BORIS Johnsons has warned world leaders if they fail to thrash out meaningful action to salvage climate crisis efforts, Glasgow will remembered as “the historic turning point when history failed to turn”.
Opening the world leaders' summit at COP26, the Prime Minister warned his peers that if world leaders fail to make the summit a success, future generations “will not forgive us” as he stressed that politicians “must not fluff our lines or miss our cue” for action.
Speaking in front of gathered world leaders, Mr Johnson said that “while COP26 will not be the end of climate change it can and it must mark the beginning of the end”.
He added: “In the years since Paris the world has slowly and with great effort and pain built a lifeboat for humanity and now is the time to give that lifeboat a mighty shove into the water like some great liner rolling down the slipways of the Clyde.
“Take a sexton sighting on 1.5 degrees and set off on a journey to a cleaner greener future.”
READ MORE: COP26: Nicola Sturgeon tells world leaders to 'step up' as success 'in the balance'
The Paris Agreement committed ations to limit global warming to 2 degrees with anambition to work towards 1.5 degrees - a benchmark pleded for at COP26.
But individual plans drawn up by countries, as they stand, would see global temperatures soar well above the tipping point.
The Prime Minister said: “Four degrees and we say goodbye to whole cities, Miami, Alexandria Shanghai, all lost beneath the waves.
“The longer we fail to act and the worse it gets and the higher the price when we are forced by catastrophe to act.”
He added: “The clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster… and quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2, raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and abruptness that is entirely man made.”
Mr Johnson said there is a duty to find the funds pledged at a previous climate summit Paris.
He warned: “We cannot and will not succeed by government spending alone.
“We in this room could deploy hundreds of billions, no question. But the market has hundreds of trillions and the task now is to work together to help our friends to decarbonise.”
He said such a move would help de-risk key projects to allow private sector money to be brought in.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson greets US President Joe Biden at #COP26
— The Herald Politics (@HeraldPols) November 1, 2021
[Pic: PA]
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READ MORE: Nicola Sturgeon: Every leader should feel 'bloody uncomfortable' about lack of climate progress
Mr Johnson added: “In just the same way that it was the private sector that enabled the UK to end our on dependence on coal and become the Saudi Arabia of wind.”
He said: “The children who will judge us are children not yet born, and their children.
“We are now coming centre stage before a vast and uncountable audience of posterity, and we must not fluff our lines or miss our cue.
“Because if we fail, they will not forgive us – they will know that Glasgow was the historic turning point when history failed to turn.
“They will judge us with bitterness and with a resentment that eclipses any of the climate activists of today and they will be right.
“COP26 will not and cannot be the end of the story on climate change.”
Mr Johnson concluded his speech by saying COP26 must mark when the moment when humanity began to “defuse that bomb” of climate change and began the fight back.
He said: “Yes it’s going to be hard and yes we can do it.
“And so let’s get to work with all the creativity and imagination and goodwill that we possess.
“Thank you very much and good luck to all of us.”
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