British Prime Minister Boris Johnson says UN climate deal is “tinged with disappointment”

 

London, : British Prime Minister Boris Johnson on Sunday hailed a global agreement to speed up the fight against climate change as “truly historic” and “the beginning of the end for coal power”.

But he said his “joy at this progress” at the UN COP26 summit in Glasgow was “tinged with disappointment” at the failure to secure agreement from all countries to phase out oil.

Nearly 200 countries on Saturday signed a global deal to try to stop uncontrollable global warming after two weeks of painful negotiations, but have failed to respond to what scientists say is necessary to contain dangerous increases.

India and China weakened the text of the summit’s final decision in the home stretch, insisting that the language had shifted from “phasing out” coal to “phasing out,” forcing the British president out of the process. COP26, Alok Sharma, to apologize and say the Asian giants had to explain their decision.

“Those for whom climate change is already a matter of life and death, who can only sit idly by as their islands submerge, their farmlands turned desert, their homes battered by storms, they demanded a high level of ambition of this summit, ”says Johnson.

“While many of us were ready to go, not everyone was,” he added, not citing India and China. “Unfortunately, this is the nature of diplomacy.

“We can pressure, we can cajole, we can encourage, but we cannot force sovereign nations to do what they do not wish to do.

“It is ultimately their decision to make and they have to stick to it.”

An optimistic Johnson said elsewhere at a press conference that the deal had succeeded in “lowering the dial” to a warming of “about two degrees” Celsius – still falling short of the Accord’s commitment of Paris in 2015 to limit warming to 1.5-2.0C.

“But despite all of our disagreements, the world is definitely moving in the right direction,” he said, insisting that the 1.5 ° C target was “still alive”.

Work is now needed to hold countries to account on their commitments, he added.

“COP26 has shown that we can do it, that we can end our dependence on coal and fossil fuels. We can curb uncontrollable climate change and we can preserve our unique planet for generations to come,” he said. -he declares.