Boris Johnson has urged world leaders to begin dismantling the carbon “timebomb” that threatens the world as the opened the COP26 climate change confererence.
The Prime Minister compared the momentous conference to a James Bond film, with delegates tasked with defusing a ticking bomb in Glasgow over the next two weeks.
Welcoming world leaders to the city, Johnson said the fictional spy was Scotland’s “most globally famous fictional son” and said delegates were “in roughly the same position” as the British spy.
Bond, he said, “generally comes to the climax of his highly lucrative films strapped to a doomsday device, desperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off, while a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know it”.
He added: “We are in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond today – except that the tragedy is this is not a movie and the doomsday device is real.”
“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.”
The Prime Minister quoted climate change activist Greta Thunberg as he urged world leaders to reach a deal to build on the pledges of previous COP meetings.
He said: “All those promises will be nothing but ‘blah, blah, blah’, to coin a phrase, and the anger and the impatience of the world will be uncontainable unless we make this cop 26 in Glasgow the moment where we get real about climate change.
"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.”
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