It was a sweltering late July afternoon in Kew Gardens with a thunderstorm in the offing and John Kerry, in a dark suit and sky-coloured tie, needed a chilled can of water and a discreet handkerchief as he stepped to the podium. But the former senator, presidential challenger and US secretary of state, who is now President Biden’s special envoy on climate, had a clear mission: to rally global action on the climate crisis.
The hard-hitting speech very deliberately put climate at the centre of US foreign policy: politely but firmly demanding co-operation from China, ramping up fears about the consequences of failure, while also keeping alive hope that this year’s “COP26” summit (ie, the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC) could deliver the progress needed to halt climate breakdown. It was a bravura performance by one of the world’s most powerful statesmen. But nobody from the host government for those talks—that is, Boris Johnson’s administration—was there to hear it.
COP26, which opens on 31st October in Glasgow, is a two-week meeting of world leaders, plus 30,000 delegates—the biggest diplomatic event on UK soil since the Second World War. As president and host, it falls to Britain to herd 196 governments into a deal that will fulfil the real but hazy promise of the previous agreement in 2015 in Paris. Delayed by a year due to the pandemic, it should be a last, best chance for the UK to prove there is some substance to its sometimes-mocked “Global Britain” pose.
More importantly, it may be the last realistic chance of staving off uncontrollable climate chaos. The biggest powers can see this: at the UN general assembly in September, Xi Jinping announced China would shut off finance to coal-fired power plants abroad, while Joe Biden wrote an overdue cheque to help poor countries cope with the unfolding crisis. This creates an opening, but much more is needed—China will have to stop building coal stations at home, and that American cheque is going to need to get bigger. Many developing countries feel increasingly desperate for action, but few can afford to do much on their own. Meanwhile fossil fuel exporters, from Russia to Saudi Arabia and Australia, continue to sit on their hands. What’s sorely needed is an engaged and honest broker to seal a deal.
A question of leadership
As an environmental journalist, I have taken a ringside seat for 14 out of the last 16 COPs, the new form of international relations created when the UNFCCC was signed in 1990. Climate negotiations have always been tortuous, sometimes disastrous and occasionally triumphant, but one thing has held true throughout: while scientists, businesses, passionate campaigners and technocrats are all involved, the outcome ultimately turns on the individual big players. Tom Burke, veteran government adviser who once worked for Michael Heseltine before co-founding the green thinktank E3G, is emphatic: “Personal chemistry among leaders is enormously important.”
The 2009 Copenhagen summit subsided into mayhem after the poorly-briefed Danish premier Lars Løkke Rasmussen foolishly wrested control from his environment minister, without grasping the complexities of the process—it took Barack Obama, holding court in a small room with Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, to salvage a partial deal from the ruins. By contrast, the all-out “360 degree diplomacy” of President François Hollande paved the way to success in Paris six years later: for two years in advance, his ministers were sent round the world making demands. Many months before the meeting, Hollande himself was on the front foot, demanding a “miracle” of his fellow world leaders.
All this makes it important to ask where, precisely, Johnson is on climate. His record is patchy, to put it kindly: his Telegraph column often took a denialist stance, repeatedly indulging crank climatologist Piers Corbyn. As recently as 2015, commenting on the Paris agreement, he was insisting: “Global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear—as far as I understand the science—is equally without foundation.” Which would appear to show that he did not understand the science at all.
Mercifully, Johnson has recanted such views. In September, he told journalists: “If you were to excavate some of my articles from 20 years ago you might find comments I made, obiter dicta, about climate change that weren’t entirely supportive of the current struggle. But the facts change, and people change their minds and change their views, and that’s very important too.”
“With 30,000 delegates, COP26 is the biggest diplomatic event on UK soil”
The facts have not changed. Climate scientists really should have silenced the last squeals of denialists in 2007, when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reported with more than 90 per cent certainty that human actions were responsible for “unequivocal” changes to the climate. But if the prime minister’s views have caught up, that may at least be progress.
In power, Johnson has proved no Trump on climate. He has laid heavy emphasis on renewable energy in regenerating the north, and his rhetoric on green issues has been robust, even if his actions have lagged behind. Downing Street insiders insist the PM is now seized with urgency: “He really is on board with the climate agenda,” says one. They point to his new wife Carrie, a conservation campaigner, and his father Stanley, who was a “green Tory” stalwart: “His home is full of environmentalists,” they say. Downing Street officials blame the pandemic for the lack of photo-ops with other world leaders, and insist talks are quietly carrying on. “The PM is constantly in touch with world leaders on this issue,” adds one minister in the thick of it.
And yet if you’re watching the PM from outside the bunker then, until very recently, you will have detected little urgency. “Boris Johnson has been invisible,” in the opinion of Tom Burke, talking to me two months before Glasgow. “This will be a leaders’ summit—and he has done nothing to cultivate that with other leaders. He has been absent.” There also seems to be some confusion about the attitude at the top in foreign capitals. “Johnson is certainly viewed as a reliable ally and leader on climate by the Biden team,” says Paul Bledsoe, Washington-based analyst and veteran of “COPs” since his days in the Clinton White House. But he adds that “hopes that Johnson might play a key role on the global stage,” for example by coaxing China into greater action, “have yet to materialise.” And indeed, “the PM’s silence after Kerry’s Kew Gardens speech was notable.”
When, at the UN in September, Johnson finally put climate front and centre in a pre-COP rallying cry, he still couldn’t quite cast off his trademark frivolity. In the same hall where Margaret Thatcher woke the world up to climate change in 1989, with stirring quotes from Charles Darwin and John Milton, Johnson’s rhetorical register veered from Sophocles to Kermit the Frog—a style that sounded dangerously unserious to diplomats. One top UN official said privately: “A little less Sesame Street would have been helpful.”
Through the pandemic, Johnson had blown the few chances available to build relevant rapport with other leaders, most notably when hosting the G7 in Cornwall in June. He relished the socially-distanced beach snaps with Biden, Merkel and the rest, but one diplomat present reports the event “was a disaster” because “he wasn’t interested in talking seriously about the climate. They were more interested in Brexit and headlines about sausages.” The G7 communiqué contained almost nothing of substance on COP26. Pointedly, Germany and Canada made announcements on climate finance only after leaving Cornwall. Beyond the rich world, London’s standing with crucial developing countries has been sunk by Johnson’s swingeing cuts to foreign aid.
Meanwhile, a series of domestic decisions—building airports and roads while cutting green incentives, delaying low-carbon infrastructure, indulging North Sea drilling and even coal-mining—are viewed with puzzlement and concern abroad. The colleagues Johnson has chosen to sit around the Cabinet table are also mostly missing in action, barring one important exception I’ll return to. Liz Truss was recently promoted to foreign secretary immediately after having struck a trade deal with Australia which controversially excluded the binding temperature targets of the Paris agreement. Chancellor Rishi Sunak has repeatedly delayed important climate initiatives.
Chris Venables, of the Green Alliance, sums up what Johnson is missing in a single word: “grip.”
Urgency of now
Under the Paris agreement, developed and developing nations came together for the first time to set clear limits on global temperature rises: they would be kept “well below” 2C above pre-industrial levels, with an aspiration to stay below 1.5C. Those goals are enshrined in the treaty; in a separate, non-binding annex, countries set down their own national plans—called nationally determined contributions, or NDCs—to cut (or for developing countries, curb growth of) emissions sooner, with most targets pegged to 2030.
The NDCs brought to Paris did not go far enough to fulfil the overall promises—and everyone in the crowded halls knew it. Without improvements, temperatures would rise by about 3C—dooming world cities from London to Shanghai to flood. But the French hosts focused frantically on avoiding yet another COP failure, and so accepted inadequate NDC bids while also inserting a “ratchet mechanism”—an agreement that nations would return to the table with better targets every five years, which is (after a year off for the virus) where we are now. COP26 represents the moment of truth for the Paris agreement. Will its spirit now be honoured by governments finally presenting NDCs commensurate with the supposedly-settled temperature goals?
It’s no dress rehearsal. At 1.1C above pre-industrial levels, global temperatures are already moving in on that pledged 1.5C limit, and increasingly extreme weather underlines the running down of the clock. As the IPCC “unequivocally” confirmed this summer, the link to human activity is beyond doubt (see physicist Lawrence Krauss) and the planet is witnessing sometimes “irreversible” changes “unprecedented” in hundreds of thousands of years.
With various ruinous “tipping points” threatening a total loss of control, the central task at Glasgow is to keep that 1.5C goal tenable. And this needs NDCs that can collectively cut global emissions by roughly 7 per cent a year for the next decade. If we fall far short of that, we forfeit our best chance of relative safety, possibly forever.
And this is a chance that simply has to be seized because politics in Washington are propitious, with Republican denialists in disarray. Who is to say where things will stand there when nations meet for the next scheduled Paris ratchet, in 2025? Even if the planet were not yet doomed, another Trump could strangle hope before the talking gets started.
However necessary a serious Glasgow deal may be, it is not guaranteed, because it would have to involve a profoundly difficult shift. Barring a lockdown blip last year, the rise in emissions is remorseless. Indeed, the International Energy Agency forecasts next year will see the second-biggest annual rise on record.
Naked into the chamber
Alok Sharma is the understated but conscientious Cabinet minister who—to Johnson’s credit—the PM has put in charge of COP26, as the summit’s president-designate. In August, he flew back from Brazil into a media storm. The Daily Mail, followed sheeplike by others, was outraged at his “crime” of having visited 30-odd countries, six of them red list, by plane and without quarantine.
The criticisms were grotesquely, and cynically, misplaced. Sharma’s punishing schedule was the only available evidence at that point of serious UK engagement before the 11th hour. He is praised in private by diplomats and chippy green campaigners alike. In September, he visited China to meet its special climate envoy, Xie Zhenhua, who called the discussions “candid, in-depth and constructive.” That was about the most positive pre-talks signal anyone had yet got out of the world’s biggest emitter.
As a former international development secretary, Sharma also has close contacts in many of the poorest countries who so are pivotal under the UN’s consensual processes, where every nation counts. Previous summits have shown the best way to shame a reluctant China into action is to assemble a “coalition of high ambition,” which includes poor and vulnerable states.
Unfortunately for Sharma, those same countries are the ones hit hardest by Johnson’s tabloid-pleasing aid cut. Coming so soon before COP26, the move left international observers gasping. “People are shocked,” said Mary Robinson, former Irish president and UN climate envoy, who now chairs the Elders group of independent global leaders. “The poorest countries are the moral authority at COP… You need them fully behind the UK presidency.” Burke is blunter: the PM “has thrown away one of the most potent weapons for delivering at Glasgow.” With his “unnecessary and stupid” aid cut, he says, “the prime minister has sent himself naked into the conference chamber. He has nothing much to offer people now.”
Sharma tries to dampen things down. The cut “comes up from time to time, but generally it is not raised by governments. It is raised by civil society groups.” Perhaps. But if other governments are too tactful to raise it with Sharma directly, they are less so among each other—privately, developing country negotiators have told me the aid cut runs “like an open wound” through proceedings.
“Long-term legal targets are meaningless unless followed through with more immediate action plans”
It’s true that within the UK’s shrinking total aid budget, £11.6bn over five years remains ringfenced for climate finance. But the overall political stance—effectively, that in the face of Covid bills, charity must begin closer to home—is hardly helpful to Sharma in persuading other rich countries to dig deep. Neither will his diligence be enough to forge the top-level rapport the summit needs. “Leaders need to talk to leaders,” says Burke. “It needs the prime minister.”
Mayday!
Under Theresa May, the UK took a truly pioneering step, passing one of the world’s first “net zero” laws. That phrase means emissions must be cut to their lowest possible level, with any irreducible residual then balanced out by carbon-absorbing measures, such as tree-planting, encouragement of other natural carbon sinks, or—thus far uncertain—technology to capture and store CO2. It was scarcely mentioned at Paris, but gained currency after a 2018 IPCC report that found global emissions must reach net zero around mid-century to hold global heating to 1.5C.
The UK was well placed to give a lead as a largely post-coal economy, which had slashed carbon further and faster than any other major economy. But many other countries soon followed suit, with their own net zero targets. President Biden made it one of his first actions, the EU set one as part of its €1 trillion green deal and China’s president Xi Jinping last year pledged to net zero by 2060. All told, countries responsible for about two-thirds of global emissions are now under mid-century net zero targets.
It’s a huge advance. But such future reductions are not enough, particularly since the climate responds to cumulative emissions. Besides, long-term legal targets are meaningless unless followed through with more immediate action plans.
That is where Johnson has failed. Despite huffing slogans about “building back greener,” the 10-point plan he came up with was more wishlist than policy: the only concrete proposal, a “green homes grant” for insulation, soon collapsed into maladministration. The independent Committee on Climate Change, green businesses and concerned MPs all bewail the “policy vacuum” on net zero. Into that vacuum has stepped a wilfully ignorant press instinctively hostile to all serious action as state meddling, and certain Tory backbenchers—including Craig Mackinlay and Steve Baker—have set up a new caucus to resist net zero policies.
“It is through our Promethean faith in new green technology that we are cutting emissions in the UK,” the prime minister told the UN in September, adding: “In fact, we produce so much offshore wind that I am thinking of changing my name to Boreas Johnson in honour of the North Wind.” Even if we take such talk as a mark of good-humoured earnestness rather than flippancy, words must be judged against decidedly mixed deeds. Yes, the UK has made impressive emission reductions—but those happened overwhelmingly before Johnson took office, and carbon has recently surged following a lockdown plunge. Alongside investments in offshore wind and a deadline of 2030 for phasing out fossil fuel cars and vans—both good things—have come a string of policy decisions that point directly away from net zero.
“Capitalism remains wilfully and stubbornly detached from the science of climate breakdown”
A coal mine in Cumbria was briefly green-lit by the (recently sacked) communities secretary Robert Jenrick, before he backed down and shunted the issue over to an inquiry, whose work grinds on. In a serious net zero state, there would be no discussion here: it has long been understood that coal is uniquely damaging. New licences are being handed out for North Sea oil and gas, behind a fig-leaf promise of a “climate test.” The government’s own lawyers exposed its hollowness when they argued in court, in response to a Greenpeace challenge to a BP oil permit, that climate change was “not relevant” to whether licences should be issued.
Ministers have also delayed a recent environment bill to fight strengthening amendments suggested in the Lords; cut incentives for electric cars; jacked up train fares while cutting air passenger duty; frozen fuel taxes and poured £27bn into new roads; connived in airport expansion; and delayed reforms requiring builders to fit new homes with heat pumps.
Then, in September, came that dubious trade deal with coal-exporting Australia, a nation refusing to strengthen its climate commitments ahead of Glasgow. If ministers roll over so quickly to anti-climate interests, what pressure can they hope to put on laggards at COP26?
Forcing markets
In May, the International Energy Agency calculated—in a report compiled at London’s behest ahead of COP26—that all new fossil fuel development must cease from the end of this year, if the world is to stay within 1.5C.
The ramifications would be huge. Oil producers such as Saudi Arabia and Russia would have to give up prospecting—now. US fracking and Alaskan drilling would be curtailed, and the UK would have to stop developing the North Sea too. No new coal mines, anywhere. Much of Canada’s vast tar sands would go untapped. Trillions of dollars-worth of fossil fuel infrastructure would be left as “stranded assets,” and the corporate giants built on oil, coal and gas would plunge in value.
And yet global stock markets went largely unmoved by the IEA, just as they had by the IPCC’s “starkest warning yet” on the climate. Post-pandemic, gas prices are soaring again and fossil fuel companies continue to attract billions in investment. Capitalism remains stubbornly detached from the science of climate breakdown or the associated need to finance a green transition.
The market alone will simply not solve climate change, says Mark Carney, former governor of the Bank of England and now a UK and UN climate envoy. “It wouldn’t happen spontaneously… We need clear, credible and predictable regulation from government.” Only with “strong regulation for the future,” he says, will “the financial market… start investing today, for that future.”
And so we come back again to the politicians who must make that regulation—only they, ultimately, can give the necessary impetus. But for all the mushrooming policies, plans and net zero targets, only two countries—Denmark and Costa Rica—have called a halt to new fossil fuel development. With such weak signals, the market rationally concludes that the carbon boom has a way to go yet.
Getting late
Johnson’s only recognisable political philosophy is cakeism: “I’m pro having it and pro eating it too.” Claiming he could get everything—trade and sovereignty alike—at once served the PM well in handling the politics (if not the substance) of Britain’s departure from the European Union. It may be tempting to bumble through COP26 with the same sort of intellectual evasiveness, but it would also be downright dangerous.
Another Brexit tactic was to proceed by brinkmanship, using the threat of total failure in the run-up to hard deadlines to force his counterparts to reveal their hands, and bring domestic critics into line. The emerging late burst of Johnsonian activity before Glasgow is thoroughly in character.
The trouble, as Carney told MPs this summer, is that we have already left it not just late, but “exceptionally late” to deal with climate. When the UNFCCC was signed in 1990, a gradually managed decline in fossil fuel use over the course of this century could have kept us within 1.5C. Now, because we have allowed emissions to rise and carbon to accumulate, we probably have less than 10 years left to make drastic cuts. Tough choices are not only inevitable, but upon us.
The eventual cost of a green transition should still be manageable—less than 1 per cent of GDP by 2050, according to the Committee on Climate Change—but only if the big decisions are made now. Those include that huge diplomatic ask of a costly and disruptive shutdown on fossil fuels. However, amid increasingly frequent floods, droughts and storms, it is plainer each year that doing nothing is itself a choice with tough consequences. Citizens of all the countries gathered at Glasgow are already beginning to pay the costs, with flood defences and insurance premiums only the more obvious. After record heats devastated the Canadian durum wheat harvest this summer, pasta prices are forecast to double.
Britain needs to convey all the resulting urgency authoritatively. But after Johnson’s long months of drift, his late engagement risks coming across as panicked and hasty. Moreover, the leaders that Britain is now tasked with rapidly persuading in Glasgow will be interrogating the real practical choices made by their hosts—new oilfields, new airports, new roads—and asking why they should be expected to do anything different.
COP26 ought to be an opportunity for our boosterish prime minister to shine: charming, cajoling and nudging the world leaders towards a sustainable future. A chance to take the Rolls-Royce of FCDO diplomacy for a spin, to trumpet the UK’s real success in cutting its emissions to gee everyone else along. But Johnson always exuded confused priorities, and left the legwork hopelessly late. Burke warns everyone against imagining there is some sort of “rabbit you can pull from a hat at the last minute.”
But even now, there is still goodwill in abundance, from all the players desperate for concerted global action—including the US, the EU and the rest of the G7. Kerry’s team may have been surprised by the government’s no-show at Kew, but they refused to criticise the UK. Even in the last few weeks, no one involved in the talks—not even the ordinarily prickly campaigners—are willing to publicly criticise Johnson or the UK. There is too much at stake, when—as Jennifer Morgan of Greenpeace insists, “there is still a chance for the UK to get this right.”
In the final few weeks, a full-throttle attempt to bring China, India, Brazil, Australia and other recalcitrant countries into the fold could just succeed. “Boris clearly retains the ability to surprise,” notes Bledsoe, from the distance of Washington. “He may yet rise to the occasion, since producing a successful climate road forward is a crucial test of his leadership.” And yet, with the way things are going, he fears that the boy who famously wanted to be “world king” could fall so short in his world-saving efforts as to risk being eclipsed by another figurehead who is due to attend COP26. “It may be that Queen Elizabeth, rather than Boris Johnson, will be the most memorable British voice for climate action in Glasgow.”
