What if Cop26 doesn’t meet expectations?

The absence of President Xi of China (the world’s most polluting nation) and of President Putin (Russia is still a superpower in hydrocarbon resources) will fatally damage the prospects of a binding agreement, writes Sean O’Grady

Boris Johnson has belatedly taken to saying that the negotiations will be ‘extremely tough’ (PA)

Will the Cop be a flop? There are certainly some official collywobbles about the prospects for the 26th Conference of Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change (signed in 2016). Cop26 will assemble in Glasgow on 31 October and run until 12 November, and the bickering within government about it has already begun – never a good sign and one that suggests that the outcomes from the conference of world leaders will not live up to overblown expectations. Specifically, the absence of President Xi of China (the world’s most polluting nation) and of President Putin (Russia is still a superpower in hydrocarbon resources) will fatally damage the prospects of a binding agreement to keep greenhouse gas emissions to (relatively) safe levels. The presence of such key personalities as Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, the Queen (assuming she’s well enough), Nicola Sturgeon, Emmanuel Macron, Angela Merkel, Joe Biden, Scott Morrison and Narendra Modi will help maintain the prestige of the gathering and means that probably something will emerge from the meetings and speeches (because “sherpas” will have prepared the necessary ground), but without China’s leader “in the room” it is a case of Hamlet without the prince.

The fear voiced by some connected to Cop26 is twofold, therefore. First, that this grand and much-hyped meeting will fail to deliver a radical and clear enough commitment from the major industrial powers, with the obvious dire consequences for the future of life on Earth. Second, are the “optics” of “Global Britain” failing to provide useful leadership when given the opportunity to chair and steer such an important, indeed transcendent, project. The flaws inherent in the UK’s own recently published climate change strategy paper (including a mysterious and rapid withdrawal of a section on eating less meat) have also compromised Boris Johnson’s claim to be “world king” of the environment. Post-Brexit Britain is supposed to be emerging from its EU cocoon like a gorgeous bright butterfly, attracting the delight and inspiring the hope of all around; instead it’s been swatted and squashed by the old men of Beijing. Would Cop26 be more successful and better attended if it was being hosted by the UK with all the economic and diplomatic heft of the EU behind it? It’s an awkward thought.

Politically and presentationally, it may well be the prime minister’s own fault. With so much riding on the success of Cop26, it was hyped up, maybe hopelessly, with typical Johnsonian boosterism. When he went to address the UN General Assembly on climate change he quoted Kermit the Frog, pushed his luck even further with the bemused delegates by telling a weak joke about Miss Piggy, and told world leaders, usually more mature in outlook and judgement than the British prime minister, to “grow up” and face the climate crisis. It is, after all, not so very long ago that Johnson was writing sceptical articles about climate change in The Spectator and The Daily Telegraph. Johnson said that the summit “simply must succeed” in order to save the planet; what will it say, then, about the man who failed in that task?

Ominously, the prime minister has belatedly taken to massaging expectations earthwards – it will be “extremely tough”. It’s the kind of thing a politician does when he knows that something weak and half-baked is going to emerge from an international conference. As one minister quoted in The Sun remarked: “Nobody has pitched properly that this is not going to be some big hand of history moment where a new deal is done, so it’s going to feel like a damp squib. Alok is raging. It’s got completely out of control. They keep saying ‘keep 1.5 alive’ but I don’t know what it means. It’s incomprehensible.”

No doubt, if Cop26 does turn into a flop then it will be the smooth-talking Alok Sharma, a man who would try to put the best gloss on the sinking of the Titanic, and the Cop26 spin doctor, Allegra Stratton, whose careers will sink with this flagship of post-Brexit diplomacy. Still, if you can’t stand the heat...