Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson

I failed my country at COP

I should have been more critical when I had the chance

Former Icelandic prime minister Sigmundur Davíð Gunnlaugsson (Getty)

I’m on my way to Glasgow for COP26. It’s the first time I have been abroad since before Covid. Conveniently enough I had already decided to visit the UK for other reasons and that gives me a chance to travel to Edinburgh by train (there’s no accommodation available in Glasgow). I will be able to tell everyone that I arrived by train. Hopefully no-one will ask how I got from my island country in the first place (it wasn’t by sailboat).

This will be my second COP conference. Previously I attended Paris 2015 as prime minister. Since then, I have publicly apologised for not having been more critical at the time. I was preoccupied with other things, primarily the unparalleled measures we took to repair the economy after the financial crises, resulting in the fastest economic revival seen by any country in living memory.

I know, it’s not a perfect excuse. I realise I should have questioned the groupthink. However, everything had been decided before I arrived. You know how this works. Nowadays politicians don’t usually make policy. They have become the spokesmen for establishment policy. Bureaucrats in the Nordic countries had for years been working on our approach to COP. In Paris it was all about solidarity, showing that we were more enthusiastic than anyone else, providing a good example and getting every country on the globe to sign up. It was all so easy. We just needed to say what we wanted to happen and then figure out later how or whether that could be achieved.

Enough with the excuses. Since Paris we have — or should have — learnt a lot. As Bjorn Lomborg has pointed out, even if the Paris accords were fully implemented (which now seems almost impossible) the effects would be minuscule. We should also realise that the West´s approach to lowering emissions is dependent on exporting production to other countries.

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