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Posted: 2021-11-04 00:53:17

And this is the point.

The choking, terrible fear of COP’s UN and UK organisers was that it would fail hard and fast.

There was a real chance of this and not just because of the pandemic and the fracturing of the mesh of international relations over the six years since Paris.

In Paris the world agreed on a framework.

Parties to the agreement could get away with making promises and then going home.

Here in Glasgow though, promises are being tested.

For Glasgow to work not only do national targets associated with the Paris agreement have to be updated, but real money has to be committed. Details of how incumbent industries are to be reformed - or seen off - have to be thrashed out. Paris promised, says the COP president Alok Sharma, but Glasgow has to deliver.

These are harder conversations to have. It can’t be blah blah blah.

In order to give the talks a whisper of a chance of success, momentum had to be demonstrated in the early days, and if it couldn’t be demonstrated, it would have to be fabricated because without movement at the start of these talks there’d be none at the end.

So far the momentum seems real. Increased national reductions commitments as well as the pledges to reduce methane and end deforestation are being found by credible analysts to have the potential to significantly reduce warming.

On day four of the talks it is expected there will be significant announcements about the international movement to kill off the coal power sector as fast as possible, a key goal of the UK organisers of this COP.

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It is expected that the two themes - finance and carbon reductions - will be woven together in these announcements, with some emerging economies to be paid off to abandon coal faster.

The Powering Past Coal Alliance, backed by the UK, will welcome somewhere near 30 new members including Ukraine, which has Europe’s third largest coal fleet, and Singapore, which only opened its first coal power station a decade ago.

Another 25 or so 24 countries and public finance institutions are expected to sign up to an agreement to end coal financing.

Greta Thunberg poses with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (C) and fellow climate activist Vanessa Nakate (R) on Monday, November 1 at the COP26 conference in Glasgow.

Greta Thunberg poses with Scotland’s First Minister Nicola Sturgeon (C) and fellow climate activist Vanessa Nakate (R) on Monday, November 1 at the COP26 conference in Glasgow. Credit:Getty

Johnson himself alluded to this move on coal in his opening speech to the COP, in which he described the fossil fuel era and the use of coal-driven steam engines in particular as a “doomsday clock”.

“It was here in Glasgow 250 years ago that James Watt came up with a machine that was powered by steam that was produced by burning coal,” he said.

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“And yes my friends – we have brought you to the very place where the doomsday device began to tick.”

It’s here in the coming days that COP organisers hope to bury coal and stop the blah blah blah.

Whatever they achieve, or fail to achieve, Thunberg will clearly not take a backwards step.

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