16 2GM Wednesday November 10 2021 | the timesNews
Johnson implores leaders to pull out all the stops to settle on deal
Oliver Wright Policy EditorBoris Johnson will urge international
negotiators to “pull out all the stops” to
try to reach climate change deal in the
final days of the Cop26 conference.
Johnson is scheduled to travel to
Glasgow again today and will hold
meetings with environment ministers
from some of the leading delegations.
He will be joined by António Guter-
res, the UN secretary-general, in trying
to make countries agree concessions onsome of the key sticking points. China
and Saudi Arabia have blocked at-
tempts to beef up the transparency and
inspection regime designed to provide
independent assurances that countries
are meeting the pledges they make.
Other countries are opposing plans
to increase the frequency of producing
their new climate-change targets. This
stands at every five years, but critics say
the frequency should be increased if
there is any chance of keeping global
warming to within 1.5C.Johnson had been expected to travel
to Glasgow later this week but uncer-
tainty about when the conference will
end is understood to have brought his
visit forward.
Although Cop26 is due to finish on
Friday, negotiations often overrun into
the weekend and Johnson has to be in
London for the Remembrance Sunday
ceremony at the Cenotaph.
Negotiators from 197 parties are
taking part in the talks that are also
working to agree a package of financetary, yesterday declared air travel was
not the “ultimate evil” and that people
should not feel “guilty” for flying.
He said that Britain could achieve
“guilt-free” travel while still commit-
ting to greener transport commit-
ments, according to The Daily Tele-
graph.
He said: “There are some changes in
the way we live our lives — one of those
changes should not be the inability to
go and visit your friends and family and
do business”.The world is on course to heat up by
2.7C under present carbon-reduction
policies, according to a study of prom-
ises made at Cop26.
Climate Action Tracker, an alliance
of independent scientific bodies, found
that global greenhouse gas emissions in
2030 will be double the level needed to
meet the Paris agreement target of 1.5C.
It said net-zero goals set for 30 to 50
years by many countries, including
Brazil, China, India, Russia and Saudi
Arabia, were giving false hope.
The alliance accused countries of
paying lip service to climate action as
they had failed to announce strong
emissions reduction targets for 2030 to
accompany their net-zero pledges.
The implementation of actual poli-
cies to cut emissions was “advancing at
a snail’s pace”, it added.
Countries’ carbon reduction policiesNews Cop
cop26 at a glance
Green councillor took
a flight to Glasgow
A Green Party council leader is
facing calls to resign for flying the
length of Britain to give a speech
about cutting carbon emissions in
Glasgow. Phélim Mac Cafferty, the
head of Brighton and Hove
council, then went on a march led
by Greta Thunberg calling on
world leaders to do more to
prevent climate change. His
80-minute flight from Gatwick
would have produced 160kg
(352lb) in carbon dioxide. Mac
Cafferty, 42, who is on the
council’s carbon neutral working
group, apologised for the “failure
of judgment” and said he would be
taking the train home. Others said
that was not acceptable, however.
Daniel Yates, a Labour councillor,
said: “I hope he will consider his
position while contemplating his
air miles... It’s not a failure of
judgment. It’s a total lack of
principles.”Car companies promise
zero emissions by 2040
Six big vehicle manufacturers,
including Ford, Mercedes and
Volvo, have pledged that all
new car and van sales will be
zero-emission by 2040 globally —
and by 2035 in leading markets.
Market leaders, including
Volkswagen, BMW and Toyota,
are yet to agree. It means that
31 per cent of the world’s
passenger vehicle markets have
agreed to end sales of fossil-fuel
powered vehicles, up from a near
zero share at the start of this year.
Last night ministers announced
that all heavy goods vehicles in
the UK would be zero-emission by- Grant Shapps, the transport
secretary, said: “The transition to
zero-emission transport has
reached a tipping point.” Zero-
emission vehicles are forecast to
comprise 70 per cent of new sales
in 2040, a projection that has
doubled in the past five years.
Vallance: Climate crisis
bigger issue than Covid
Climate change will do more harm
than coronavirus unless humanity
acts, the chief scientific adviser has
said. Sir Patrick Vallance said that
in both cases behavioural change
was needed on top of innovation,
and people should not rely on
“magic new technology” over steps
such as flying less and eating less
meat. He told the BBC: “If this is
not stopped, this will be a bigger
challenge to the way we live and
lives will be lost.” Although
Vallance was optimistic about
green technology, he said of
lifestyle changes: “Those little
things that appear like they’re not
very much are important when
they’re aggregated across many,
many millions of people.”for nations most vulnerable to climate
change and to address the issue of loss
and damage in developing countries.
Johnson said his visit would allow him
to see first hand where the gaps needed
to be closed. He has previously promised
to intervene directly with other leaders
in an attempt to persuade them to com-
promise. “This is bigger than any one
country and it is time for nations to put
aside differences and come together for
our planet and people.”
Grant Shapps, the transport secre-
PETER MACDIARMID/REUTERSCarbon-cutting pledges ‘will
still cause warming of 2.7C’
— what they are actually doing — were
analysed, and based on those there
would be 2.7C of warming by 2100. This
is 0.2C lower than the alliance had fore-
cast in a similar report last year.
With warming of 2.7C, billions more
people would be at risk from extreme
heatwaves, droughts, floods, storms
and crop failures. Sea levels could rise
by more than a metre.
The analysis was supported by an up-
dated assessment by the UN Environ-
ment Programme, which found that
emissions in 2030 based on uncondi-
tional pledges by countries would be
almost twice as high as they need to be
to limit warming to 1.5C.
It forecast that global emissions in
2030 would be 51.5 billion tonnes of
carbon dioxide equivalent but to meet
the goal of 1.5C they need to be 27 bil-
lion tonnes.
Promises made before Cop26 and in
the first few days of the conference hadreduced the forecast for 2030 by about
only 500 million tonnes, the UN added.
The alliance also looked just at coun-
tries’ targets for 2030, disregarding
their long-term net-zero targets, and
found they put the world on track for
2.4C of warming. It said there was a
chance of limiting warming to 1.8C but
only if net-zero targets that now cover
90 per cent of the global economy were
fully implemented.
Even this “optimistic scenario” would
involve breaching the 1.5C target in the
2015 Paris agreement, which commit-
ted all countries to limiting warming to
“well below” 2C above the pre-industri-
al level and to “pursue efforts” to keep it
to 1.5C. The planet has already warmed
by about 1.1C.
“The vast majority of 2030 actions
and targets are inconsistent with net-
zero goals: there’s a nearly 1C gap
between government policies and their
net-zero goals,” Bill Hare, chief execu-tive of Climate Analytics, a partner
organisation to the alliance, said.
“It’s all very well for leaders to claim
to have a net-zero target, but if they
have no plans as to how to get there, and
their 2030 targets are as low as so many
of them are these net-zero targets are
just lip service to real action. Glasgow
has a serious credibility gap.”
The 1.5C limit will be breached unless
big consumers of coal, such as China,
India, Indonesia and Vietnam, stop
building coal power stations, Hare said.
He said countries should switch from
coal to renewable energy, not gas. “We
cannot let fossil fuels be replaced with
more fossil fuels,” he said.
Ed Miliband, the shadow business
secretary, said: “The test of Cop26 has
always been what concrete commit-
ments it would deliver by 2030, the de-
cisive decade to keep 1.5C alive. This re-
port is a reality check on the govern-
ment’s attempt to greenwash Glasgow.”Ben Webster Environment EditorC
op26 risks
falling short
of an
agreement
that will keep
the world on course to
limit global warming to
1.5C, Lord Prescott has
warned as he revealed
he had made lifestyle
changes in the name of
going green (Patrick
Maguire writes).
Writing for The
Times Red Box this
morning, the former
deputy prime minister
urged Boris Johnson to
emulate the “diplomacy
of exhaustion” thathelped to seal the
Kyoto protocol in 1997
to salvage the chances
of an ambitious deal in
Glasgow.
Prescott, who has
made what he calls a
“small contribution to
cutting carbon
emissions” by selling
his only remaining
Jaguar car and
converting to
low-carbon fish and
chips, said world
leaders should meet
annually “until we have
commitments that will
save the planet”.
The Labour peer —who was in charge of
climate change issues
in the Blair
government and was at
the head of an EU
delegation at Kyotothat also included
Angela Merkel — said:
“Climate change won’t
wait another five years,
so leaders must be sat
on and held to account
every year.”
Warning that
President Clinton and
his deputy, Al Gore,
failed to secure the
backing of the US
Congress for the dealagreed at Kyoto, he
added: “Pledges are
important but they
must set out how they
will deliver.”
Prescott’s trip to
Glasgow, where he will
highlight work done by
the University of Hull’s
Aura Innovation
Centre to drive down
pollution in estuary
cities such as his hometown, marks a return
to the political stage
after a stroke in 2018.
He said the prospect of
attending the talks had
“spurred my will to
recover”. and argued
that the city for which
he served as an MP for
40 years offered
leaders a model of
how to decarbonise
post-industrial areas.PM needs to drive a
hard bargain to save
planet, says Prescott
Lord Prescott, who as the
deputy prime minister
was known as Two Jags,
now has no car at all
and eats low-carbon
fish and chips