Keir Starmer arrived at the Baku COP climate summit yesterday bearing something unusual — an actual plan with a new government behind to limit global warming. He had one of the more substantial pledges at a notably thin summit, where the main proposals come from China, while the US absorbs the impact of a Donald Trump victory.
The UN’s climate outings are intended to keep the minds of wayward governments on the agreed UN goal. That is to limit the rise in global temperature to under 2°C (compared to pre-industrial levels). Theoretically almost everyone agrees with this. A rise in extreme weather events, from the disastrous floods in Spain to the soaring temperatures and wildfires on America’s West Coast, has brought home to governments the correlation of climate with extreme weather in volumes that are now harder to dismiss as coincidence or cyclical .
