COP26: A Barnsley family’s plea over climate action – Jayne Dowle

Without winning our hearts and minds, and convincing the doubters and deniers, your fortnight in Scotland will amount to nothing more than hot air.

COP26: Our moral duty to save the planet we call home – The Yorkshire Post says

Even as you flew in, if you looked out of the plane window over northern England, you would have seen the catastrophic evidence of changing weather patterns on our small island in the middle of the sea.

How climate change threatens Yorkshire coast – Andrew Vine

I don’t much care if – personally – you believe in climate change or not, but half of Cumbria is under water, battered by incessant storms.

As for me, I don’t want to see the country I love gradually slipping under the waves, and I would like to know that the planet is a safe place for my children, and their children.

I understand the aims of your global gathering – to accelerate action towards the goals of the Paris Agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change – but what does it mean for two adults, two teenagers, a dog and a cat, living in a draughty old house with a gas boiler in the middle of what was once the South Yorkshire coalfield?

What you say on the stage can seem so very far away from the realities of daily life. We need far more connectivity between ideals, targets and consumer choices. More than half (55 per cent) of us Brits admit that we’re put off doing anything to help tackle climate change over perceived fears that doing so is too expensive.

That’s despite 70 per cent of us saying we would love to do more, with a further 81 per cent acknowledging that individual action can contribute to reducing global warming. Switching off the lights, turning down the thermostat one degree, not buying bottled water. Talk to us about this.

We want the big picture, but we also need detail too. What steps can we all take to reduce our own personal and household emissions?

And there is also the question of public trust. Above all, I would like each and every one of you to behave with dignity and restraint during this event. And please take young people seriously; remember how Donald Trump humiliated Swedish teenage climate change activist Greta Thunberg.

We all have to accept some very big changes in coming years; changes to our weather patterns, which are already running riot, changes to the environment we live in, and even to the very air we breathe.

The most important thing is for political leaders to pull together. COP26 is a major test of co-operation. Can all of you put aside your colossal egos and ambitions and commit to joint action?

And before we go any further, let’s deal with the elephants (not) in the room. Without the attendance of Chinese President Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, it’s said that Cop26 will turn out to be effectively nothing more than a grand showboating exercise.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Cop26 could become the most significant marker yet in the rapidly shifting sands of climate change, the moment that the world really did sit up and take notice.

This won’t happen, however, if you don’t engage public and media interest. Two weeks is a long time, especially in world where there are so many other calls on our attention.

That said, we don’t want either long speeches or glib sound-bites. What I’d like to hear is how you are going to build an international framework of clean energy sources which will help us reduce carbon emissions. The current buzz is that achieving net zero by 2050 is an unreasonable aim. I’m not a climatologist, so I can offer no informed opinion on that.

However, I do know that throwing millions at 600,000 heat pumps, as our own Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, did, is only a drop in the ocean.

I’m also very interested on how you propose we tackle our dependence on fossil fuels for travel and trade. I’m keen to hear about your plans to improve public transport within and between countries, ship more goods by rail and sea and create alternatives to aviation kerosene.

And before I let you go and get ready for your speeches and seminars, could I add a quick PS? If any of you world leaders have any tips on persuading the male members of my family to switch off the lights when they leave a room, please could you drop me a line? Saving the planet may be playing out on the world stage, but action must begin at home.

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