![]() ![]() We can plant hundreds of millions of trees – a trillion –it’s not technologically difficultĪnd halt and reverse deforestation by 2030 We can end the use of coal fired power stations – we can do it by 2040 in the developing world and 2030 in the richer nations We can phase out the use of cars with hydrocarbon internal combustion engines – by 2035 – we can do that and we in the UK are ending new sales by 2030 ![]() We have the technology to deactivate that ticking doomsday deviceīut one by one and with ever greater speed and efficiency we can begin to close down those billions of hydrocarbon combustion chambers that you find currently in every corner of the planet We can get real on coal, cars, cash and trees Unless we make this COP 26 in Glasgow the moment when we get real about climate change I was there in Paris six years ago when we agreed to net zeroĪnd to try to restrain the rise in the temperature of the planet to 1.5cĪnd all those promises will be nothing but blah blah blah - to coin a phraseĪnd the anger and impatience of the world will be uncontainable I was there with many of you in Copenhagen 11 years ago when we acknowledged we had a problem If we don’t get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow. It’s one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock and we need to act now. The worse it gets and the higher the price when we are eventually forced by catastrophe to actīecause humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change. Raising the temperature of the planet with a speed and an abruptness that is entirely manmadeĪnd we know what the scientists tell us and we have learned not to ignore themĢ degrees more and we jeopardise the food supply for hundreds of millions of peopleģ degrees and you can add more wildfires and cyclones – twice as many of them, five times as many droughts and 36 times as many heatwavesĤ degrees and we say goodbye to whole cities – Miami, Alexandria, Shanghai – all lost beneath the waves With which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster- record outputsĪnd quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO2 While a red digital clock ticks down remorselessly to a detonation that will end human life as we know itĪnd we are in roughly the same position, my fellow global leaders, as James Bond todayĮxcept that the tragedy is that this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is realĪnd the clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines Who generally comes to the climax of his highly lucrative films strapped to a doomsday deviceĭesperately trying to work out which coloured wire to pull to turn it off Welcome to COP, welcome to Glasgow and to Scotland whose most globally famous fictional son is almost certainly a man called James Bond ![]()
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