COP26 Summit: British PM Boris Johnson Warns Of World Facing 'James Bond' Moment To Save Planet
Delivering his speech, Johnson referred to the fictional spy who often ends his films fighting to stop a force from ending the world.
New Delhi: Opening the 26th Conference of Parties (COP26) Climate Summit in Glasgow, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Monday warned about the world leaders’ meeting being the world’s James Bond moment to save the planet.
Opening day one of the two-day World Leaders’ Summit of the COP26 to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Scottish Event Campus in Glasgow, he said: “It is one minute to midnight and we need to act now.”
READ: COP26: What Does 1.5-Degree Warming Mean For World Fighting Climate Change | EXPLAINED
Delivering his speech, Johnson referred to the fictional spy who often ends his films fighting to stop a force from ending the world.
“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 the doomsday device is real,” he said.
Warning that two degrees more to global temperatures will jeopardise food supplies, the British Prime Minister said three degrees more will bring more wildfires and cyclones, while four degrees and “we say goodbye to whole cities”.
Johnson warned that the world may have to say goodbye to whole cities unless global temperatures are brought down towards 1.5 Celsius.
“Miami and Shanghai lost beneath the waves. The longer we fail to act, the worse it gets, and the higher the price when we are eventually forced by catastrophe to act because humanity has long since run down the clock on climate change,” he warned, PTI reported.
The British Prime Minister also made reference to a speech delivered earlier by teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg at a youth summit last month in Milan, Italy, in which she lambasted the empty promises made by the political leaders stating “blah blah blah”.
Unless the world leaders act, “all those promises will be nothing but blah, blah, blah”, Johnson countered.
Stating “it is the children who will judge us and their children”, Johnson said: “And we are now coming centre stage before a vast and uncountable audience of posterity and we mustn't bluff 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 resentment that eclipses any of the climate activists of today and they will indeed be right. COP26 will not and cannot be the end of the story on climate change,” he added.
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Acknowledging the “special responsibility” the western world has to take action against climate change, Johnson said: “Even though for 200 years, the industrialised countries were in complete ignorance of the problem that they were creating, we now have a duty to find those funds -- USD 100 billion a year that was promised in Paris by 2022, which we won't deliver until 2023.”
Prime Minister Narendra Modi will, during the summit in which around 120 world leaders have gathered, present the formal position on India's climate action agenda and lay out the best practices and achievements in the sector.
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