(ETX Daily Up) – Can God solve climate issues? Can James Bond save the planet? Should we throw a coin at the Treviso Fountain to stop global warming? Politicians around the world in a jet at COP26 in Glasgow called for divine precedents to activate their respective legislative mechanisms to save the planet.
“God bless you all and God save the planet”. No, this is not an American Super Production dialogue, but the words of US President Joe Biden during the COP26 parade on Monday, November 1. Since the start of the Glasgow Conference on Climate Change on Sunday, 31 October, speeches and declarations have followed each other to propose solutions to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Some speeches stood out for their originality. Like President Biden, therefore, who proposes to rely on God.
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The US president isn’t the only one who has marked spirits. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson began the conference by quoting Spy 007 in his speech: “Dear world leaders, we are in the same position as James Bond, but this is not a movie and the destructive machine is real. The clock is hundreds of billions. is ticking off the furious speed of pistons, furnaces and motors with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster,” he said, to indicate the urgency of the act while borrowing images of superheroes from the popular imagination. said.
Similarly, during the G20, the leaders of the world’s biggest economic powers posed in front of the Trevi Fountain, tossing a coin into the water, “to be lucky in the fight against the emergency climate”, as did the Portuguese writer Bruno Mackes. Said in a tweet. So we are sure.
When we look at the pollution caused by the visit of leaders to this world climate conference, we wonder if God Himself can save anything.
“High Flying Hypocrite”
Behind his emergency speech – “the apocalypse is one to midnight on the clock,” Boris Johnson said during his speech in Glasgow – the great leaders of this world are full of contradictions. The Prime Minister of the United Kingdom used a private jet to travel 600 km between the Scottish city and London. “A time crunch”, exhorts the government spokesperson to justify this method of displacement.
Joe Biden used an Air Force One plane to get to Europe. Nothing unusual so far, except that the American has also brought with him three other presidential planes, a helicopter, twenty cars and “The Beast”, an extremely energy-hungry tank.
And what about the arrival of Jeff Bezos (also in a private jet) at COP26 earlier in the week? His Amazon company generated 60.64 million tons of CO2 in 2020. The equivalent of 60 million Paris-New York round trips by plane. Not many people applauded the CEO’s arrival in a private jet to try and explain to the world how to fight global warming. The bullet is difficult to pass.
“High-flying hypocrite” headlined the Scottish Daily Mail to denounce the carbon footprint of this global meeting. According to the Sunday Mail, around 400 jets will attract Glasgow, Edinburgh and Prestwick during COP26. According to the Daily Record, the arrival of these private planes, which are the world’s most CO2-emitting mode of transport, would produce about 13,000 tonnes of CO2, or the equivalent of 1,600 Scots of carbon emissions a year.
Data compiled by the Financial Times, and quoted by The Independent, show that the last COP summit produced an average of about 53,000 tonnes of CO2, of which 45,000 came from air travel alone. When we know that in 2018 the average annual carbon footprint of a French person was 11 tons.
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