Gavan Reilly: Optimism at Glasgow, but hard work ahead

The column comes to you this week from Glasgow, where I am covering the COP26 summit for Virgin Media News. The posting is one of those jobs that remind you that, for all of its well-documented flaws, Ireland is (at least on paper) one of the world’s better performers: we are one of the few countries that has a legally binding target to have our emissions by 2030, and later this week we will see the nuts and bolts of how that will be achieved through the climate action plan.

Boris Johnson may have a lot of flaws but he did something very clever in his opening address yesterday: Trying to convince other politicians that it’s not just the planet’s fate at stake. Instead of the usual meaningful – but familiar and sadly tiresome – pleas for the global good, he instead pulled at his counterparts’ professional heartstrings by outline the risk of worldwide climate riots and populist uprising if the environment is allowed to continue its slow decay. It was a risky and much less familiar approach – but when so many of the earnest messages have already been exhausted, it might just be the one to get people to set up and take notice.

That still might be hard to swallow for some in the Irish farming community though. The talk is that the Climate Action Plan to be published this Thursday - the aforementioned nuts and bolts - will require agriculture to cut emissions by as much as 30 per cent by 2030. Given that Irish emissions are disproportionately made up of methane (ie cows) this almost inevitably means downsizing Ireland’s herds in the coming years.

Telling Irish farmers that downsizing business is for the global good is a hard sell when the world’s largest cattle country, India, isn’t doing likewise. Its prime minister Minister Narendra Modi was the first one to come to Glasgow and announce an actual, new, national climate plan… but that plan only intends to balance the books, carbon wise, by 2070. That’s a full 20 years after the world is supposed to achieve net zero, and suggests Indian livestock farmers will face far less stringent conditions than those in Ireland. Irish farmers are already looking for some exemptions - Irish farming is so specialised and successful that it makes a large contribution to feeding the world - so special dispensation for a bigger rival is never going to sell.

Adding every other similar sectoral problem – and the fact that many of the world’s biggest polluters are also still underdeveloped economies – and and suddenly the outlook from Glasgow is much more gloomy.

At least the President of Brazil seems to have surprised people: Jair Bolsonaro is one of the 100+ leaders signing a pledge to end deforestation by 2030. Readers might remember the 2019 wildfires in the Amazon, exacerbated by the president’s own programme of tree falling, and the global horror that the "lungs of the planet" were being allowed to perish. His late conversation to ending deforestation is thus invaluable – though only as long as it is followed up with action, or rather, in action. We have been here before when leaders have made pledges and on paper, but failed to deliver in practice.

One other reflection from Glasgow: it might seem like rank hypocrisy for world leaders to fly to a climate summit on private jets, and leaving their motorcades idling outside the venue while they hobnob indoors. ‘Why aren’t events like this taking place over Zoom calls now?’, you might wonder.

But from having been here for a few days, the visible truth is that a lot of the work only gets done when leaders are able to eyeball each other. Leaders and their entourages stalk the corridors here with disarming ease – you can easily imagine Modi being sidelined and harangued by his counterparts from Pacific and Caribbean islands which are literally disappearing beneath their feet. Include all the other financiers and central bankers present, and you can see how a more radical plan could be hatched through a chance meeting between a climate industrialist and a government figure.

In the press centre yesterday I was surprised to see the President of Cyprus sitting on a (IKEA-sponsored) chair for close to 90 minutes, seemingly holding court with anyone who wanted to approach for a chinwag. If that is the opportunity for some wind energy developer to approach him and offer a mutually beneficial arrangement, then the outcome is surely worth the carbon cost of his flight.

Gavan Reilly is Political Correspondent with Virgin Media News and Political Correspondent with Meath Chronicle

The Column first appeared in Tuesday's paper