UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose government is hosting the talks, will warn Monday that humanity has run down the clock on climate change.
“It’s one minute to midnight, and we need to act now,” he will say in an opening speech, according to remarks sent to journalists.
“We have to move from talk and debate and discussion to concerted, real-world action on coal, cars, cash and trees. Not more hopes and targets and aspirations, valuable though they are, but clear commitments and concrete timetables for change.”
The G20 leaders’ meeting that ended in Rome on Sunday suggests that leaders are finally listening to the science, but they still lack the political unity to make the ambitious decisions required to meet the moment.
COP26 convenes about 25,000 people for one of the biggest international events since the pandemic began, and it comes after a year of extreme weather that claimed hundreds of lives in unexpected places that caught even climate scientists off guard.
All of this language was in the G20 leaders’ communiqué, including an acknowledgment that to meet net zero by mid-century, many member nations will need to lift their emissions-reductions pledges, known as Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), over this decade.
But their failure to put an end date on the use of coal — the single biggest contributor to climate change — and to get all countries to firmly commit to net zero by 2050 (as opposed to 2060, as China, Russia and Saudi Arabia have pledged) shows that the countries that use and produce fossil fuels still have…
Source : cnn
