Millions of words have been spoken at and about the Glasgow Summit – the challenge is sorting the weeds from the chaff. Much of the discussion centered around numbers.

Some verbal contributions to COP26 can be immediately moved to the trash. One such was from Greta Thunberg, a Swedish schoolgirl who has emerged as a media celebrity against global inactivity on climate change. She branded the Glasgow Summit a failure — a two-week long celebration of business as usual. This ensured her visibility on BBC news and in the tabloids, but is unfair to those who came for more than a headline.

Boris Johnson, the British prime minister, while preparing for the most important global event his country has hosted during his lifetime, treated himself and his Downing Street staff to a viewing of the latest James Bond blockbuster. It was to be the metaphor for his opening address. Agent 007 usually ends up chained to a doomsday explosive device, and there is a cutaway to a flashing red digital clock, counting down.

“We are roughly in the same position, my fellow global leaders”, Johnson said in an unsuccessful attempt at gravitas. “Except the tragedy is that this is not a movie, and the doomsday device is real.” He added, “The clock is ticking to the furious rhythm of hundreds of billions of pistons and turbines and furnaces and engines with which we are pumping carbon into the air faster and faster – record outputs and quilting the earth in an invisible and suffocating blanket of CO₂.” He left Glasgow the next day, with no plans to return, in a private jet.

With COP26 delegates unable to approve even a limited draft agreement after ten days of talks, Johnson — aware of the photo opportunity — boarded a train for the 555 kilometre trip from London to Glasgow. With just hours remaining to reach an agreement, he called for a “determined push to get us over the line,” demanding that world leaders pick up their phones “to their teams here and give them the space they need to manoeuvre and get this done.”

But Johnson had already been upstaged by Presidents Joe Biden and Xi Jinping. John Kerry, the first ever US presidential envoy for climate, and his Chinese counterpart appeared together at a joint press conference (a rare occasion in itself) to declare that the two biggest global emitters would work together to combat climate change. They had found common ground, with “more agreement than disagreement.”

Two early agreements made at COP26 represent major steps forward.  The first was a Declaration on Forests and Land Use  by 100 leaders, including Scott Morrison, to stop taking the chainsaw to the world’s forests. Brazil, where ecologically significant chunks of the Amazon rainforest have been cleared for beef production, was also a signatory. The pledge included a US$19.2 billion fund for restoration and new planting. In addition, chief executives from more than 30 financial institutions with over $8.7 trillion of global assets have committed to eliminate investment in activities linked to agricultural commodity-driven deforestation.

More than 100 countries, led by the United States and the European Union, also vowed to get a 30 percent reduction in methane gas emissions by 2030. China, significantly, has also decided it will take part, although Australia, under pressure to do so, will not. Methane, which comes predominantly from agriculture, the natural gas industry, and landfills, is the second-largest contributor to greenhouse gas emissions after CO₂ and is said to be responsible for about a quarter of all current global warming. Methane emissions are easy to reduce using existing technology, and easy to track with satellites.

Coal produces about a third of the world’s electricity, but the proportion is coming down. In Glasgow, more than 40 countries signed a pledge to shift away from thermal coal production, among them major coal users: Poland, Vietnam, and Chile. Australia would not sign up to this nor would the US or China, although the two biggest emitters both agreed no longer to invest in new overseas coal mines or other projects burning fossil fuels beyond the end of next year.

The big goal of COP26 was net zero, or rather the date by which greenhouse gas emissions would stop. The Paris Accord set 2050 as the target date, but many countries at Glasgow – led by the European Union – believe that should come down to 2030. China is currently aiming at 2060, India has announced a target of 2070, while Australia, like the US, offers no improvement on 2050. Global temperatures have risen by 1.1 percent since pre-industrial times, hence the push to prevent world temperatures rising more than 1.5 percent by 2030. Unfortunately, the United Nations’ latest tally of 162 countries finds global emissions are on course for a 2.7 percent rise by the end of the century. This is an improvement of the catastrophic 3.5 percent forecasts prior to the pre-COVID-19 cooling of economies, but still far too high.

Daniela Schmidt, professor of earth sciences at Bristol University, who has been running the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in Glasgow, agrees recovering economies will threaten 1.5 percent. “The time for action is right now. There is so much we could do, and there’s so much we should do. We are heading for 2.4 percent at the end of the century. That will have impact… threats to food security all over the globe, health impacts because of extreme heat, shortfalls of drinkable water.”

It has to be said that Scott Morrison, the quintessential marketing man, did a poor promotional job for Australia at COP26, not that expectations were high. The best that could be said was that he turned up, unlike Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Morrison did not endear himself to other delegates by suggesting they might be wasting their time in Glasgow. “The challenge of climate change will be met” he said, “by those who are frankly largely not in this room.  It will be our scientists, our technologists, our engineers, our entrepreneurs, our industrialists and our financiers that will actually chart the path to net zero.”

Morrison reiterated his much-repeated commitment to adopting new technologies in a transition period in which Australia would invest over $20 billion over the next decade, leveraging private investments to reach $80 billion in total. Partnerships were being forged with Singapore, Germany, the UK, Japan, Indonesia, and India, he said. One partnership, the Australia-UK FTA, is at risk with opposition from a fast-growing body of cross-party British MPs seeking changes ahead of a final House of Commons vote.

COP26 has now moved into implementation mode, but there are several twists to the tale. Morrison missed “finance day” in Glasgow. He was at 35,000 feet heading for Dubai on the third day of COP26, when a former governor of the Bank of England announced that the group of financial firms he represented– which account for $130 trillion in investments – had agreed to use their clout to force measures towards achieving net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. On the same morning, the body responsible for international accountancy standards announced it would set up a new board to develop and impose minimum sustainability disclosure requirements for companies throughout the world. So much for Morrison’s dig at those in the room.

The talk in the bars in Glasgow was about high energy prices just at a time when people were preparing to jettison fossil fuels. The official explanation was because of the revival of industrial activity in the OECD countries, plus the tightening of gas supplies from Russia. But with so many senior executives from oil and gas companies at COP26, mingling with the energy ministers from OPEC countries, a conspiracy theory developed that gas supplies had been deliberately tightened to create shortages and price hikes. It then emerged that Boris Johnson had a role in this. In recent weeks, he met with representatives of the Emir of Qatar, resulting in four giant LNG supertankers being diverted to Britain to ensure that the nation’s central heating would not be turned off for Christmas. The prime minister could see some benefit in the few hours he spent acting as host of COP26.

Colin Chapman is a writer, broadcaster, and public speaker, who specialises in geopolitics, international economics, and global media issues. He is a former president of AIIA NSW and was appointed a fellow of the AIIA in 2017.

This article is published under a Creative Commons License and may be republished with attribution.