COP26: Limiting Global Temperature Rises

Jeremy Corbyn Excerpts

Thursday 21st October 2021 Commons Chamber

[Caroline Lucas]

I could not thank the hon. Member more for his intervention. I think he has been reading my notes, because I was going to make exactly that point. The Prime Minister himself has said:

“It is the biggest economies in the world that are causing the problem, while the smallest suffer the worst consequences.”

Yet he has not grasped the implications of his own statement. As the hon. Member has just said, climate justice means the biggest economies doing far more and being far more ambitious than net zero in 30 years’ time. Climate justice means cutting emissions at home, without overreliance on international offsets or costly and uncertain negative emissions technologies. Climate justice also means recognising the obscenity of continuing with business as usual knowing that young people, especially those in climate-vulnerable countries, are paying for it literally with their futures.

[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I thank the hon. Lady for her excellent speech. Following that point, at COP26 do we need to get proper funding for technology transfer to the poorest countries in the world, which need such technology to protect their environments? Unfortunately, the signs following covid, where there has not been a proper sharing of vaccines or vaccine knowledge, are not good. We have to internationalise our knowledge freely across the whole world in order to protect the environment on which we all rely.

[Caroline Lucas]

I thank the right hon. Gentleman for his intervention, with which I wholeheartedly agree. I particularly agree that if we look at the covid pandemic as an example of international co-operation, it does not augur well. If we cannot properly share technology and vaccines even when our own wellbeing depends so directly on that, it does not augur well for the climate crisis. We absolutely need the kind of technology transfer to which he refers.

Let me say a few words about the Government’s own track record, because we are not on track to meet the fourth and fifth carbon budgets, let alone the sixth carbon budget, which is the first to be based on net zero by 2050, rather than the older 80% reduction. Just last month, Green Alliance calculated that the Government policies announced since 2020 will cut emissions by just 24% by 2032, and that the policies out for consultation, even if enacted, would still fall far short of the fifth carbon budget. This week’s publications of the net zero strategy and the heat and building strategy lack ambition. They lack urgency and—crucially—they lack the serious funding we need. As a result they still do not do enough to get us back on track. Time is running out in the race for our future, and the Government are barely over the starting line.

Not only are the Government not doing enough of the right things, but they are actively doing too many wrong things. Consider some of the most egregious examples on the charge sheet: a £27 billion road building scheme; the expansion of airports; scrapping the green homes grant just six months after it was introduced; stripping climate change clauses out of trade deals; and an obligation still in statute to maximise the economic recovery of UK petroleum. Perhaps most egregious of all, we are pressing ahead with Cambo, a new oilfield off Shetland. No wonder the Climate Change Committee has concluded that the Government continue to

“blunder into high carbon choices”.

Leading by example on climate and nature matters, not just here at home, but because globally the first rule of diplomacy is to walk your talk. Perhaps it is not surprising that, despite what I am sure have been the best efforts of the COP26 President-designate, the Government have so far failed to persuade many other countries to come forward with climate targets aligned to 1.5°C. Indeed, Gambia is currently the only country whose climate pledge is compatible with 1.5°C. Based on the UN’s assessment of the nationally determined contributions submitted so far, the world is on track for warming of around 2.7°C. That cannot be allowed to happen. Shamefully, almost 90 countries responsible for more than 40% of global emissions, including China and India, failed to meet the UN deadline at the end of July to submit new pledges ahead of the Glasgow meeting. What more will the Government do to galvanise more ambitious action to keep 1.5°C alive? What is the President’s plan post-COP26 if the world’s collective pledges are not compatible with 1.5°C?

The Government’s second goal for COP26 is to adapt to protect communities and natural habitats. Globally, Ministers need to lead efforts for a new post-2025 public finance goal, specifically for adaptation, and ensure that other countries and the multilateral development banks follow the UK’s commitment to ringfence 50% of climate finance for adaptation. We need a scaling up of locally led adaptation and support that is accessible and responsive to the needs of marginalised groups. We also need ambitious and rigorous ecosystem protection and restoration incorporated into the enhanced nationally determined contributions and adaptation plans of all countries. Nature, with its vast ability to store carbon and cushion us from shocks such as flooding, is our biggest ally in the fight against climate breakdown. It is therefore shocking that just weeks before the start of COP26, more than 100 fires have been reported on England’s peatlands. They are a vital carbon store, and it is environmental vandalism to set fire to them right now. The climate and nature emergencies are two sides of the same coin, and they need to be addressed together with far greater co-ordination.

Let me move to the third goal of mobilising finance. The COP26 President has stated that delivering the 10-year finance pledge is a matter of trust. Yes it is, but when that pledge has not been delivered anything like in full, trust is at breaking point. Any leverage that the UK might have had in persuading others to step up has been carelessly thrown away by its becoming the only G7 country to cut overseas aid in the midst of a pandemic. That unforgiveable decision means that climate programmes are being slashed, leaving some of the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries bearing the brunt. For example, aid to Bangladesh has been cut by more than £100 million. It is not too late to change direction, restore the official development assistance budget, ensure that climate finance is genuinely new and additional, and increase our commitment so that we are providing our fair share.

We must also act on loss and damage—a subject far too long consigned to the margins of negotiations. I welcome the UK presidency’s more constructive approach to that issue, including making progress on operationalising the so-called Santiago Network, but we need to do more. We must facilitate a process to scale up dedicated finance specifically for loss and damage, and we must acknowledge that as the third pillar of climate action, on a par with mitigation and adaptation. We must ensure that it has its own dedicated space on every COP agenda, and take forward calls for a specific loss and damage champion. It is long past time for the more wealthy countries to put aside their concerns about liability and compensation, and instead to come from a place of solidarity and human rights, in order to make meaningful progress on loss and damage and delivering new finance. As the young Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate has said:

“Our leaders are lost and our planet is damaged…You cannot adapt to lost cultures, you cannot adapt to lost traditions, you cannot adapt to lost history, you cannot adapt to starvation. You cannot adapt to extinction.”

The climate crisis is pushing many communities beyond their ability to adapt.

The fourth goal of the COP26 presidency is to work together to deliver. No one would argue with that, but I go back to the context in which these talks are being held. The summit is taking place while the pandemic continues to rage in many of the poorest countries, as a direct result of vaccine apartheid. Only around 2% of the populations of low-income countries have received even one dose of the vaccine, and of the 554 million doses promised by the richest nations, just 16% have so far reached their destination. That failure is morally obscene, as well as running entirely counter to our own self-interest. If COP26 is to succeed, the concerns and justified anger of countries in the global south urgently need to be addressed. That means providing enough finance and vaccines to match the need, waiving intellectual property rights, and transferring technical capacity and expertise.

Glasgow is not only crucial for delivering climate ambition and finance in line with the Paris agreement; it is also a litmus test for safer, fairer, more inclusive forms of economic restructuring and global governance. It is a chance urgently to shift to an economic system that values the long-term wellbeing of people and planet above the endless growth that, in the words of the OECD, has generated “significant harms” over recent decades. When the climate crisis is caused by our extractive, exploitative economic model, we cannot expect to win the chance for a better future by re-running a race that we see we will ultimately lose, and that everyone else will lose as well.

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[Jeremy Corbyn (Islington North) (Ind)]

I welcome this debate and congratulate the hon. Member for Brighton, Pavilion (Caroline Lucas) not only on securing it but on all the work she has done over many years to bring environmental issues to the fore in this House.

I also thank my right hon. Friend the Member for Newcastle upon Tyne East (Mr Brown) for drawing attention to the fact that, on May Day 2019, this House became the first Parliament in the world to declare a climate emergency, which I am pleased to say many local authorities across Britain, as well as other countries around the world, have also taken up.

We have to start at a local level because, in a sense, all politics is local. If we are to win the climate debate, it is not necessarily about convincing each other in this Chamber; it is about convincing a very large number of people that their living standards and livelihoods are not under threat by greening our environment, but that a green industrial revolution is a chance and an opportunity to create a high-skilled, high-paid workforce and to create the green energy jobs of the future. That will not be done if we rely on market forces; it will only be done through substantial public investment to achieve that transition to a green economy.

I was at an excellent meeting on Monday morning organised by Islington Council to launch its brilliant green agenda. It will mean better insulation in homes; transport initiatives; using waste heat from an underground station as part of a district heating scheme; using waste heat from a stepped down transformer owned by the national grid to heat a school and neighbouring properties; and installing a heat pump in a community centre to meet the passive house standard. I was struck that local authorities do not have enough planning powers to properly insulate places and properly demand of developers that we have solar panels and greened roof spaces and that we build buildings to last much longer than the planned obsolescence after 60 years before we knock them down again, with all the environmental costs of doing so.

It is also about waste disposal. In my borough we manage a 30% recycling rate, which is better than it was but is nowhere near good enough. The rate should be much higher. Reduce, reuse and recycle is important, but achieving it also requires the Government to support local authorities, and not planning greater levels of incineration all over the country, with the pollution that results.

Let us look at COP26 as a great opportunity for the sharing of technology and wealth across the world, for investment in biodiversity across the world and, above all, for the transfer of knowledge held by the richest countries to all on this planet. If we do not do that, global warming and extreme weather patterns will continue and, ultimately, everyone will suffer. There will be no hiding place, however rich we might be.