Boris Johnson must channel the spirit of Churchill to tackle the climate crisis

The climate column: the COP climate conference process has failed, leaving humanity careering over a cliff. It is time for our prime minister to step up

Humanity cannot expect to keep repeating a strategy that has failed every year since the first Conference of the Parties (COP) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change met in Berlin in 1995, and expect it to eventually succeed.

It is time to point out that the COP emperor has no clothes.

We urgently need new processes for this year’s 26th COP in Glasgow – the kind that could actually end our climate nightmare.

In 1992, when the UN first agreed upon the Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere were at 354 parts per million (ppm).

The framework set out “to stabilise greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system” – in other words, to stop us emitting so much carbon that we would trash our climate.

Implicit was a halt in the rise of carbon-dioxide levels and to return them to below what was regarded as the highest safe level of 350 ppm, which had been passed in 1988.

Yet year upon year, the signatories of the UNFCCC failed to meet their self-imposed CO2 targets.

By 1995, when the signatories to the UNFCCC first met in Berlin, levels had reached 360 ppm.

By 1997, when the UNFCCC had agreed the Kyoto Protocol, levels had reached 362 ppm.

By 2009, when the Copenhagen COP collapsed in disarray again following squabbling from the largest emitters, levels had reached 386 ppm.

By 2005, when presidents Obama and Xi helped broker the third international climate agreement at the Paris COP, levels had reached 399 ppm.

And now, in 2020, as Britain prepares to preside over the Glasgow COP in November, emissions have soared to a terrifying 414 ppm, a level far higher than anything seen in human history.

In other words, instead of reversing or even halting carbon emissions, we’ve accelerated, as the global south rapidly industrialises, meat consumption explodes and the world’s remaining forests are bulldozed or devastated by pest infestations and wildfires.

Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised: any climate process dependent on consensus from countries led by Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, Recep Erdogan, Vladimir Putin, the Ayatollah Khamanei and Prince Mohammad bin Salman is arguably destined to fail.

So if we admit the COP process has failed and left humanity careering over a climate cliff – what should we do instead?

First, we must acknowledge the five pillars of power in the fossil fuel economy – governments, fossil-fuel corporations, the media, finance and civil society – and organise the COP around them.

Second, Mark Carney in his role as the UN special envoy on climate and finance needs to convene a summit in Glasgow of the world’s banking and finance corporations. This needs to agree an immediate moratorium on all lending for new fossil fuel infrastructure, and a reallocation of the $5 trillion (£3.9 trillion) proposed fossil fuel investments over the next decade into creating a global renewable energy economy.

Third, James Murdoch, having bravely stood up to his father Rupert and brother Lachlan on the climate emergency during the Australian bushfire apocalypse, should be appointed by UN secretary general Antonio Guterres to be the UN special envoy for media and climate. He would then convene a similar Glasgow summit for the world’s media to sign a climate declaration that might include, for example, banning advertising by fossil fuel corporations.

We should remember that governments were not able to effectively regulate the tobacco industry until they banned it from conferences dedicated to tackling its devastating health consequences. Similarly, the UK government should ban fossil fuel corporations from infiltrating the COP.

Nigel Topping, the former head of the global climate action corporate alliance We Mean Business, now the COP’s high-level climate action champion, should convene a separate summit of the world’s fossil fuel corporations in Glasgow, getting agreement from them to immediately end all new fossil fuel investments, and a commitment to transitioning to 100 per cent renewable energy within an agreed timeframe.

Finally, Antonio Guterres should convene a global citizens’ assembly immediately prior to the COP, as called for by Extinction Rebellion, which would have all the current science placed before it and agree the options for a just, five-year transition to a zero-carbon economy. These could then be presented to the governmental COP for endorsement by a two-thirds majority, rather than consensus.

Boris Johnson has proven he is a great disrupter. The evidence shows that the COP needs radical disruption if it is to deliver. Britain’s future is on the line, in a way it was not, even when Churchill faced Hitler across the Channel.

Now is the time for Johnson to channel the inner Churchill he has intimated for so long.

Prime minister: your country and your planet need you.