Can we rescue Cop26 from destruction after Boris Johnson’s blundering hypocrisy?

New carbon-emitting developments will leave a catastrophic carbon footprint, threatening the UK’s credibility and, in turn, the future of humanity

The UK has a crucial role in keeping the world below a rise of 1.5C (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

In a Trumpian fit of self-harm, the UK has sabotaged its own presidency of the crucial upcoming Cop26 UN climate summit. This is the most important global summit since the Paris Climate Agreement was signed in 2015, as it is the first five-year review of countries’ promised carbon reduction targets.

The literal future of humanity, and what is left of nature, depends on its success. The UK as president has the crucial role of getting the international community to agree to a deepening of carbon-emission cuts to keep us below a rise of 1.5C.

Yet this month the UK government gave the go-ahead to Woodhouse Colliery, the largest new coal-field in Europe.

It had previously given permission for the largest new fossil-fuelled power station in Europe at Drax in Yorkshire and supports the expansion of the world’s largest aviation hub at Heathrow.

Last autumn it granted the tenth successive fossil-fuel duty cut and announced the biggest UK road-building programme in a generation.

Woodhouse will emit more carbon emissions in its lifetime than the entire annual UK economy. The minister for local government, Robert Jenrick, ruled that it was a “local” decision for Cumbria County Council and refused to veto it despite its destruction of the UK’s international credibility as president of the Cop.

A few weeks later, the same minister announced that he was creating legislation to grant himself the power, as Secretary of State, to veto any local council proposal to move the statues of dead slave-traders.

Just think about that.

The UK government thinks protecting the prominence of slave-trader statues is of national importance, but destroying the credibility of the UK’s presidency of the global climate summit is a “local” decision.

The cruel irony that the climate crisis is already having devastating consequences for Africa seems to have escaped the minister.

The rationale given by the government is that it is better for the UK to produce its own coal for steel manufacturing, rather than have to import it.

But this is a beggar-our-neighbour policy. It gives the green light to every other country that is a signatory to the Paris Agreement, to open their own new coal, oil and gas fields, which would literally end all remaining hope to avoid global climate genocide.

Instead of going backwards by opening new coal mines, the UK should instead be developing steel plants powered by hydrogen, produced by renewable energy, as Sweden is already doing.

As we wrote last week, scientists are warning that the emergency is now so dire that we need to be taking carbon out of the atmosphere not adding millions of tonnes more per annum.

The proposed new Drax fossil-fuelled power station in Yorkshire was rejected by the planning inspectorate in 2019, as its carbon emissions would break our commitments under the Paris Agreement.

But this was overruled by Boris Johnson’s government, which said authorities should not assess individual planning applications against the UK’s Paris Agreement carbon budget.

The lifetime emissions of this new power station are a staggering 287 million tonnes or four-fifths of the UK’s entire annual carbon emissions.

Then the UK Supreme Court on 16 December disastrously overturned a lower court’s ruling that the government’s go-ahead for Heathrow airport expansion contravened the UK’s Paris Agreement commitments.

The estimated emissions from the expanded airport would be 183 million tonnes over the next 30 years, or over 50 per cent of the entire UK economy’s annual emissions.

Taken together just these three decisions by Johnson’s government would emit a devastating 890 million tonnes of carbon.

To put that in context, over the last 25 years, to practice what I preach, I invested about £30,000 in triple-glazing, solid wall insulation and renewable energy to bring my home’s carbon emissions to net-zero.

Yet it would take 300 million years of the carbon savings from my net-zero home to make up for these new emissions.

So how can we rescue Cop26 from destruction by Johnson’s blundering hypocrisy?

Unless Johnson reverses these decisions, it is untenable for the UK to preside over the negotiations that need to produce an agreement to cut greenhouse gases by 50 per cent by 2030.

Johnson cannot possibly tell poorer nations that they cannot open up their own huge coal mines, build new fossil-fuelled power stations or massively expand their airports, when the UK is forging ahead with its own.

This is now not just a UK crisis but a global crisis.

When we contacted the UN Secretary-General António Guterres’s office for a comment, a UN spokesperson said: “he has repeatedly called on countries to strengthen their national climate plans before Glasgow, including more ambitious emission cut targets for 2030”.

If Johnson does not immediately reverse course, it is incumbent on the UN Secretary-General, in consultation with the UNFCCC executive, to step in to terminate the UK presidency.

A joint-presidency shared by John Kerry, President Biden’s new Climate Envoy, and President Alvarado Quesada of Costa-Rica, a developing country that has already achieved a 98 per cent green electricity grid and reversed tropical deforestation, would have far more chance of success than the now compromised Johnson-appointed UK COP President Alok Sharma.

The future of humanity is again critically at stake and Guterres must act, if Johnson refuses to.