So the 2023 James Martin Memorial Lecture.
My name is Charles Godfrey. I'm the director of the Oxford Martin School.
The school was set up maybe 20 years ago with a very generous gift by James Martin,
Jim Martin to enable the university to do cutting edge research to address the major challenges of the 21st century.
The James Martin Memorial Lecture is our flagship event where we remember and commemorate Jim, who sadly died just over ten years ago.
And we hope that the school is a permanent legacy and fitting tribute to the visionary understand,
to his visionary understanding of the unique challenges facing humanity in the coming decades.
In addition to the audience here in the Shell donation, we also have a live online audience.
And I know this includes Jim's wife, Lillian, and her two daughters, Layla and Jaron.
And we have the pleasure of Lillian and Jay on visiting Oxford a few weeks back.
And I'm sorry you're not here with us in Oxford this evening.
So I'm delighted to introduce our speaker for 2023.
The Right Honourable Alec Sharma.
MP Alec is a Conservative politician who grew up not far from here in Redding and today represents a constituency in his home town.
He read Applied Physics and Electronics at University.
So rare background for an MP and after working in corporate finance, was elected as an MP in 2006,
he held a series of junior ministerial appointments before joining the Cabinet as Secretary of State for International Development and then business,
energy and Industrial strategy.
In 2021, he stepped back from his ministerial roles but remained in Cabinet as president of COP26 at Glasgow, and that meeting, amongst other things,
agreed The Glasgow Climate Pact and those of us following the news at the time will not forget
Alec's hard work and commitment that was so clear in his emotional closing of the conference.
I believe not having slept for three days.
So what we are going to do this evening is that first Alec will give a presentation and then I'm going to have a short conversation with him.
And then we will open for questions from the floor.
So with no further ado, I hope I look welcome to Oxford and the Sheldon, and we're much looking forward to hearing what you have to say.
Charles, thank you very much for that very kind introduction.
And this gentlemen, it's it's actually a real honour to be invited to give this year's James Martin Memorial lecture and actually having a look back.
I'm following in the footsteps of very dear friends, Lord Nick Stern, Christiana Figueres,
the human dynamo that is Christiana Figueres, who many of you will know.
And actually we are all also following in the footsteps of James Martin.
And by all accounts, he was a truly remarkable individual and frankly, it would have been a privilege to know him.
You will know his vision for this school, and it was about bringing together brilliant individuals to find solutions,
as Charles has said, for the most pressing global challenges and opportunities of the 21st century.
And as I said, I had an expert in my speech and of course, in the discussion that we have,
I believe that in a world which is in turmoil and which is facing very many immediate and short term challenges,
which we obviously collectively have to address, tackling the chronic threat of climate change and its impacts remains the biggest
global challenge and opportunity that the world faces in the years ahead,
in the decades ahead. And actually, I would go so far as to say in this make or break century for the planet.
Now, the last time I was in this magnificent building was over two years ago.
And by the way, I'm very pleased that it's not been designed to modern standards.
Thank goodness it's still still standing and looking looking wonderful. But that was back in September 2021.
And I came here for the graduation of my older daughter, Isabella.
And COP26 was two months away. And I was trying incredibly hard to focus on the ceremony.
And I have to say, your ceremonies here at Oxford are quite unique compared to to to other university.
But they're great.
And, you know, I was trying very hard to have a clear day without thinking about all the things that we needed to get done before we got to Glasgow.
And my wife and I were sitting literally up there, along with lots of other proud parents and, you know, looking, you know,
beaming at our our offspring and also secretly congratulating ourselves for
their brilliance because it all always down to us rather than their hard work.
And as this ceremony was going on, there's a parent sitting next to me, really lovely lady,
and she leant across and she said, You must be really stressed right now.
Thank goodness. Thank goodness you get the occasional day off. And actually, it was a great day.
Was it? It was a fabulous dinner. And I want to thank, obviously, Oxford and St John's for taking such good care of my daughter during her time here.
And I have a message for all the students and I think there are lots of students here and some of you may have just joined in the last few weeks,
which is that of course you're here to work hard. So, you know, definitely do that.
You got here because of your hard work, but also enjoy yourselves.
Right? The time goes really fast. And I know sort of it's a very sad thing to say, but honestly, it is absolutely true.
So enjoy yourself at the same time as working hard.
So, I mean, talking of of COP26, I would like to take you back to almost two years ago in in Glasgow.
And if you recall, the world was still in the grip of COVID and we had cancelled COP26 once it was due to take place in autumn 2020.
And because of the pandemic, we agreed that with other nations that we should cancel this.
And actually, in the weeks leading up to November 2021,
I had lots of calls from lots of people telling me I personally should stop it and postpone it
once more because of the risk of COVID at an event involving many tens of thousands of people.
And. I took the decision that we should proceed.
You know, I trusted the measures that we had in place.
And actually, I can report that the incidence of COVID within the conference centre was far lower than that in the in the general population.
But nevertheless, we had to deal with this this extra issue, which I hope no other future cop faces.
And as a result of COVID, we also had our economies incredibly stretched.
Responding to COVID. I was business secretary at the time during that year when I was busy doing the comparable same time.
And I remember recently speaking to one of my senior officials from that time, and she said to me that I came out of the first meeting,
one of the first meetings that we had when we were discussing the the first economic response,
which was several tens of billions of pounds, and that I looked totally ashen faced and I didn't remember this.
But she said to me, apparently, I said as I came out, we're going to be paying for this for years.
And. You know the outcome.
We managed to deploy over £400 billion to support.
People with their lives, their livelihoods and businesses. And it was absolutely the right thing to do.
Absolutely the right thing to do. But the reality is that that has cast a shadow.
And, you know, when we talk about, you know, spending money on many of the other issues that are important,
that is something that we have to bear in mind.
And, of course, we also had a worsening geopolitics even at that time, which I was very concerned about.
And then obviously, after COVID, we after COP26, we went into 2022 and things got a lot worse with Putin's illegal and brutal invasion of Ukraine.
But despite all of this and all of these differences that countries had amongst themselves under our leadership,
under our presidency, almost 200 countries came together and they agreed to forge the historic Glasgow climate pact.
Now, you know, I'm the one standing in front of you today giving this speech,
but I can tell you that getting this pact agreed was a huge team UK effort, brilliant civil servants, brilliant diplomats around the world.
All our partners in civil society and business, they were responsible for bringing all of this together.
And I sometimes feel that, you know, you know, you will know this as if you are in leadership positions in your organisations when things go well.
You know, you sometimes get a disproportionate amount of the plaudits, and I feel a little bit like that.
But you also know that when things go wrong, if you're in a leadership position, you face the opposite effect.
But the one thing I can tell you is that, you know,
many of the people I've spoken to since we've had COP26, including actually those in other governments,
have remarked that what we got over the line at COP26 was arguably one of the biggest soft power wins for the UK in decades.
And there's actually no doubt that I literally stood on the shoulders of giants in the UK system as we negotiated for this.
And again I want to place on record my thanks to the UK team and also we had a group called the Friends of COP and some of them are here.
So thank you as well for everything you did to help us. So what did we actually achieve at COP26?
Well, I think we got more done that many people had expected.
We managed to get countries to increase their emissions reduction targets, those nationally determined contributions.
We managed to get more finance pledged by developed countries to help developing nations, particularly in terms of adapting to the changing climate.
We managed to go from 30% of the global economy covered by net zero target to over 90%.
Just about every single G20 country signed up to a net zero target during the time of our presidency.
We closed off the Paris rulebook. Some of you will be aficionados of the technicalities of the Paris rulebook,
and I can tell you there are a lot of people who didn't think we would get this done, but we did.
And then for the first time in 26 cops, we managed to get language on phasing down the use of coal.
And those of you who have read about what happened at the end, who may have actually seen what happened,
know that there was a big wobble in the final hours and China and India objected to the original language and phased out of coal use.
And I was acutely aware at this point that in these processes everything works on consensus.
You just need one country to walk away and the whole thing collapses.
Two years of hard work of international diplomacy.
And, you know, it's kind of the first time I really understood the meaning of that phrase, having the weight of the world on your shoulders.
And I can tell you I definitely didn't need that Oxford parent to remind me how stressed I was.
It was it was pretty stressful.
But nevertheless, we managed to get this thing over the line and we also managed to get very significant commitments from the business community.
I spent 20 years in finance and business before I went into politics,
and for me it was incredibly important that alongside these incredibly important negotiations among countries,
we also needed to get the business community there so they could make commitments because ultimately
we rely on them to press forward and deliver on these net zero commitments that countries have made.
I'll come back and talk a little bit more about the business commitments.
So the International Energy Agency did a wrap up and they estimated that if you take all of the commitments that were made,
including the net zero commitments,
the world would be heading towards 1.8 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels if they were all delivered.
And I have to say that is still a terrible outcome for very many millions, in fact, billions of people in the world if that comes to pass.
And just to put this into perspective, you know, if we if we were to get to 1.5 degrees of absolute global warming,
we're talking about 700 million people across the world feeling extreme heat just about all the time.
You get to two degrees. You're talking about over 2 billion people as a whole range of statistics that many of you know in terms of what happens when.
We ratchet up the temperature scale.
And in fact, I think me and Mottley, the prime Minister, Barbados,
has become a dear friend through this process who set it up in a brilliant and emotional speech, she said.
Two degrees would be a death sentence for her people, for our island.
And that applies as much to Barbados as it does to very many other low lying states.
But having said that, if you have a look at what the world has collectively achieved in terms of bending the temperature arc downwards,
the scientists were telling us and there's lots of them here and hopefully they'll confirm this.
The scientists were telling us that before Paris came into place,
we were heading towards four degrees of global warming post Paris, three degrees, Perth, Glasgow, 1.8.
But as I said, all this relies on these commitments actually being delivered and that is why I described COP26 as a fragile win.
And I said at the time that 1.5 was still on life support.
So why did all of these countries sign up despite their differences?
Well, I think there are a number of reasons. Firstly, there was a collective self-interest.
I went to 54 countries, many of them twice, some of them three times, some of them even four times,
to persuade governments to be more ambitious in terms of their commitments.
And the one thing was very clear they all understood the impact on the lives,
the livelihoods and the infrastructure of their populations as a result of the changing climate.
I, of course, talked to ministers, to leaders, to businesses when I went to different countries, but I also met communities on the front line.
I met civil society groups. I met youth groups. And let me I just want to tell you,
because I think this is really sort of very important to put into perspective how if you're on the front line, it is for people.
I want to give you some idea of some of the people that I met.
I went to the island of Barbuda and that had a hurricane called Hurricane Irma a few years prior to when I was there.
And actually, if you stood in the middle of that island and you looked around, it literally felt like a hurricane had blown in a few weeks earlier.
Yes, there'd been some restoration, but a lot of the place was still in a bad state.
And when I talk to those still on the island, what they said was that they were frightened that these climatic events,
that that experience as a result of Irma were becoming more frequent and more ferocious.
And their message to me at the time was, tell the G20, tell the biggest emitters they have to cut emissions.
As in Jakarta, many of you will have been there if you haven't when you go.
Apart from the touristy bits, go and have a look at the seawall. The wall that's holding back the rising sea levels when you see it.
And for me, this is the remarkable thing.
You can literally see every few years where they have added a few metres onto this wall to hold back the waters.
I was in Sydney. I met the first responders who have to deal with the aftermath of wildfires and the flooding,
and they told me that what used to be regarded as one in 100 year events are now one in ten.
One in five year events, their homes and businesses in parts of Australia that cannot get insurance because of climate change.
And by the way, that's not just in Australia. That's across the world.
And if you're in the insurance sector or, you know, people in insurance sector,
ask them, this is this is a huge, huge issue and I'm afraid it's going to get worse.
I went to Seattle, ironically, for a clean energy conference, and we arrived at night.
We flew in overnight. And as you look down, you could see the burning wildfires.
And I don't exaggerate. And I say to you, it was literally like looking in the jaws of [INAUDIBLE].
And as you as you get into Seattle, I mean, there is a during the day, there's a sort of terrible haze hanging in the atmosphere.
As in India, when they had the heatwave in 2022, I met people who work outside for a living day in, day out.
I mean, I think very few of us can imagine what that is like.
But there is only so much the human body can take.
I met at the U.N. General Assembly in 2022, the climate change minister for Pakistan.
And this is the point where a third of her country was underwater because of a climatic event.
And just to put that into perspective, that is bigger than the size of the United Kingdom.
What do you say to someone, a third of whose country is underwater?
It was a really very challenging discussion.
And of course, closer to home, we've seen the wildfires and the flooding that we've been experiencing across Europe.
Last year, we had wildfires breaking out outside London. We had a very sadly loss of life because of the heat waves that we faced.
And so the point that I'm trying to make is that countries have understood in coming to
Glasgow that climate change does not recognise borders and we have to act collectively.
Countries also recognise the science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is very clear.
Human activity is unequivocally responsible for global warming and that is something that countries have understood.
And then of course there are the costs.
And when Nick Stern gave his memorial lecture a few years ago, I'm sure he will have talked about the Stern Review,
where he estimated that unmitigated climate change could cost up to 20% of global GDP every year.
Very recently the Independent Office for Budget Responsibility in our country, in one of their risk reports,
estimated that unmitigated climate change could lead to our national debt, rising to almost 300% of GDP of our economy by the end of the century.
I mean that. I'm afraid it's just been just does not work on any level.
And that is not a legacy that I think my generation should be looking to leave to some of the younger folks who are here in the audience today.
And then, of course, there are the cascading risks of risks that are exacerbated as a result of climate change,
food insecurity, water insecurity, migration risk.
Last year, there were more people displaced in the world because of climatic events, 32 million than there were because of conflict, 28 million.
And, you know, we have an issue right now in our country in terms of dealing with people coming illegally in boats.
Can you imagine? What will happen if large parts of the world literally become uninhabitable?
Where will people go? And that's something that should be exercising governments, particularly in our part of the world.
And then, of course, there's the issue of physical security.
We know that terrorist groups like ISIS and al-Shabab use the impacts of climate change, of scarcer resources as a recruiting sergeant.
And so overall, I believe that the reason that countries acted is because they understood that the cost of not acting,
the cost of inaction was going to be far greater than the cost of taking action.
So where are we now, two years on? Well, we're at 1.2 degrees of global warming above pre-industrial levels.
2023 is the hottest year on record and the warnings keep coming.
The World Meteorological Organisation and the Met Office put out a report in May which estimated that the way that we are going,
we are going to, in the balance of probabilities, breach 1.5 degrees in at least one of the next five years.
It's probably going to be temporary, but we're going to breach it.
And so the reality is that unless countries are prepared to act with more urgency, I'm afraid the vital signs of 1.5 will continue to ebb away.
So then I guess the question is, you know, is there hope? Can we still keep 1.5 alive to avoid the worst impacts of climate change?
And I have to say you yes, we've seen some progress, but the reality is that unless we act with more urgency, the window to act is closing very fast.
We need to cut emissions by over 40% by 2030.
We're going to stay on track. Now, global emissions are starting to flatten out.
But the reality is that trajectory of these emissions needs to come down a lot, lot faster.
And look, we have seen some progress. So we've seen significant falls in the cost of wind power and solar over the last decade.
Last year, almost three quarters of all newly installed energy capacity globally was wind or solar in the coming years.
You know, the expectation is that renewables will be the largest source of electricity generation globally.
And one of the impacts of Putin's illegal war is that it did spur countries to speed up renewables
deployment because people understood you can't rely on hydrocarbons controlled by a hostile actor.
And they hadn't already twigged this. They certainly understood that energy security, national security and climate security are totally interlinked.
Electric vehicles in 2017, one in 70 new car sales in the world were electric vehicles.
Last year it was one in seven. This year it's estimated to be one in five.
The deployment is speeding up.
And the point here is that the IPCC has estimated that we've basically largely got the technologies to meet our 2030 emissions reduction goals.
We just need to deploy them a lot, lot faster.
So what about the business community I talked about? Why?
I think it was important to have them at COP26. And I,
I can tell you I spent a lot of time talking to businesses and many of them have recognised
that the pursuit of net zero is the biggest economic opportunity of the century.
They're responding to what their customers want, what their clients want, what their employees want.
And you know, there are very many people going into the workforce, young people, many of you on your way in or certainly will be in a few years.
And you know,
what I hear is that one of the things that people are looking for now is to work for a company which effectively has a social conscience,
which has got serious climate commitments. And I can tell you, companies large and small, absolutely recognise that.
And. They also understand that actually it's quite good for your bottom line as well.
And going into COP26, we had over 5000 international businesses signed up to the UN Race to Zero campaign.
That figure has grown to over 8000 and we had $130 trillion of assets, financial assets,
huge wall of money committed to investing in a net zero future by the end of last year.
70% of the Footsie 100 100 largest companies had set science based targets for net zero by 2050.
And actually even in the US, by the end of last year, around 40% of the Standard Poor's had done the same.
So there is hope. Things are happening.
They just need to go a lot faster. So after COP26 came COP 27 and some of you will have been there as well.
And in my closing remarks at COP 27, I acknowledged the historic agreement on the creation of a loss and damage fund.
I think that was vitally important, and I made the point that the contribution,
the money that goes into this has to come from the widest range of parties and sources.
And again, those of you who follow these things will know that the transitional committee putting this thing together has met recently and
there is more work to be done if the aim is to operationalise this fund to support developing nations by the time COP 28 finishes.
But I did say at the time very publicly that COP 27 was not an unqualified success.
You know, I had very many challenging conversations at COP 27.
And many of us went there to get more ambition than we had at COP26.
We just about managed to hold the line on what we achieved at COP26.
And but we had to really battle for it. We had to really battle for this.
And there were significant elements that were not in the final agreed text.
We didn't manage to agree a date for the peaking of emissions.
We didn't manage to have clear follow through on the phase down of coal.
We didn't manage to get a clear commitment to phase out fossil fuels. And we had 80 countries, including the UK, pushing on that agenda.
And some of the text, particularly the energy text, was weakened at the last minute.
So now we are some weeks away from COP 28.
What do we want to see coming out of that?
Well, I think the first thing we have to acknowledge is that the global geopolitics is definitely more challenging than going into COP26,
the Russia's illegal invasion.
And that war in Ukraine continues to cast a long shadow.
We now have conflict in the Middle East, and I was the Cabinet minister responsible for UN negotiations on climate and energy at the G20 in 2020,
2021 and 2022 and 2020 and 2021 were productive.
We managed to get agreement on quite a number of things.
2022 wasn't productive and I think the same thing happened at 2023 where we weren't able to get a joint agreement on the climate and energy track.
So COP 28 is going to be a real test of the multilateral system.
Will world leaders once again be willing to put aside all their other differences to try and tackle this existential issue of climate change?
And of course, what we're going to get is a response to the global stocktake.
You will all know that, you know, countries have come together.
They've looked at what they said they would do, where we are, where we are, what we've actually managed to do.
And, you know, surprise, surprise, we are some way off where we should have been.
And therefore, what we're going to need to see is some updated emissions reduction targets and also some sector plans.
You know, it's no good saying I'm going to be net zero by the middle of the century.
The question that should be asked is, what are you going to do in the transport sector, the energy sector, the agriculture sector?
What are you going to do by 2030? By 2035, By 2040?
And I think that is something that countries are going to have to answer.
We also need to see a huge push on renewables capacity being deployed across the world.
And I think there are estimates that we need to be at three times that level of capacity by 2030 that we have now.
And in fact, in parts of the world like Africa, we need to be going at it even faster pace six times as fast.
And during the COP process, we worked up something called the Just Energy Transition Partnership,
bringing together finance from developed countries, together with the private sector,
to support emerging economies like South Africa, like Vietnam, like Indonesia,
and subsequently others to make that transition from coal to clean energy.
And. This element of just is actually vitally important because when I was in South Africa last I met.
Miners. I met the mining unions and they said to me, Look, we understand that we've got to cut emissions.
We know it's important for our future, nature and future. But you have to understand that tomorrow we have to put food on the table.
And therefore, there has to be a plan. If we are no longer working in the coal sector for jobs in these new industries.
And that has to be part of this just transition.
And frankly, that's as relevant in South Africa and in developing nations as it is in the developed world as well.
We also need to see some agreement on the phasing out of fossil fuels.
And look, I recognise that this is a transition.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that you turn off the taps overnight on oil and gas.
Even in the net zero scenario, there is going to be some of this fossil fuel is going to be needed.
But the reality is that 75% of emissions are energy related unless you are willing to tackle this.
You are not going to get to net zero in the timeline that we have.
And at the G7, they did agree language on the phase out of unabated fossil fuels.
There wasn't a date,
but I hope this is something I know this will be a big issue that will be debated and I hope that there is some success on on language,
on fossil fuels and then finance.
None of this is possible without finance. There are various estimates out there.
One suggests that the global economy needs $125 trillion deployed to get to net zero, and that has to come largely from the private sector.
There is a wall of money they want to invest. We just have to make sure that the tools are there.
We need to make sure that the multilateral development banks are stepping up with products like first loss.
We need to make sure that in developing nations we have the regulatory environment to allow the private sector to invest.
All of that needs to happen. And the one thing that I think would make the biggest difference is that if every institution.
Every business insured. That they embedded climate risk in every financial decision that they took.
If we do that, you'd be amazed how we change track and how quickly we address this particular issue.
Just a few words on the UK and decarbonisation here. Look, we have decarbonise faster than any other g seven nation.
Over the past 30 years we have grown our economy by 80%, emissions down almost 50%.
When i was 16 state for business and energy,
we put together a a ten point plan for a green industrial revolution to to revitalise our industrial heartlands,
bring in private sector investment into the green technologies, create lots of green jobs.
And frankly, it has been working since 2010. We've had over £200 billion of private sector investment coming into the UK, into the low carbon sector.
We've got the second biggest offshore wind sector in the world and it's created many tens of thousands of new jobs as a result of all of this.
But proud as I am of what our country has achieved, the one thing that is very clear to me is that we cannot rest on our laurels.
And there are some who will say to you, We've done our bit.
Time for somebody else to do the heavy lifting.
They always say to you, After all, the UK is only responsible for 1% of global emissions on a territorial basis.
It's time for India and China to be doing the heavy lifting. Of course, it's time for India, China or the G20 to do the heavy lifting.
They're responsible 80% of global emissions,
but it's because we as a country were prepared to be domestically ambitious that we've managed to get others to step forward at COP26.
We had that moral authority to ask them to do more.
And I can tell you from the conversations that I continue to have with governments around the world, they want the UK to continue to lead.
And the case that I continue to make to my friends and colleagues in government is that this is not just about an environmental dividend.
This is also about a huge economic dividend.
So I just want to end by remarking on on the title of my speech and whether anybody saw this on the website.
But but it said that I think the title is for you, something like Time to look Up and.
The context of this is that after COP26, which is frankly pretty exhausting for me, and, you know,
by the end of this year, I mean, I was ready to be a sort of couch potato over Christmas.
And like many of you, I watched this film Don't look up.
And those of you seen it knows that it doesn't have a happy ending.
And the final line struck a chord with me. It was and I quote, We really did have everything.
Didn't we? And so what I say is that what leaders do need to look up.
This is the time. And I hope at COP 28 and beyond, world leaders will actually match the rhetoric of their words.
And you will hear that at COP 28. But with action and delivery on climate.
The world is watching. It is absolutely vital they deliver for today's and tomorrow's generations.
Thank you. That was fabulous.
Thank you so much for that.
Before I ask some more substantive questions, could I ask you to say a little bit more about what it was like on that last day in Glasgow in COP26?
From the outside, it looked pretty frantic. Yeah, it was pretty frantic.
So, I mean, I think those of you sort of saw this is that, you know, always in these places and by the way, COP26 was my first corpse.
I had nothing to compare it to but the final few hours and lots of people milling around.
And it was very clear that the Chinese and the Indians were not happy with a commitment.
So, you know, basically I went behind the curtain, so to speak, with church and home from from China.
The minister from China who was there, the then the father, the Indian Environment Minister John Kerry, and Frans Timmermans.
And and we sat there and it was pretty tense.
And then there came a point where I just said, okay, what is it that you can live with to the Chinese and Indian ministers?
And I literally wrote down word for word in longhand what the language was.
That was effectively the compromise that was sort of on offer.
And we went backwards and forwards. And by the way, I still have that piece of paper at home.
At some point I might I don't know quite what I'll do with it, but anyway, I still got it.
Give it to the bottle it. Okay. Give it to the bottle in. Fine. But,
but the one thing that I was acutely conscious of is that because we had effectively
sort of gone off stage and the whole thing had become incredibly opaque,
time was running and, you know, the more uncertainly there is, the less chance there is that you're going to get a deal.
And so we really had to sort of press on.
And and, you know, once I got this this this wording, I came out and I sort of showed it to the to the heads of the various negotiating groups to ask,
you know, would they be prepared to support this, even though it wasn't exactly what they wanted.
And then, of course, you know, we went to the plenary itself.
But yeah, it was it was stressful turning to the cop in a few weeks time.
You mentioned the global stocktake, and that is estimating business as usual, 2.6 degrees or something like that.
Many people are calling for resets roadmaps to really accelerate action.
How optimistic are you that at least a first step towards that is going to come out of Dubai?
Well, so I'll let me put this into the context of of COP26.
So, you know, when the UK took on the presidency and then we had a change and I was appointed,
I think there were lots of question marks about, frankly, about me.
People quite rightly said, you've never been to a cop before. How are you going to get anything done?
And I understand that. And we had to work very hard on that.
And people did question, you know, were the Brits going to be be able to get anything over the line?
So I think that the point I'm making is that every presidency faces questions.
And I think that that's right and proper. And you never really know until the end, you know, what the outcome is going to be.
But what you you can and need to do is to be out there in building the coalitions, building the trust.
Because I can tell you one of the reasons we were able to get COP26 over the line is because the UK team and
I spent so much time over those those two years in meeting other governments in having this discussion.
So when I said to people, this is the best that I can deliver, they trusted it.
And I think so the point I'm sort of making here is that I think it's it's, you know, we won't know until the very end what the outcome is.
But I do know that the COP 28 president designate has been putting in a lot of hours and his team have been out there sort of talking to people.
So, you know, I remain hopeful. I mean, there've been some mixed messages on phasing down, phasing out fossil fuels,
whether it's the degree of abatement, how much will be done by carbon capture and things.
Do you think there is a clear message coming out now? Well, at some point there will be a text that will emerge and, you know,
countries will have a chance to comment on it and they will have a chance to negotiate on it.
I mean, I'm no longer of the I'm no longer in government, so I'm not involved in those negotiations.
But obviously, I retain a great deal of interest in terms of what that wording is.
And, you know, we will find that out as we get into into the start of the process.
And then you mentioned the loss and damage fund,
and there's a lot of interest in adaptation and how one can get more money going, especially to least developed countries.
And although figures like 100 to 300000000 million.
3 billion US per year sound a big number and they are a big number.
But then subsidies for fossil fuels are of the order of 7 trillion, according to the IMF.
Are you optimistic, especially at this time of such geopolitical tensions, that the richer,
the richer countries are going to go beyond pledging and actually delivering the finance?
So one of the key, you know, trust elements of this process for developing nations is the delivery of $100 billion a year in climate finance,
which was promised back in 2009, was supposed to be delivered by 2020, wasn't under our presidency.
We we got a report done, which is obviously the numbers verified by the OECD, which said that we would get to 100 billion by 2023.
So certainly one of the things I think we do need to see is some kind of verification
understanding that we have got to the 100 billion in terms of climate finance for 2023.
And that, I think, will will hopefully inject some measure of trust.
But I get back to this point is that, you know,
ultimately you're going to have to deploy money from the private sector if we're going to get anywhere close to net zero by the middle of the century.
And and that's why that piece of work is so important.
You know, we've had a change at the leadership of the World Bank.
You know, the put a G Banga has put in a climate again now is sort of one of the sort of key areas they're going to focus on.
There's talk about how you deploy the the the the balance sheet of the multilateral banks further to try and release more money.
But ultimately, we have to find mechanisms to get the private sector to invest.
That is what is going to deliver the level of finance that we need.
I thought you made a really important point about the discussion about net zero going beyond sort of national level and into particular sectors.
And it's always struck me that agriculture in particular,
which is arguably responsible for 30% of emissions, has always been left out of Kyoto and Paris.
Am I right that there is that in Dubai and other things happening at the moment?
There is a move more to bring agriculture in and to have some of the difficult
discussions both about the production side but also the consumption side.
Well, again, I'm not involved now in the in the discussions, but yes, my understanding is that there will be a more on on on agriculture,
on health, on some of these issues that haven't been at the forefront of discussions before.
But, you know, you can have lots of discussions.
Ultimately, what you're going to have to deliver is very concrete plans for people to have trust and then to ensure that,
you know, countries are actually meeting those particular commitments that they're making.
We chatted about this event a month back, and I think one of the things that that we sort of explored discussing was how lucky we were in the UK,
that climate change was far less politicised than it is in some other countries.
And of course in the last month it has become more politicised.
And I wonder if you might just reflect on that, whether it makes substantial substantive change, whether it will last.
It's a very good question, isn't it?
Look, I think you have to write that, you know, we we've had a broad consensus in our politics on on this this this particular issue.
And actually we are still committed.
I think all the main political parties are committed to net zero by 2050 is enshrined in law.
We are committed to our near term carbon budgets, which is again, you know, they are legally binding.
And but, you know, I you're making reference, I think, to the Prime Minister's speech some weeks ago.
And at the time I commented very publicly that I was disappointed with with, you know, some of the messaging that was coming out of it.
There was actually some some very positive stuff in there as well about reforming the grid,
which perhaps didn't get the the level of reporting that that it should have done.
But I think the issue with it was twofold.
One is, you know, one of the policy areas that there was some rollback on was the date by which we should be phasing out petrol and diesel vehicles.
And that date was moved from 2013 out to 2035.
And I was I was actually state when we we announced that date in November 2020, and that was after a lot of discussions with the auto sector.
And if you are in business and there'll be plenty of folks here who who work in business or run businesses, you know,
the one thing that you definitely want, you can cope with just about anything, but the one thing you want is certainty of policies.
And that is the basis on which you make long term investments.
And I think that's why some of the sector reacted as they did, because they felt there was a chopping and changing of policies.
If you look at the sort of the sum total of of of of the changes, yes, we're going to have to find emissions reductions in other policy areas.
But I think the bigger issue here was kind of the the the the the message that the
business community took away and also that the international community took away.
You know, on the day of that speech, I was at the UN General Assembly and she coincided with with the Anthony Gutierrez's a climate summit.
And I had a lot of questions from international colleagues in other governments about the UK and what we were doing.
And the one thing and I said this in the speech, I think the one thing people want is the UK to continue to lead on this particular agenda.
You know, we did that going into COP26. We did that in our presence a year.
And, you know, the Prime Minister is obviously going to go to COP 28 and I hope he will take a, you know, positive message about the UK.
Just one other thing I would say on this, though,
is that one of the things that Rishi Sunak announced at COP26 was to have London as kind of the the financial centre,
the premier financial Centre for Green Finance. That actually is incredibly important.
And if we are able to get that, I think we would make a huge, huge difference in terms of global decarbonisation.
So look, I'm afraid we're going to have to finish there as we've come to the end of that time.
You mentioned the anger and the enthusiasm among the among young people.
One wonderful thing that was happening during the times when schoolchildren on Fridays were coming out and demonstrating that
often demonstrate just out there and decrepit professors like me would walk by them and give them a round of applause and things.
And if there is a hope, it is with the with the enthusiasm there.
And I think this has been a wonderful lecture. And I know you're stepping down from parliament at the next election.
I very much hope that you remain engaged in climate change and the arguments around it.
Glasgow COP26 put the UK much more centre stage in these debates and I very much hope that you will continue to ensure that we stay there.
Please join me in thanking Sir Alec Sharma for our being.