WORLD’S LEADERS IN CLIMATE CALL TO ARMS AT COP26
▶ US President Biden says summit in Glasgow can be trigger for ‘decade of ambition’
US President Joe Biden told world leaders gathered at the Cop26 global climate summit in Glasgow yesterday that catastrophic change could be averted for the next decade but warned there was no more time left to hang back.
In a call to set aside delay and inaction, the US leader said an ambitious response to climate change would generate opportunities for jobs and growth around the world.
“Glasgow must be the kick-off of a decade of ambition,” he told the meeting in the Scottish city that was a vital world port after the Industrial Revolution.
“We meet with the eyes of history upon us. Every day we delay, the cost of inaction increases, so let this be the moment when we answer history’s call, here in Glasgow.”
Mr Biden recalled former president Donald Trump’s withdrawal from the 2015 Paris Agreement and offered his apologies to yesterday’s gathering for this setback.
The US has offered $3 billion a year in climate financing for vulnerable nations to adapt to rising seas, droughts and other consequences of global warming. This is part of the country’s $11.4bn climate finance annual offer from 2024.
Antonio Guterres, the UN Secretary General, chided the meeting for the lack of progress on pushing back the global temperature rise. He struck a strident tone, saying that humanity was digging its own grave.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson used the host’s prerogative to invoke the heroic intervention that British superspy James Bond might make to avert disaster.
“We are in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond, today,” Mr Johnson said. “The tragedy is that this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real.”
Having “long since run down the clock on climate change” the only real hope was that technology exists to “deactivate that doomsday device”.
The world must mount a “military-style campaign” and use both government resources and private sector money to tackle the climate crisis, Britain’s Prince Charles said.
The prince, who has spent decades raising awareness about the environment, spoke at the opening ceremony of Cop26 in Glasgow yesterday.
“We have to put ourselves on what might be called a warlike footing,” he said.
He urged leaders to engage with business to solve climate problems.
“We need a vast military-style campaign to marshal the strength of the global private sector,” he said. “With trillions
at its disposal – far beyond global GDP and, with the greatest respect, beyond even the governments of the world’s leaders – it offers the only real prospect of achieving fundamental economic transition.”
Charles delivered a speech in Rome on Sunday to leaders at the G20 summit, where he described Cop26 as “the lastchance saloon”.
Yesterday he said: “The scale and scope of the threat we face call for a global, systems-level solution based on radically transforming our current fossil fuel-based economy to one that is genuinely renewable and sustainable.”
He said that after many years of championing environmental issues, he was “at last sensing a change in attitudes and the build-up of positive momentum”.
Solutions “seem possible only if there is a much closer partnership between government, the main multilateral banks, the private sector and its investors,” he said.
He told world leaders that the cost of inaction outweighed the cost of action.
“Many of your countries are already feeling the devastating impact of climate change, through ever-increasing droughts, mudslides, floods, hurricanes, cyclones and wildfires,” he said.
“Any leader who has had to confront such life-threatening challenges knows that the cost of inaction is far greater than the cost of prevention.
“So, I can only urge you, as the world’s decision-makers, to find practical ways … to rescue this precious planet and save the threatened future of our young people.”