Pádraig Hoare: Why Cop26 is an eye-opener
Welsh police, with colleagues from around the UK, wait for protesters at the entrance to the Scottish Event Campus (SEC), in Glasgow, where the Cop26 summit is being held. Picture: Andrew Milligan/PA Wire
Logistics at the Scottish Event Campus (SEC) may have been shambolic as Cop26 got under way, but getting here has been an eye-opener for all the right reasons.
There is much to criticise, and even lambast, about UK-led preparations for the 25,000-strong-delegate UN climate-change conference in Glasgow this week.
Scrunched into queues for hours, with zero social distancing, inside a security tent, has become an invitation for Covid-19 to follow delegates returning home from Scotland.
Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti, for example, tested positive a day after a breakfast meeting with world leaders at the event.
Climate activists — the real agents of change over the past three decades, as the world woke up to the metastasis that is global warming — have been excluded, as world leaders, business executives, academics, and the media assemble in various zones to discuss the obvious.
However, there have been bright spots.
For those of us priced out of exorbitant hotel rooms in Glasgow and its surrounds over the past week, the daily train commute from Edinburgh has shown that when public transport is nurtured and respected, it is a marvellous asset.
Getting from Edinburgh Airport to the centre of the great Scottish city costs little if one takes the bus, just a 60-second walk outside the arrivals terminal.
The bus drops you 500m from Waverley Train Station, in Edinburgh, in 30 minutes.
From Waverley, it’s a 48-minute train ride into Glasgow's Queen Street Station, or about an hour into Glasgow Central.
This correspondent walked the 2.5km to the SEC on day one of the conference, oblivious to the fact that specially-designated Cop26 buses were picking up delegates 10m outside the entrance to both rail stations.
On day two, the 10-minute bus journey was seamless because roads around the SEC were closed to general traffic. It was a wholly enjoyable experience.
While not quite a cynic about mass adaptation of public transport at home in Ireland, I believed that getting the public (myself included) out of their cars and onto trains, trams, and buses was going to be the tallest of orders.
Cop26 has shown me that when our thoroughfares are cleared of needless cars, then public transport can be an achievable method of reducing emissions and galvanising the public into buying into the wholesale changes that are coming our way if our climate crisis is to be tackled.
It would be naive, and arrogant, to think that people living outside of urban congregations should just get on board with the changes. Their fears are real and founded.
It won't be easy to convince them otherwise, but mass investment in public transport of all kinds, and in all areas, should be a centrepiece of any climate-mitigation vision for Ireland.
In July, Taoiseach Micheál Martin described the €185m plan as a "game-changer” for Cork, when it was announced in June as part of the €1bn recovery plan, with a commuter line from Cobh to Midleton to Mallow planned, to run through Kent Station, and new stations at Tivoli, Blarney, and Kilbarry.
The Eoin English reported earlier this week: "A new, high-frequency, cross-city bus service, along the suggested route of Cork's proposed, €1bn light-rail system, has been announced as part of a major redesign of the city's bus network.
"More bus services, with shorter wait times, are also promised, with a simplified route and fares structure to make interchange seamless.
"Passengers won't have to pay extra to change between bus, rail, or future light-rail services within a 90-minute period.
"The details are contained in the draft, new bus-network proposal for Cork, which has been published today by the National Transport Authority (NTA)."
A light-rail system running through the city, along with the new bus-network plan for Cork, will be transformational, if the Climate Action Plan reduction of 500,000 car-journey kilometres coincides with such investment.
Public transport cannot be done piecemeal. This will need to be one of the most radical shifts in the State's history, if it is to work. But if it does, it will be one of its finest achievements.
Elsewhere at Cop26, on energy day, the conference's press office confidently (and brazenly) announced that "coal is being consigned to history...as countries, banks, and organisations move away from the single-biggest contributor to climate change".
"At least 23 countries have made new commitments today to phase out coal power, including five of the world's top-20 coal-power-using countries," it said.
What the triumphalist line did not say was that China, India, and Australia were not part of the deal, nor was the US, despite president Joe Biden's lofty words, earlier in the week, about his commitment to climate-change mitigation.
Cop26 president, Alok Sharma, said: "From the start of the UK's presidency, we have been clear that Cop26 must be the Cop that consigns coal to history. With these ambitious commitments we are seeing today, the end of coal power is now within sight."
Professor at Edinburgh University, Stuart Haszeldine, was more circumspect.
South Africa, Poland, and Vietnam signing the agreement was very useful, he told BBC Scotland, but Australia, China, and the US were the major emitters.
"There's talk about moving towards the end of coal, but this is not quite that," he said. It will be "tens of years" before fossil fuels are fully phased out, he added.
- Cop stands for Conference of the Parties
- It refers to annual meetings of the 197 countries who are party to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC)
- The 26th Cop is in Glasgow from October 31 to November 12
- Cop26 aims to make progress on delivering the objective of the Paris Agreement to keep global warming below 2C above pre-industrial times, and to aim for 1.5C
- Each country must submit its climate plans – called Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs)
- The NDCs published in advance of the COP would result in warming of 2.7C
- Ireland negotiates as part of the EU at Cop meetings
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