STOP Climate Chaos Scotland (SCCS) has sent out a press release urging the Scottish Government to ramp up measures to tackle climate change ahead of the COP26 talks in Glasgow.
Tom Ballantine, the coalition’s chairman, states that previous ‘COPs have failed to deliver the climate action we need’. He should ask how much extra emissions were created over 25 years by these meetings and how much additional emissions will be created by the 30,000 delegates in Glasgow next year.
SCCS can achieve nothing whilst the majority of the world does nothing. SCCS must know that Scotland is responsible for 0.15 per cent of global emissions while China’s proportion is 30 per cent, and that China is building 1,171 coal-fired power stations to add to the 2,363 it already has. It is also building a $3.4billion coal-fired plant for the United Arab Emirates.
China has already declared it will continue to increase its emissions until at least 2030.
Only a handful of countries have legally-binding Climate Change Acts; the rest refused, but instead made promises which are regularly broken. The Paris Agreement is holding together only because developing countries were promised that if they signed up they would get a slice of the $100billion-a-year climate fund cake paid for by developed countries.
China said it would not agree unless it was classed as a developing country and got a big slice. However, that cake is proving difficult to bake since very few countries have so far contributed. America withdrew from the Paris Agreement, so no dollars from that source.
Perhaps a visit to China by Tom Ballantine would persuade Chinese President Chinese Xi Jinping to close his coal-fired plants and save the planet.
