Cop26

Tuesday

Dominic Green

Joe Biden is asleep at the wheel

Did Joe Biden fall asleep during the opening speeches of the COP26 climate jamboree in Glasgow? It’s hard to blame him if he did. A conference dedicated to saving the planet is generating nothing but hot air, some of it carboniferously heavy with the exhaust of the armada of private jets that brought the guests. But it’s Biden’s job to stay awake, look lively and remember his lines. The footage shows a frail man who’s jetlagged, pushing eighty and trying his best to absorb the torrent of heated eco-bilge that’s being pumped into his ears. But he’s only human. The presidential eyelids start to flutter as a speaker pleads ‘on

Steerpike Steerpike

Six of the most melodramatic warnings from COP26

The COP26 summit in Glasgow reaches its climax today, as world leaders try and thrash out a deal to halt climate change. But as well as attempting to find agreement, politicians and other bigwigs are competing to outdo each other in their dire warnings of what might happen if nothing changes. Here are six of the most melodramatic claims to emerge so far from COP: Boris Johnson’s ‘doomsday clock’: ‘The doomsday device is real,’ said Boris Johnson as he addressed COP26 delegates on the dangers of climate change. The PM said humanity’s situation was comparable to a James Bond film where ‘a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a destination

Monday

Ross Clark

The wishful thinking of COP26

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

Katy Balls Katy Balls

Is Britain heading for a full-blown fish war with France?

As the COP26 summit gets underway, a diplomatic Brexit row is escalating on the sidelines of the conference over fish. After France threatened to block British boats from its ports and increase checks on vessels over a disagreement on fishing licences, the UK warned it could retaliate if France goes through with it. Suggestions from the French over the weekend that a solution in the form of ‘practical operational measures’ had been found were quickly shot down by the UK side. With a French election looming, Macron can be expected to do more not less of this This morning, Liz Truss doubled down – using a morning media round to say the UK is

Steerpike Steerpike

CNN’s COP capital confusion

American network CNN appears to be bringing the same rigour and insight to COP26 that it displayed throughout the Trump administration. The broadcasters rocked up to the UN climate change summit in Scotland this weekend, brimming with their usual brio and bumptiousness at the chance to cover Biden, Boris et al rubbing shoulders. There’s only one problem – their staff do not appear to know which city they are actually in. Celebrated CNN anchor Wolf Blitzer fired off a beaming photo of himself this morning, grinning in front of Edinburgh Castle with the caption ‘I’m now reporting from Edinburgh in Scotland where 20,000 world leaders and delegates have gathered.’ Unfortunately COP26 is not actually

Steerpike Steerpike

COP commences with chaos

‘COP26: no time for delay’ scream the signs at Euston station. But for hundreds of desperate delegates yesterday it proved to be a cruel irony after dozens of rail services to Glasgow were cancelled thanks to a fallen tree and severe weather sparked rail chaos. Members of HM lobby took to their WhatsApp group to complain about the chaos, with Britain’s hacks forced to engage in an undignified game of Planes, Trains and Automobiles to race across the country to reach the UN eco-jamboree. The i paper‘s Paul Waugh had his Glasgow-bound train turned back at Milton Keynes while Red Lion regular Eleanor Langford was one of many forced to board domestic flights, as

Thursday

The Spectator

Portrait of the week: Queen stays home, Boris rubbishes recycling and pay freeze thaws

Home The Queen will not attend the COP26 meeting in Glasgow next week; she had resumed light duties after having spent a night in hospital for ‘preliminary medical checks’. The Queen would address COP26 by means of a recorded video. ‘The recycling thing is a red herring,’ Boris Johnson, the Prime Minister, told a press conference attended by schoolchildren. ‘You can only recycle plastic a couple of times, really. What you’ve got to do is stop the production of plastic.’ The protestors calling themselves Insulate Britain blocked main roads into London and approaches to the M25. Amazon Web Services was awarded a contract to provide a high-security cloud system for

Martin Vander Weyer Martin Vander Weyer

Why paying more dividends could save the planet

Climate emergency demands action, not rhetoric. So, on the eve of COP26, which UK news item promises to deliver the most positive impact for the future of the planet? Not, I suggest, Sadiq Khan’s extension of the Ultra Low Emissions Zone to the North and South Circulars, imposing stinging costs on owners of older diesels who can’t afford newer ones; nor Rishi Sunak’s £7 billion pledge for sustainable transport in cities outside London — only £1.5 billion of which turns out to be new money. No, the headline that matters more is the one that says dividend payments by UK companies are returning to normal. During the darkest days of

Fraser Nelson Fraser Nelson

Cop out: Boris’s battle to save the climate summit

As so often, the Queen put it best. While opening the Welsh parliament a couple of weeks ago, she was caught on microphone discussing the COP26 summit and its frustrations. ‘Still don’t know who is coming,’ she told the Duchess of Cornwall. ‘It’s really irritating when they talk, but don’t do.’ In just a few words, she perfectly summed up the challenges facing Boris Johnson in Glasgow. The PM wants to get countries to commit to net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But how to get a deal, if the main players aren’t at the table? Xi Jinping hasn’t left China since the Covid outbreak and will stay put now. Vladimir

Katy Balls Katy Balls

The Tory blame game over COP26 has already started

Just a few months ago, the view inside Downing Street was that the COP26 summit would be a national morale booster. The Coldplay singer Chris Martin was mentioned as a potential headline act and there were excited discussions about giving the event a cute mascot. Now, the headlines are about rail strikes, bin men running away from rats on rubbish-strewn streets in Glasgow and the Prime Minister declaring that recycling doesn’t work. Even the mascot, Bonnie the seal, has been called ‘rat-like’ by government sources. ‘It’s hideous,’ says a member of a foreign delegation. Just as the technical climate negotiations have hit stumbling blocks, so too have No. 10’s other

Ross Clark Ross Clark

What’s really behind the net-zero zealotry of big businesses?

Boris Johnson’s biggest challenge at COP26 doesn’t lie in avoiding a finger-wagging from Greta Thunberg, who won’t be going. Neither will it be in preventing the party being spoiled by Insulate Britain holding up the limousines of the great and good. Nor will Johnson have to struggle too hard to persuade his fellow world leaders to sign some kind of declaration strong enough to be spun as a triumph but anodyne enough to allow China, Russia and others to ignore it. No, the PM’s biggest challenge lies in fending off the demands of big businesses, who have latched themselves to the cause of net zero with great gusto, aware of

James Lovelock

Why are we so afraid of nuclear power?

The climate change summit in Glasgow will have one important part of the discussion missing: the role of nuclear power. It seems the government is in no mood for a discussion with the nuclear industry — every one of its applications to exhibit at the COP26 summit has been rejected. That’s a shame, because there are plenty of myths to be addressed. We could discuss the lessons from the plant at Fukushima, seriously harmed by a tsunami in March 2011. Sometime later, two of the reactors overheated, burst and released a small quantity of radioactive material into the environment. At the time of this event, my wife Sandy and I

Wednesday

Charles Moore

The cold hard truth about heat pumps

When I went to Poland not long before Covid, I found a country more bitterly divided by a culture war even than we are. So I would not rule out EU leaders being right that the current government there has intruded on the independence of the judiciary for its own political ends. This is the background to recent Brussels fury that the Polish Constitutional Tribunal (supreme court) asserted the primacy of Polish law over that of the EU earlier this month. The problem never arises in the EU, of course, because there the European Court of Justice has never had an independent judiciary to be tampered with. It has aways

Melanie McDonagh Melanie McDonagh

Giving up meat won’t make us greener

There was a nifty about-turn last week when the so-called Nudge Unit, the government’s behavioural policy advisory body, abandoned its proposals to get us to shift towards a plant-based diet and away from eating meat. Among other exciting intiatives it suggested ‘building support for a bold policy’ such as a tax on producers of mutton and beef. It pointed out that the government could get people used to a vegetarian diet through its spending in hospitals, schools, prisons, courts and military facilities – you can just imagine how that would go down with soldiers, prisoners and patients – and declared that a ‘timely moment to intervene’ would be when people are

Tuesday

Steerpike

Parliamentarians plot to ruin China’s G20

It’s a big week for fans of high politics and hobnobbing. Prior to the launch of Sunday’s COP26 shindig there is first the small matter of the G20 summit in Rome. And while the attention of many attendees – chief among them Britain’s Boris Johnson – will no doubt be on green gambits and climate diplomacy, there are fears that other crucial issues risk being overlooked in the dash towards Net Zero. Chief among these are the various abuses committed by President Xi’s China towards the Uyghur Muslims and the effective destruction of Hong Kong. Xi himself is not expected to physically attend the summit, not having left China since

Saturday

Annabel Denham

Boris Johnson should trust the market to solve climate change

In a 368-page document published this week, the government announced its strategy to cut emissions to net zero by 2050 and confirmed its target for all electricity to come from low carbon sources by 2035.  It’s difficult to imagine worse timing for the release. An energy crisis is exposing the failures of decades of massive state meddling in the market. Insulate Britain have been picnicking on the M4 and M25. And on Wednesday a leak of documents showed Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia are asking the UN to play down the need to move rapidly away from fossil fuels. None of this has weakened the Prime Minister’s resolve, though that’s

Tuesday

Steerpike

COP out: jet-setting of top mandarins revealed

The world is gearing up for COP26, the UN’s climate change conference in Glasgow, due to be held in less than a fortnight’s time. Ahead of the eco-jamboree, ministers and mandarins have been busily telling the rest of us how to live, with the Treasury today unveiling the truth about how much going green will cost: the Net Zero target means by 2030 we can expect to pay £45,000 for a new electric car while the replacement for a gas boiler by 2035 should be between £6,000 to £10,000. Ooft. Still, while the government has suggested saving the planet by not rinsing plates before putting them in a dishwasher or freezing, rather than

Ross Clark Ross Clark

This heat pump scheme is a bung to the rich

Who does the government think will be the 90,000 lucky people who succeed in pocketing £5,000 grants to replace their gas boilers with heat pumps? Just-about-managing homeowners in ‘Red Wall’ seats who strained every sinew to buy a draughty two up, two down – or well-off homeowners with nice period houses, lots of capital and three cars on the drive? Here’s a little clue: even taking into account the £5,000 grant it will still cost upwards of £5,000 to install the heat pump itself, plus another £10,000 for insulation and to install larger radiators – so it is really not an option for the first group. As for the second,

Monday

Fraser Nelson

Join: The Spectator’s online COP26 summit

The two-week COP26 climate change summit starts this weekend, with 100,000 expected on a protest march in Glasgow. And tomorrow, we at The Spectator will hold our own (virtual) summit looking at what lies ahead — and asking if history is about to be made, and how much of this is likely to be political theatre. The morning will open at 9.30am with a keynote speech from Dieter Helm, professor of energy policy at New College, Oxford: I’ll be in discussion with him afterwards. His book, Net Zero, is perhaps the best primer you’ll read on the topic: he supports the objective but is sceptical about the “jaw-jaw” of climate summits

Thursday

Stephen Daisley

Glasgow is threatening a rubbish COP26

Glasgow’s bin men mostly manage to avoid being drawn into international relations but that could be about to change. The city’s refuse workers have voted 96.9 per cent in favour of industrial action in response to a pay offer that would have seen local government employees on less than £25,000 gain an extra £850. Unless there is an improved offer, members of the GMB Glasgow branch could go ahead with industrial action, including during the first two weeks of November. That is, of course, when world leaders from the Prime Minister to President Biden will be in town for COP26. As I wrote about in the magazine earlier this month,