries can work across borders to meet their climate goals. A country that has surpassed its climate target can tally up the emissions it has prevented, for example, and sell them to a country that’s falling behind. It could also include carbon offsets like restoring forests to balance out greenhouse gases.

But these tools are only as good as their accounting, and figuring out the right balance of transparency and flexibility has proven to be an immensely difficult task. Many vulnerable countries also argue such mechanisms end up being a way for polluters to stall instead of making emissions cuts.

Debates over the arcane rules governing carbon markets drove past climate meetings into overtime, but they were finally settled at COP26.

The agreement on Article 6 in Glasgow created rules to prevent double-counting of emissions credits, closed loopholes, and added stronger language make credits being traded across borders represent real reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. Countries will also have to take a detailed inventory of their greenhouse gas emissions by 2024, which will be used as the basis for future emissions cuts.

Key details of paying for past, present, and future climate damages were unresolved

Climate change adds up over time, and the wealthiest countries in the world have spewed out the largest share of greenhouse gases that are heating up the planet. Yet the countries facing the worst effects of sea-level rise, more intense heat waves, and more destructive downpours — countries whose citizens often have the least resources to adapt — contributed the least to the problem.

“I think we say consistently that 20 countries equal 80 percent of all the emissions, and they do bear the greatest responsibility,” US climate envoy John Kerry told delegates. “President Biden from the moment he has come into office has been determined to live up to that responsibility.”

A key principle in international climate finance negotiations is the idea of “common but differentiated responsibility.” Every country has to contribute to solving climate change, but more developed countries have an obligation to help countries that have fewer resources pay for it.

But some of the mechanisms for paying for these losses have been underfunded, and many wealthy countries, including the US, have pushed back on paying for the climate damages they already caused.

Ian Forsyth/Getty Images

One of the main shortfalls is a commitment made in 2009 to make $100 billion available for climate-related financing for developing countries by 2020. This money, via loans, grants, and investments, would go toward supporting a shift toward clean energy and building resilience to climate change. That goal has still not been met and may not cross that threshold until 2023. For developing countries, this promise was a key test of how serious wealthy countries are in addressing the climate damages they caused, and they emphasize that this is an obligation, not charity.

The Glasgow pact “[n]otes with deep regret that the goal of developed country Parties to mobilize jointly USD 100 billion per year by 2020 in the context of meaningful mitigation actions and transparency on implementation has not yet been met.”

Jan Kowalzig, a senior policy advisor for Oxfam, said that “not yet been met” implies that getting to $100 billion at some point in the future would fulfill the pledge. However, developing countries say that since it was pegged to a specific point in time, the window has closed and that this climate finance package must have enough money to retroactively fill the shortfalls beginning in 2020.

“This $100 billion is a key ingredient to this carefully crafted balance between developing and developed countries,” Kowalzig said. “Not meeting it is eroding this trust.”

Wealthy countries are also failing in their promises to help the countries facing the worst effects of climate change to adapt to a warmer world. The text of the pact “[n]otes with concern that the current provision of climate finance for adaptation remains insufficient to respond to worsening climate change impacts in developing country Parties.” There is no funding target mentioned, but developing countries said they want international climate adaptation finance to roughly double from 2019 levels to about $40 billion by 2025.

Another key issue is paying for the losses and damages from climate change that have already happened. The Glasgow agreement urges developed countries “to provide enhanced and additional support for activities addressing loss and damage associated with the adverse effects of climate change.”

But there is no funding mechanism in place and contributions to loss and damage funds are voluntary and so far only one country — Scotland, which contributed $2.68 million — has chipped in at all. The US, the European Union, and the UK opposed language that would have created a more rigorous funding stream.

“The reason is, they fear that once they start accepting that they are contributing to financial assistance to address loss and damage, this would open up the avenue towards compensation claims for harm done through causing the climate crisis,” said Kowalzig.

COP26 also spawned a number of smaller climate agreements

Taking advantage of the international spotlight on the proceedings, a number of countries at COP26 also signed on to other climate side deals and targets:

The US-China deal

Even as President Biden and former President Obama called out Chinese President Xi Jinping for not attending COP26, Chinese and US diplomats were hashing out a deal. The countries put out a surprise statement during the meeting that emphasized their willingness to do more to cut fossil fuel pollution over the next 10 years. The statement doesn’t change either country’s goals and is light on details, but observers said it shows that the US and China are willing to separate their work on climate change from other diplomatic tensions.

“This agreement of the world’s two biggest emitters is a reassuring sign that the US and China can work together on the biggest crisis humanity is facing,” said Byford Tsang, a senior policy advisor for climate diplomacy at E3G, a think tank, in a statement.

Ending deforestation by 2030

Forests absorb and store carbon dioxide as they grow. When they’re cut down, much of that carbon ends up back in the atmosphere, heating up the planet. Deforestation accounts for about 10 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions.

More than 100 countries, including Russia, Brazil, and the US, pledged to end deforestation by 2030. Between them, they cover 85 percent of the world’s forests. These countries also committed almost $20 billion in public and private funding to back efforts to curb deforestation. However, Indonesia, home to one-third of the world’s rainforests, has already begun to walk back its commitment, and past promises to save the Amazon have failed to save millions of acres from fires, illegal logging, and agriculture in Brazil.

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Cutting methane emissions

Methane is a potent greenhouse gas that leaks out of natural gas pipes, belches out of cows, and seeps out from landfills, ultimately trapping about 30 times as much heat as carbon dioxide over 100 years. That means cutting methane has swift and sweeping climate benefits. More than 100 countries, responsible for half of global methane emissions, signed the Global Methane Pledge to cut their methane emissions by 30 percent by 2030. Signatories include the US, the European Union, and Japan.

Phasing out coal

More than 40 countries have committed to ending their domestic use of coal for electricity, and 25 countries agreed to stop financing coal power in developing countries. Coal-fired power plants produce one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. But China, India, the US, and Australia — comprising more than two-thirds of global coal consumption — did not agree to a domestic coal phase-out.

Ending oil and gas production

Many discussions focus on the burning of fossil fuels, but a new program at COP26 targets their extraction in the first place. The Beyond Oil and Gas Alliance, launched by Costa Rica and Denmark, commits country members to phasing out new licenses for oil and gas production. Members, which currently include France, Greenland, Ireland, Quebec, Sweden, and Wales, must also set a date for ending oil and gas production in line with the Paris agreement.

“Fossil fuel demand is decreasing, and supply needs to adjust,” said Christiana Figueres, one of the lead negotiators of the Paris agreement, in a statement. “That’s why I’m so pleased to see such a diverse group of governments launching the Beyond Oil & Gas Alliance to take decisive action to phase out oil and gas production.”

More long-term climate goals are in place, but near-term actions are still going in the wrong direction

The foundations for zeroing out global greenhouse gas emissions and staying below 1.5°C have to be laid now. But some countries are still moving in the wrong direction, even those that call climate change a “crisis” and an “existential threat,” and activists have decried the hypocrisy.

At COP26, Obama scolded Russia and China for failing to send their top leaders to the meeting and criticized their commitments.

“Their national plans so far reflect what appears to be a dangerous lack of urgency, a willingness to maintain the status quo on the part of those governments,” Obama said.

However, Obama campaigned for president on boosting US fossil fuel production, presided over a massive increase in US fossil fuel extraction, lifted a ban on crude oil exports, and licensed the US’s first natural gas exports shortly before leaving office. Ahead of COP26, President Biden reached out to the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries to ask them to boost oil production.

Abdulhamid Hosbas/Anadolu Agency via Getty Images

In fact, several countries that claim to have net-zero emissions targets are planning to invest in more fossil fuel production in the near future. A group of environmental groups and think tanks put out a report during COP26 highlighting how the US, Norway, Australia, Canada, and the UK are still subsidizing and expanding fossil fuel production.

And “net zero” targets set decades from now could end up allowing countries to continue emitting more greenhouse gas emissions in the meantime with the expectation that those emissions will be soaked up somehow at a point in the future.

“Developed countries will continue using the carbon budget the belongs to the developing world, and this is not fair,” said Diego Pacheco Balanza, leader of the Bolivian delegation. “We need to really push developed countries not to get to net zero by 2050 but to achieve real reductions of emissions now.”

This is a bad way to tackle a global crisis, but there isn’t a better one

A big international meeting of 196 parties with their own prejudices, political constraints, rivalries, and economic interests is a terrible venue for tackling an urgent crisis like climate change.

But the atmosphere doesn’t care under whose flag greenhouse gases are being emitted — the whole planet will warm the same. So every country has to be at the table, every country has to have a say, and every country has to agree on what to do. More than two and a half decades into these COP meetings, it’s clear that this makes for an agonizingly slow process as delegates hang on every word in an agreement.

At COP26, a simple change from “urges” to “requests” in a draft document left delegates, observers, and journalists scrambling to figure out which word was stronger as they parsed the language.

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Often, many of the same debates are relitigated over and over. Island countries want immediate cuts to emissions, developing countries want more financing, fossil fuel producers don’t want to halt their exports, and wealthy countries don’t want to pay for their damages.

Meetings like COP26 are not the only venues for climate action, but they’re one of the few times where every country faces the spotlight and where negotiators can meet face to face and go head to head. The process is slow, but it still accounts for the biggest strides in mitigating climate change.

The next challenge will be to strengthen the commitments that are now on paper. “Glasgow has delivered a strong message of hope, a strong message of promise,” said Tuvalu’s Finance Minister Seve Paeniu. “What is left now is for us to deliver on that promise.”

At next year’s COP27 meeting in Egypt, the process will repeat again — and possibly end with another step forward. But another year will be lost, the planet will get hotter, and the window for action will close even further.