(Bloomberg) — Prime Minister Boris Johnson will seek to position the U.K. as a leader on climate change on Tuesday, just days after firing the president of the next global climate talks.
Claire O’Neill said she was sacked by Johnson’s top adviser Dominic Cummings on Friday with no clear reason. In a letter to Johnson published on Tuesday, she accused the government of playing politics over climate change and failing to prioritize the issue, leaving the country “miles off track” in its preparations.
“Our efforts right now are somewhere around the middle of League One,” O’Neill told BBC radio on Tuesday, a reference to the third tier of English soccer. The U.K. must perform at Premier League level “if we are going to actually do what the world needs us to do, which is to break out of this incrementalism and start us moving forward on where we need to be which is a really rapid decarbonization.”
Johnson will formally launch the United Nations summit process on Tuesday morning in London. The U.K. is set to host the November talks, known as COP26, in Glasgow, Scotland, but in her letter to Johnson, obtained by the Financial Times, O’Neill said she’d heard the budget was “ballooning” and that Johnson was considering moving the summit to an English location.
On Tuesday, Johnson will say the U.K. is bringing forward its target to end the sale of new petrol and diesel cars by five years to 2035, in a bid to cut pollution.
Lip Service
He will enlist the help of revered wildlife filmmaker David Attenborough at the launch event in London, but the occasion has been overshadowed by a dispute O’Neill.
Johnson views on climate change have shifted over recent years and he’s questioned some of the science in the past. But since becoming prime minister, he’s expressed enthusiasm for leading on the topic. But O’Neill accused him of only paying lip service to the issue. She said he’d failed to host a cabinet meeting on climate change, despite promising to do so.
“The prime minister has made incredibly warm statements over the years,” she said. “He’s also admitted to me that he doesn’t really understand it.”
O’Neill also warned that a stand-off between Johnson and the Scottish government was derailing progress in organizing the talks. She said her suggestion that First Minister Nicola Sturgeon should be given a greater role in COP26 was met with a “salty” reply from the prime minister.
‘Playground Politics’
“The playground politics — the ya boo of this — has got to stop,” she said.
Johnson’s spokesman James Slack said the decision had been taken to make the presidency a ministerial role, ruling out O’Neill, who stepped down as a member of Parliament last year. The new president will be appointed in the next ministerial reshuffle, expected in the coming weeks.
COP26, the abbreviated name of the 26th session of the Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, is seen as key to the process, as it marks the year when all countries are supposed to submit long-term pollution goals. It will also need to finish the work of COP25 last year in Madrid, which ended in failure.
Musk, Thunberg Among the Green 30 Countering the Climate Crisis
“Hosting COP26 is an important opportunity for the U.K. and nations across the globe to step up in the fight against climate change,” Johnson will say, according to extracts of his speech released by his office. “2020 must be the year we turn the tide on global warming — it will be the year when we choose a cleaner, greener future for all.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jessica Shankleman in London at [email protected]
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Tim Ross at [email protected], Alex Morales, Stuart Biggs
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