More blah blah blah?

The COP26 UN cli­mate change sum­mit that brings to­gether most of the world’s lead­ers in Scot­land this month should rep­re­sent the end of rhetoric and the be­gin­ning of strong and ef­fec­tive ac­tion. The sum­mit, one of the most con­se­quen­tial cli­mate events since the ne­go­ti­a­tion of the Paris Agree­ment in 2015, aims to “build a more sus­tain­able, re­silient and zero-car­bon fu­ture”. How­ever, it will not be easy for the COP26 to rep­re­sent a major break­through for the planet, be­cause two of the most pol­lut­ing pow­ers in the world, China and Rus­sia, are not par­tic­i­pat­ing. And be­cause part of the world’s pop­u­la­tion no longer gives any cred­i­bil­ity to gov­ern­ments that have been mak­ing empty promises for too many years, but have not been able to re­duce global warm­ing at all. The young Swedish ac­tivist Greta Thun­berg, who has be­come an in­ter­na­tional ref­er­ence point for the gen­er­a­tion most sen­si­tive to the neg­a­tive ef­fects of cli­mate change, de­fined the fail­ure of states in a very graphic way when she ac­cused them of achiev­ing noth­ing more than “blah, blah, blah”. Sci­en­tific ev­i­dence is ac­cu­mu­lat­ing and the trends threat­en­ing the planet are ac­cel­er­at­ing, but none of the com­mit­ments made so far have been of much use. The short-term prospects are al­ready wor­ry­ing, and real cat­a­stro­phes are loom­ing and about to threaten our way of life as we know it if big changes do not hap­pen be­fore it’s too late. Ei­ther we im­ple­ment rad­i­cal change now, or fu­ture gen­er­a­tions will be the in­no­cent vic­tims of our abuses, ex­cesses and mis­takes. That is why there is grow­ing con­cern among the young, be­cause they see their fu­ture se­ri­ously threat­ened by be­hav­iours for which they are not re­spon­si­ble. We will soon see whether a new list of the usual promises and de­c­la­ra­tions emerges from the Glas­gow sum­mit, or it be­comes known as the mo­ment when the world stopped all the “blah, blah, blah” and fi­nally started to act de­ci­sively.