“History will be kind to me, for I intend to re-write it”…
Rishi Sunak has followed where Liz Truss left off and has already made a major U-Turn. On Twitter this morning the Prime Minister announced he would be attending COP27 after all. He added:
“There is no long-term prosperity without action on climate change. There is no energy security without investing in renewables. That is why I will attend @COP27P next week: to deliver on Glasgow’s legacy of building a secure and sustainable future”
Off to a flyer…
Labour is furious – absolutely incandescent –over Rishi Sunak’s announcement that he’s not going to next month’s COP27 summit in Egypt during his second week in office, and while getting to grips with a financial crisis.
Having the PM fly to Sharm El-Sheikh, a flight that would emit 3.35 tonnes of carbon, is clearly the only thing standing between Britain and environmental armageddon. On Sky News yesterday afternoon, Miliband said Rishi not going is “abdicating leadership” and a “big mistake”.
Reminder that when we hosted it last year, and Boris did go, it resulted in Alok Sharma crying on stage as pro-emission countries blocked the environmental proposals Britain was pushing for…
The shadow minister’s attack is particularly eyebrow-raising given that in 2008 Gordon Brown didn’t attend COP14, instead sending one Ed Miliband to stand in for him. That was certainly “abdicating leadership”…
In fact, Guido’s analysis of whether PMs attended the climate summits shows that Tony Blair didn’t attend a single one. Gordon Brown attended once in 2009, David Cameron attended in 2015 and Boris Johnson attended in 2021. Labour PMs have skipped 12 out of 13 summits – 2:1 to the Tories…
Guido reckons Zoom will be perfectly adequate for the UK to get its point across this time around…
Alok Sharma hosted a pre-COP26 summit in London last week where he was attempting to shape the agenda and outcome of the event. India, which due to industrialisation in recent decades has raised the living standards of hundreds of millions of her citizens, made excuses for not attending. Continental Africa, which sent only a handful of countries, repeated demands for rich industrialised countries to transfers billions annually to fund green growth. This comes after Britain cut back billions from foreign aid this year, putting Sharma in a difficult position.
South African Environment Minister Barbara Creecy demanded countries at November’s UN COP26 climate talks in Glasgow should set a target of mobilising $750 billion-a-year from industrialised countries to help poorer nations transition to greener energy. Her goal is significantly higher than the $100 billion-a-year that was set for 2020, which rich countries have so far failed to deliver on. In negotiations leading up to COP26, a compromise is supposedly emerging to push the date to 2025. Which rich democratic countries will once again fail to deliver on.
The truth is that there will not be, whatever is promised in November, a $750 billion-a-year transfer of capital from the billion or so taxpayers in the industrialised world to the government elites in the developing world. No democratic country has a mandate to “tax and send” at that level – nor will they ever. India is not going to change direction on the dash for industrialisation powered by coal, which has powered great rival China’s rapid industrialisation. India knows that vastly more people die as a consequence of poverty and disease each year than die as a consequence of global warming. As in the past, we humans are capable of adapting to climate change in ways that can significantly mitigate its adverse effects, without choking off economic growth. A massive reduction in fossil fuels would exacerbate global poverty, cost-benefit analyses of climate policies reveal that there are better ways to alleviate human misery than spending taxpayer subsidies on panic-driven, political non-solutions to a changing climate. We need to develop more clean, green technology to save the planet and lift people out of poverty.
