I'm Brian Lehrer. This is my daily politics podcast from WNYC Studios. It's Thursday,

November 11th. Today and tomorrow are the last two days of the COP 26 Climate Summit

in Glasgow, Scotland, and here's what they have to do.

There are two days left in the summit, right?

200 countries are participating.

Every country has to agree to every word of a final conference document.

The central goal is to agree to policies that will limit warming to 2.7

degrees Fahrenheit by 2050 to avoid the catastrophic events that scientists say would occur

if it gets hotter than that. The hard part, obviously, it's to get all the countries with all

their competing interests and unequal amounts of power and

unequal amounts of risk to wind up on the same page. And with commitments they will actually act on,

not just vague promises that sound good but don't do anything and far future goals. One cause for

pessimism, the past promise for richer countries to give $100 billion a year to poorer countries to subsidize their conversion to renewable energy was not met despite the richer country's ability to pay.

One cause for optimism.

Yesterday, the U.S. and China, the world's two biggest greenhouse gas emitters, agreed on language promising a joint reduction during this decade.

But that agreement, too, is short on specifics.

So what can we expect? What should we watch for?

And what's at stake as 200 countries seek a unified set of promises in the next two days.

With us now live from Glasgow is Mark Hurtzgard, Environment Correspondent, for the nation.

Mark, thanks for coming on today.

Thanks for all your reporting.

Welcome back to WNYC.

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