Boris Johnson claimed humanity has “pulled back a goal” against climate change in the first two days of the Glasgow climate change summit as he expressed optimism over progress at COP26.
The PM abandoned his gloomy weekend predictions that the world was 5-1 down at half time to claim “we’ve pulled back a goal or perhaps even two” as he hailed agreements on protecting rain forests, reducing methane output and transferring clean technology to developing nations.
But as he prepared to pull out of Glasgow leaving international negotiators to a fortnight of talks he urged world leaders “to guard against false hope and not think in any way the job is done because it’s not.”
Extending his cringeworthy football comparison he told a press conference: “I am cautiously optimistic. And think we’re going to be able to take this thing to extra time, because there’s no doubt some progress has been made.”
He later said the score was “5-2, I don’t know it could be even 5-3”.
But Johnson admitted that there were big challenges with India, China and Russia, three big polluters not playing on the same side as other nations.
Asked about India’s net zero target being for 2070, Johnson said: “I think the most important thing that they’ve said is that they want to decarbonise so much of their power system by 2030. That’s a massive commitment.”
Boris Johnson held out hope of keeping China to meet its net zero targets earlier than the long 2060 timescale laid out before the COP26 meeting.
He told the press conference: “It’s true that President Xi isn’t here but on the other hand Chinese team is very high level.
“He didn’t want to come because of the pandemic and you got to respect that, the same is the case for Vladimir Putin.
“But that doesn’t mean the Chinese are not engaging. They made the commitment on net zero by 2060 or earlier and they want to get to they want to get to a peak in their carbon emissions by 2030 or before.
“The question is how much before and that’s what we’re discussing with China because there is still there’s a world difference between peaking in 2030 in your emissions and peaking in 2025. That’s where we are keeping the pressure up.”
Johnson said: “When it comes to helping countries to transition, there is a huge amount to do. We have the tools to do it. And we certainly have, in theory, the finance to do it. Mark Carney would say hundreds of trillions of dollars, others would say tens of trillions, that can be leveraged by the public sector and by our investment. But I’m not going to disagree with anyone that says the world has a lot more to do.”
On the second day of the summit, Johnson celebrated an agreement to end the “great chainsaw massacre” of the world’s forests by 2030, which has been signed by more than 100 world leaders including Brazil.
Billionaire Amazon boss Jeff Bezos also announced £1.47 billion of funding to restore land in Africa after having an epiphany on the fragility of the Earth’s atmosphere after blasting into space.
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