Prime minister Boris Johnson gave his welcome address to COP26 delegates in Glasgow this afternoon.
Speaking to the conference, Johnson compared the urgency of tackling climate change to the plot of a Bond film saying: “The Doomsday device is real, and the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of turbines and systems … covering the Earth in a suffocating blanket of CO2.”
“We may not feel much like James Bond,” he joked: “Not all of us necessarily look much like James Bond. But we have the opportunity to make this summit the moment humanity began to defuse that bomb.
He referred to the risks of increasing extreme weather events such as wildfires, droughts, starvation and flooding, saying: “The longer we fail to act, the worse it gets and the higher the price when we are forced to act”.
He echoed the common environmentalist argument that the issue of climate change must be confronted in order to protect the next generation, saying: “The children who will judge us are not yet born, and their children … we must not fluff our lines or miss our cue because they will not forgive us … they will judge us with a bitterness and resentment that eclipses that of any of the clime activists today. And they will be right.”
However he transitioned to a more positive angle by referring to the ability of innovation to mitigate the issues, and argued that developed countries like the UK had a responsibility to help developing countries with their climate challenges.
However he implied that that James Watt’s development of the steam engine at the University of Glasgow in 1776, which accelerated the industrial revolution, was when “the Doomsday machine began to tick.”
He channelled Greta Thunberg, by claiming that: “All those promises [at previous climate summits] will be nothing but blah blah blah, to coin a phrase.”
Responding to the brief speech, leader of the Liberal Democrats and former climate minister Ed Davey MP, said: “Boris Johnson has blustered his way to COP26 and it is starting to show. This is the most important conference to take place on our shores in a generation, and we all need it to succeed.
“That means putting aside his differences with other western leaders, particularly our friends across Europe, and working together to force China and others to act. For COP to succeed, the Prime Minister needs to stop just talking about ‘Global Britain’ and start acting like it.
“For a good COP, we need British leadership and united Western pressure on China, Saudi Arabia and Brazil. For a bad COP, all we need is for Boris Johnson to continue down his current path.”
