Towards the end of October, just a week before the UK hosted the COP26 summit, the British Chancellor announced in his autumn budget a slashing of taxes on short-haul domestic flights. This was clearly intended to provide a much-needed boost to Britain’s battered air industries; but, even as the country’s Prime Minister was endeavouring to persuade his fellow world leaders to commit to radical enhancements to their carbon reduction targets, this seemed to send out a somewhat incongruous message to the rest of the globe.

That same week, the UK parliament had voted to allow water companies to continue to pour raw sewage into rivers and the sea. At the same time, the government was initiating a scheme to allocate £450 million to subsidise the replacement of high-emission domestic gas boilers with low-carbon heat pumps. Unfortunately, however, that budget would only be sufficient to cover 90,000 of the 25 million British homes which would need those replacements.

In the meantime, an environmental campaign group called Insulate Britain was busy blockading London’s orbital motorway, the M25. The group had been demanding that the government pay to insulate all homes in the UK in order to reduce energy wastage and usage and the resulting carbon emissions, although one of its leaders did admit to the BBC that he himself had not in fact got round to having his own home insulated as yet. Meanwhile, a report in the press highlighted a custom common among many of those millennials who hail Greta Thunberg as some kind of divine saviour: when feeling peckish, they apparently like to order the delivery of their favourite snack, flown in from warmer climes and then biked to their doors, a single, solitary, fresh, green (or not-so-green) avocado.  

A few days into COP26, the country’s popular press praised both the Prime Minister's wife and Prince William’s wife for wearing at the conference clothes that they had been seen wearing in public before, as though that were the extent of the green action needed to rescue our planet from environmental collapse. This must surely represent the most extraordinarily privileged form of supposed ‘recycling’ imaginable.

Immediately prior to the start of COP26 at the end of last month, Boris Johnson had hailed the climate conference as ‘a moment of truth for world leaders’ offering ‘the beginning of the end for climate change’ – yet, with several key leaders choosing to stay away from the event, very few observers seemed to hold out much hope for great progress to be made in Glasgow.

The outcomes of an opinion poll published by the Daily Mail newspaper two days before the summit began showed that the majority of British people wanted the country to be more environmentally friendly but were not prepared to pay more than £5 a week to achieve this. The same survey also suggested that most of the nation believed that COP26 would fail in its lofty goals. Britain may have some of the world’s most ambitious carbon reduction targets; but it’s not very clear that anyone, within or outside the country, actually believes they will ever be achieved.

A global survey published a few days earlier – involving nearly a quarter of a million respondents – had however shown that 78 per cent of the population of the planet had become very seriously concerned by the damage that human activity had inflicted upon the environment. It was at least obvious that something had to be done. What was rather less evident was what it was that had to be done, and who was going to do it.

While other global figures were unthinkingly jetting their way towards Scotland, the sainted Swede herself, Ms. Thunberg, arrived by train to great media fanfare and the fervent applause of her adoring crowds. At the same time, the world’s most famous bodybuilder-turned-actor-turned-politician-turned-activist, Arnold Schwarzenegger, had released a message calling upon world leaders to ‘terminate’ climate change. However, despite the urgency of Mr. Schwarzenegger’s warnings, the leaders of two of the world’s three superpowers, and the Queen of England and the Pope, were all unable to attend the conference. It would appear that Arnie no longer has the influence he once enjoyed. Things might perhaps have been different if it had instead been Dwayne Johnson who had intervened.

Perhaps we can hardly blame those leaders who chose not to go to Glasgow. It may be that we already suspect we are all inevitably doomed and that our continuing protestations are little more than vain hypocrisies. Despite the grandiose words of Britain’s Prime Minister, the host nation’s own highly provisional degrees of commitment to the significant sacrifices which will be needed if we are to have any hope of saving our planet might not have set the best example for the rest of humanity.

While an agreement announced right at the start of the summit to end deforestation by 2030 was generally welcomed, it was also pointed out by green campaigners that a similar agreement had been made in 2014 and had then ‘failed to slow deforestation at all’. All this might serve to remind the waiting world that, despite the desperate urgency of the climate crisis, impressive feats of rhetoric and grand plans do not necessarily guarantee effective processes of implementation, when political leaders all too often seem set upon measures intended to foster the short-term popularity which they see as immediately underpinning the continuation of their times in power.

On 8 November, the British government announced a pledge of £290 million to help developing nations deal with the climate crisis. This was however in the context of overall cuts to the country’s overseas aid budgets, and anyway represented less than one-third of a per cent of what those poorer nations had requested, and about one per cent of what the UK had last year budgeted to spend on a notoriously ineffective Covid-19 test and trace system. 

COP26’s successes almost inevitably tended to be limited by geopolitical and economic exigencies. When, for example, during the first week of the conference, more than 40 countries pledged to shift away from the use of coal (the world’s worst single contributor to carbon emissions), that list did not include China, India, Australia or the United States – four of the biggest consumers of that fossil fuel. In the rush to avert an imminent environmental catastrophe, but in the absence of bold and inspiring leadership, nation-state participants seemed willing only to make those commitments which would not cost them (their economies or their electorates) so very much.

At the start of this month, Greta Thunberg told her young fans that the world’s political leaders were only ‘pretending to take our future seriously’. Towards the end of the first week of the summit, she added: ‘We are tired of their blah, blah, blah. Our leaders are not leading.’ This political credibility gap has been epitomised by Boris Johnson’s government, following the recent recurrence of its disputes with the European Union over Britain’s attempts to reverse its post-Brexit commitments to trade protocols designed to preserve the peace on the island of Ireland, and ongoing arguments with France over post-Brexit fishing rights. Both situations have characterized Mr. Johnson and his administration as being untrustworthy and liable to abandon transnational agreements which they themselves had brokered. This is hardly a robust context in which to be hosting a crucial global summit. How, after all, can other countries seriously consider entering into solemn and binding pledges promoted by a national government which has repeatedly and very visibly broken its own promises and which only a year ago openly declared its actual willingness to breach international law? 

During the opening week of the summit, Mr. Johnson’s support for a plan to change parliamentary rules to save a member of his party from sanctions resulting from misconduct charges and his admission that he had recently taken a free holiday at the luxury villa of a man to whom he had awarded a peerage did little to restore faith in the integrity of his administration. Indeed, an opinion poll published by the Daily Mail on 5 November indicated that 53 per cent of the British electorate considered Johnson’s premiership had been tainted by sleaze. Calling their latest actions ‘shameful’, the former Conservative Prime Minister John Major observed the following day that the current Conservative government had ‘broken their word on many occasions’. 

When a few days into COP26, a pledge was announced to reduce methane emissions by 30 per cent before the end of the decade, it may have seemed significant that this major initiative was led by the US and the EU rather than the UK. Another particularly significant announcement made during the first week of the summit came not from the British Prime Minister but as the result of an initiative led by a former governor of the Bank of England, a respected Canadian economist called Mark Carney, who reported that 450 of the world's largest financial institutions had agreed to align their investment policies with climate change mitigation strategies. In the closing days of COP26, while negotiators tweaked a draft summit agreement whose modest scope (and whose calls to meet again soon) rather belied the Prime Minister’s earlier fanfares, the United States and China announced a major bilateral initiative from which British influence appeared again to be excluded.

Of course, the vast majority of the international agreements announced at such conferences have been developed through lengthy diplomatic and political efforts in the months prior to the delegates' gathering. Mr. Johnson, however, is not himself renowned for enjoying engaging in such painstaking preparations. Indeed, Britain’s recent vacillations and inconsistencies in both its Brexit negotiations and its domestic politics have made its leadership appear opportunistic, self-serving and untrustworthy. 

It wasn’t so very long ago that Britain’s reputation was very different. In April 2009, the country’s then Prime Minister Gordon Brown had assembled world leaders in London for a summit to address the impacts of the global financial crisis. The multi-trillion-dollar stimulus package which resulted from that G20 meeting went a long way to setting the planet’s economy back on track. Dr. Brown was able to achieve a consensus on this extraordinarily ambitious plan because, although sometimes considered an uncharismatic figure by many of his more flamboyant counterparts, he was admired and trusted as an economic expert, an intellectual heavyweight and an individual of extraordinary honesty, integrity and reliability. He was, in short, that most unusual of creatures, a politician of true substance, principle and authority.

By contrast, even his staunchest allies would sadly find it difficult to credit Boris Johnson with such qualities. That flip-flop, flimflam man; that merchant of nonsense; that artist of inanity and obfuscation; that bastion of blond bombast… This was the man who was photographed on the first day of the COP summit without a face-mask and apparently asleep, while sitting next to the veteran environmental campaigner and broadcasting legend, the 95-year-old Sir David Attenborough. But this is also the person who has been tasked with leading the charge to save the world – with saving us not simply, as Gordon Brown did, from economic devastation, but from the impending threat of the extinction of our civilizations and our species.

It was reported that there were more delegates from the fossil fuel industries at the summit than from any individual nation. That did not bode well. Halfway through the two-week conference, the world’s favourite perennially scandalized Scandinavian had already declared the event a failure. Time will tell as to whether the relatively modest agreements achieved by COP26 will ever generate any significant impacts at all.

As the conference entered its second week, Boris Johnson called upon its participants to make ‘bold compromises’. Mr. Johnson’s phrase sounded like something of a contradiction in terms, one which unwittingly summed up the paralyzing paradox (the conflict between national and global interests) which once more appeared to stymie the possibility of those breakthroughs so critically needed. 

Yet of course we must not lose hope. Despair would represent the most disastrous abdication of responsibility. We can and must turn this situation around – right now. Across the entire history of humanity, greater miracles have happened; but very few have ever occurred in conditions of such dire urgency.

This urgency was voiced with particular force by United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres in the final hours of the summit, when he told the world’s press that any hopes of keeping alive pledges to restrict temperature rises to 1.5 degrees were now ‘on life support’. He added that promises made would ‘ring hollow’ while fossil fuel industries continued to receive trillions in state subsidies, and that the progress made at the conference had been ‘far from enough’.

Indeed, the final draft of the deal reached by the delegates at COP26 saw essential commitments to crucial reductions in fossil fuel dependencies heavily watered down to preserve the interests of major economic powers. This was hardly the bold leap forward the world so needs and which Britain’s Prime Minister had promised just a fortnight earlier. In fact, to many observers, the summit’s outcomes appeared as fatally compromised as that Prime Minister’s own moral authority had become.

As larger nations had demanded, coal use was not to be phased out but was to be ‘phased down’ in the agreed text of the Glasgow Climate Pact, a deal which would only at best (if all its pledges were actually met) limit temperature rises to 2.4 degrees – significantly higher than the 1.5 required for the sustainability of our living environment and the survival of our species. This was a devastating compromise for which Britain’s summit president Alok Sharma tearfully declared that he was ‘deeply sorry’. This was, in short, a total cop-out, or, in the words of one BBC reporter, ‘a limp sticking-plaster for the deep wound that’s threatening life on this planet’. 

On 13 November, as the final draft of the agreement had been belatedly published, one influential academic commentator, Professor Mark Maslin from University College London, had told the BBC that in their demands for stronger commitments the world’s smaller island nations had virtually been ‘doing the UK presidency’s job for them’. 

In the end, though, the hopes of those smaller nations were cruelly dashed. The summit’s delegates eventually chose to kick the problem further down the road, agreeing to meet again next year, as though all the urgency of the climate crisis had somehow dissipated – as if the planet were not already running out of time. 

It seems difficult to see this as anything other than a tragic betrayal of future generations and of the most vulnerable people on Earth. As one climate campaigner put it, the deal struck in Scotland will not save her Pacific island nation from drowning; nor, we might add, will it save the entire world from burning up.