G7 gives a taste of Nov. Glasgow climate meet
UK mobilising allies amid environmental groups’ pressure
Carbis Bay, June 12: Britain is using its G7 summit to mobilise allies ahead of the COP26 conference in November in Glasgow amid pressure from environmental groups to make the meeting count.
The climate emergency, with the Covid-19 pandemic, is high on the agenda at the summit for wealthy nations in bucolic Cornwall in southwest England this weekend.
On Friday, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson restated his aim of a “green industrial revolution” to meet environmental challenges and create jobs after the global health crisis. Both the optics of the summit as well as its politics are important for Britain, which hosts the UN climate change conference in Scotland in November. “The UK has a serious moral responsibility to lead the way on climate and nature both as a big historical emitter of carbon but also as the host of those big conferences,” Greenpeace UK’s head of politics Rebecca Newsom said.
“We need to see proper action, otherwise our world leaders are failing us,” she said. Greenpeace released a striking video for the occasion, deploying 300 drones to form animal shapes in the sky and urge
action on biodiversity as well as the climate.
The summit also played host to a series of demonstrations with protesters vying for attention. Oxfam activists wore masks showing the faces of the summit's leaders while others, urging Japan to stop burning coal, dressed as giant Pokemon character
Pikachu.
Overwhelmingly, strict security measures kept the demonstrators away from the leaders' meetings in the seaside resort of Carbis Bay. Only Extinction Rebellion protesters briefly breached one police cordon.
“We’re hopeful that (US) President Biden has changed
the dynamic on climate change and that we will see the ambitious targets that we need from the G7,” said Oxfam campaigner Max Lawson.
Johnson is pushing for G7 countries to halve their carbon emissions by 2030 to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius.