Ross Clark Ross Clark

The wishful thinking of COP26

It's time to look at the evidence

History records that George II was the last British king to lead his troops on the battlefield, at the Battle of Dettingen in 1743. But maybe it is only a matter of time… Addressing the COP26 summit in Glasgow Prince Charles called for a ‘vast military-style campaign’ against climate change. We must put ourselves on a ‘war-like footing’, marshalling the resources of the private sector as we did during wartime. I look forward to the sight of Charles, on horseback, leading a battalion against Xi Jinping’s People’s Army to try to take the site of China’s latest coal-fired power station.

There is a very big problem with this kind of rhetoric. If, as Prince Charles added, COP26 is the ‘last chance saloon’ then where will that leave delegates at COP27? Clearly, there will be no point in them attending at all, given that it will be too late and the world will presumably be finished. In fact, according to Charles, we have already run out of time. Addressing the Copenhagen climate summit in 2009 he told delegates ‘our planet has reached a point of crisis and we have only seven years before we lose the levers of control’. By my calculations that would have taken us to 2016, yet carbon emissions continued to rise after that date and are still rising.

If, as Prince Charles added, COP26 is the ‘last chance saloon’ then where will that leave delegates at COP27?

It isn’t just Prince Charles, either. The Prime Minister has been equally alarmist, taking of mankind being ‘one minute from midnight’. Perhaps they think that dialling up the rhetoric will spur countries into action, but the opposite is true. When the hosts of COP26 start claiming we are teetering on the edge of doom they are going to turn off many world leaders, who can see such stuff is at odds with reality.

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