Hard Diplomacy’, Labour’s Miliband Says UK PM Is Miles off U.N. Climate Success
2 min readEngland (Reuters) – British Prime Minister Boris Johnson must do the “hard yards of diplomacy” if he wants any quite success at the COP26 global climate change conference in November, Ed Miliband, opposition Labour’s climate policy chief, said on Sunday.
With just over a month until the world’s leaders meet in Glasgow for COP26, some politicians and campaigners fear the United Nation’s summit is close to throw away what’s seen as a final chance to tackle the climate crisis before it’s too late.
Those fears were heightened by a U.N. analysis of country pledges earlier this month that showed global emissions would be 16% higher in 2030 than in 2010 – faraway the 45% reduction by 2030 that scientists say is required .
Miliband, an ex-Labour leader who led Britain’s delegation to the 2009 U.N. summit in Copenhagen, said Johnson should step in to support COP26 President Alok Sharma in persuading the large emitting nations to travel further and to convert developing nations by delivering on a pledge to vaccinate the planet against COVID-19.
“It’s not just a photograph op when he gets to talk Latin and gets to resurrect a classical myth and tousle his hair, it is a bit harder than that,” he told Reuters in an interview at the Labour Party’s conference in Brighton, southern England.
His advice for Johnson, supported his experience in Copenhagen when the summit was “essentially collapsing”, was to “get across the detail, do the hard yards of diplomacy”.
Johnson’s government has hailed U.S. President Joe Biden’s promise to double aid to developing nations susceptible to the worsening climate crisis and China’s announcement it might not build new coal-fired power projects abroad.
But the COP26 team in London has yet to urge major polluters, like China and Russia, to submit new national emissions pledges, seen as crucial to limiting the worldwide average temperature rise to well below 2 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit).
Drawing on his experience in Copenhagen, Miliband said it took Gordon Brown, then British prime minister, getting “his hands dirty” by stepping up the pressure on other leaders “to rescue (something) from the wreckage”.
Britain’s case to influence others wasn’t helped, he said, by Johnson’s missteps, including cutting overseas aid and not yet fully honouring a pledge to vaccinate precisely those nations where he must foster trust, also as “flirting” with a replacement coal project.
“I am afraid there’s a kind of inconvenient truth … that we are miles faraway from where we’d like to be for Glasgow, miles away,” he said.
About Author
