Glasgow, The world is at “one minute to midnight”, having run down the clock on waiting to combat climate change, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said.
He was speaking as world leaders arrived for the landmark COP26 climate change conference in Glasgow.
Johnson said leaders needed to move from “aspiration to action” to slow global warming.
He added the summit was a “critical” moment for him, and said an ambitious outcome was still “in the balance”.
The United Kingdom (UK) is hosting the summit amid mounting concern among scientists that countries are not doing enough to limit the emissions of greenhouse gases, which have caused average global temperatures to rise.
The 2015 Paris climate conference called for average temperatures to rise by well below 2C, and preferably only 1.5C, when compared to pre-industrial averages, BBC news reported
Meanwhile, US President Joe Biden was swinging the focus of his battle for fast, concerted action against global warming from the U.S. Congress to the world today, appealing to other leaders at a UN summit to commit to the kind of big climate measures that he is still working to nail down at home.
Speaking to world leaders at the newly opened climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, President Biden planned to tote up his not-yet year-old administration’s climate efforts and announce new climate initiatives, including billions of dollars in hoped-for legislation to help poorer communities abroad deal with climate damage already underway.
The summit is often billed as essential to putting the landmark 2015 Paris climate accord into action.
President Biden and his administration face obstacles in prodding the United States and other nations to act fast enough on climate, abroad as at home. In the run-up to the summit, the US administration has tried hard to temper expectations that two weeks of talks involving more than 100 world leaders will produce major breakthroughs on cutting climate-damaging emissions.
Rather than a quick fix, “Glasgow is the beginning of this decade race, if you will,” Biden’s climate envoy, John Kerry, told reporters.
Kerry yesterday (Sunday) defended the outcome of a summit of the Group of 20 leading economies that ended earlier that day in Rome. The G-20 meeting was supposed to create momentum for more climate progress in Glasgow, and leaders at the Italy summit did agree on a series of measures, including formalizing a pledge to cut off international subsidies for dirty-burning, coal-fired power plants.
The world currently is on track for a level of warming that would melt much of the planet’s ice, raise global sea levels and greatly increase the likelihood and intensity of extreme weather, experts say.
The Biden administration today released its strategy for turning talk into reality in transforming the US into an entirely clean energy nation by 2050. The long-term plan, filed in compliance with the Paris agreement, lays out a United States increasingly running on wind, solar and other clean energy, Americans zipping around in electric vehicles and on mass transit, state-of-the-art technology and wide open spaces carefully preserved to soak up carbon dioxide from the air.
The Biden administration has succeeded, over 10 months of diplomacy leading up to the Glasgow summit, in helping win significant new climate pledges from allies. That includes persuading many foreign governments to set more ambitious targets for emissions cuts, promoting a global pledge to cut emissions of a potent climate harm, methane, and the promise from leading economies to end funding for coal energy abroad.
European leaders make clear they are happy to see Biden and the US back in the climate effort after his predecessor, Donald Trump, turned his back on the Paris accord and on allies in general, the Associated Press (AP) news reported.
Source: Oman News Agency