by Dr. B. Peiser, Aug  2, 2021 in GWPF/ClimateChangeDispatch

In a warning shot across the bows of Joe Biden and Boris Johnson, China, India, and 85 other nations have decided to ignore a UN deadline to submit its pledges for cutting CO2 emissions in time for the UN climate summit in Glasgow later this year.

To underscore their opposition to Joe Biden’s and Boris Johnson’s Net Zero agenda, India has snubbed the UK’s climate meeting last week while China is rolling back its climate policies in an attempt to prop up its economy.

Meanwhile, South Africa has demanded that developed countries should set a target of $750 billion a year to help poorer nations transition to renewable energy.

The latest demands and developments look increasingly like a farcical repeat of the fiasco of the Copenhagen climate summit (COP15) in 2009.

As seasoned COP observers remember, after two weeks of deadlocked negotiations in Denmark’s capital, the leaders of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa (the so-called BRICS nations) took charge of the climate summit which was on the brink of disaster and drafted the final communique behind closed doors.

A humiliated US President Obama had to gatecrash the meeting while the entire EU was excluded from the meeting and the final statement.

In many ways, Copenhagen’s diplomatic and political fiasco was a historical watershed that marked the turning point when 500 years of Western dominance was symbolically terminated by China and India.

If Boris and Biden are not very careful, they may face a very similar situation in Glasgow. If push comes to shove there is a pretty good chance that China and India (together with a number of emerging nations) could take over a deadlocked COP yet again and draft an agreement that suits them and humiliates the US, UK, and the EU.

There is, of course, one shrewd game plan to avoid a Copenhagen-type fiasco: Boris Johnson could simply pull the plug on current summit plans, turn COP26 into a virtual conference, and blame Covid for the failure to achieve a breakthrough.

After all, Boris has developed a habit of kicking irreconcilable issues into the long grass … just saying.

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