COP26: Millennial activists have no real plan, just a greener 'blah blah blah'

The vast majority of Scots accept that global warming is real and want something done about it. It’s just that COP26 looks like a theatre of the absurd, presided over by the dodgiest showman since PT Barnum: Boris Johnson.

The optics, as we hacks like to say, were always going to be bad, which is probably why Nicola Sturgeon is relatively happy to be on the sidelines. Even St Greta of Blah seems unsure what she’s doing here. Protesters can’t make up their minds whether they think COP26 is a good thing or just a waste of hot air.

It is of course an immensely important moment, the largest gathering of national leaders in British history. Let’s just hope they make use of it. But how will we know? After all, there is to be no treaty signed in Glasgow committing world governments to net zero by 2050.

Six years ago in Paris many of the the same world leaders agreed to disagree on legally-binding CO2 targets. The UN Climate Chief at that UN summit in Paris, Christiana Figueras, says she'll regard Glasgow as a success “if they agree to meet again in two years”. That's sounds a pretty meagre objective.

Is it worth all the carbon only to agree to have another meeting? “Yes,” she says emphatically. If you don’t get them face to face, politicians will never act. Democratic politics is analogue in a digital age. You still need the “meat in the room” as they put it in In The Loop. (Where is Glasgow-born Armando Iannucci by the way? Is this event not satire gold?)

Mr Johnson has been trying to manage expectations by saying that it’s all on a knife edge, touch and go. He’s boiled the objectives down to a mnemonic: CCCT. Coal, Cars, Cash and Trees. The idea is to have all developed countries abolish coal power, phase out petrol and diesel cars, agree £100 billion in subsidies to developing nations and grow more trees than are being cut down. All this by 2030.

Coal abolition is not going to happen, of course, because the biggest coal burners, China and India, are refusing to play ball. That was the big take-away from the G20 summit of world leaders in Rome. China builds most of the world’s solar panels and turbines but seems unable to use them much at home. Britain has all but phased out coal, which as recently as 2010 was producing 30% of our electricity.

The UK is also scrapping petrol and diesel cars by 2030. Most developed countries appear to be following suit – even, ironically, China. As for cash, the £100bn for the global south will surely be agreed this week, along with saving trees through the portentous Glasgow Leaders Declaration on Forest and Land Use. Even Brazil has signed up to that. No doubt Mr Johnson will say three out of four ain't bad.

Read more: Without China on board, COP26 is a dead parrot

Actually, one key letter missing from Boris Johnson's mnemonic is M for methane. Here there is also progress, with the EU and America signing the Global Methane Pledge to cut this most destructive gas by 30% by the end of the decade . We can also expect promises to deliver Covid vaccines to the Global South. Boris’s mnemonic should be expanded to CCCTMV+.

Despite the infuriating vagueness about how it is to be achieved, the mere presence of those 150-odd leaders means the world now accepts that global warming has somehow to be capped at or near 1.5deg. The G20 countries are expected to achieve net zero sometime in the middle of this century. They’re all now in it together – even China.

But the climate will still be in mortal danger if you believe the forecasts of most climate scientists, which everyone who matters does. However, I have detected a surprising outbreak of what can only be described as technological optimism amongst a number of environmental opinion formers recently.

Optimistic: Bill Gates

Read more: Reasons to be cheerful about COP26

It is not just philanthropists like Bill Gates and expoliticians like Al Gore, who are saying that the tech is now there to get to Net Zero. The head of of the World Meteorological Organisation, Professor Petteri Taalas and normally-gloomy academics like Professor Tim Linton of Exeter University’s Global Systems Institute are also making positive noises about climate change, while lamenting emissions at COP26. Professors Linton and Taalas say it is possible now to envisage climate stability without drastic changes to western, or more importantly, developing countries’ lifestyles.

They all think that this year has been a turning point in public attitudes. Cleaning up the environment has become almost a secular religion. Market forces are taking over from political inertia. Huge reductions in the cost of renewable energy – especially offshore wind and desert solar – mean the fossil fuel age is finally over. Banks and corporations are divesting fossil fuel stocks and oil companies are desperately rebranding.

The Covid vaccine has also revived confidence in the ability of science and industry to address global problems. Carbon capture, geothermal energy and bioengineering are being talked up, along with nuclear power, which is undergoing something of a rehabilitation despite its safety issues and huge cost.

The two biggest industrial emitters of CO2 are steel and cement. Mr Gates and Al Gore think that new techniques of production can and will make them less damaging. We have to hope they’re right, because the developing world is not going to stop building homes and infrastructure for their people.

There’s a new realism in the environment movement. Technology is the only humane solution to the demands of a growing world population. It is stupendously insensitive to talk of degrowth in front of countries which are only just getting a sniff of it.

And for all the noise from the activist fringe, they don’t actually have any real alternatives. Just Millennial angst and a greener blah, blah, blah.

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