Alok Sharma Why COP26 is our best chance for a greener future TED
Transcriber: Ivana Korom
Reviewer:
I’m here, in the heart of London’s
financial district, the Square Mile.
This is the area where I worked
at the start of my investment-banking
career in the ’90s,
as a fresh-faced youth.
But if you told me then
that I would end up as COP26 president,
I think I’d have asked you what COP26 was.
It’s the 26th United Nations
climate conference
and it’s taking place in the UK.
But forget the technical terms.
What COP26 really stands for
is our last chance to avoid
the worst effects of climate change.
And I’ll come back to that later.
The point is that when I began
my career in banking,
climate didn’t feature
particularly highly,
certainly not in finance,
and not so much in the rest
of the country either.
In the ’90s, there was a guy
called Swampy,
who spent time
occupying trees and tunnels,
and he was the main face of climate action
in the United Kingdom.
But, you know, things change.
I remember being on a flight
in the late 2000s
and watching Al Gore’s film
“An Inconvenient Truth.”
And I rarely watch an entire film,
but this one I watched twice
on the same flight.
And I remember sitting
on the plane afterwards
thinking about my young daughters
and what future I wanted for them.
So fast forward 14 years or so,
and my entire professional life
is now dedicated
to getting the world to tackle
the climate crisis.
I witnessed the terrible effects
that the crisis is already having
in developing countries
amongst people who, quite frankly,
have done the very least to cause it.
And I think about that injustice a lot.
Really a lot.
And that journey that I’ve made
is just one example
of a much broader shift
over the past 30 years.
One that has seen climate
move from the margins to the mainstream
in business, in government,
in finance and indeed amongst the public.
And it’s that shift
that makes me hopeful on climate,
despite the scale of the challenge
that we face, which frankly is huge.
Now, the science shows that to avoid
the worst effects of climate change,
we must limit the rise
in average global temperature
to 1.5 degrees centigrade.
That if temperatures rise higher,
the risk of species extinction
and catastrophic impacts on human lives
increases dramatically.
And we risk kickstarting feedback loops
with the consequences of climate change,
like melting permafrost,
release even more greenhouse gases
into the atmosphere,
making it even harder
to wrestle the crisis under control.
Now, to keep 1.5-degree limits alive,
we’ve got to halve
global emissions by 2030.
That’s right, halve.
That is a huge undertaking.
But, you know, I’m hopeful
because climate is now mainstream
and that is turning
the global economy green.
Increasingly, the Swampies of the world,
they’re not protesting
in trees and tunnels,
they’re all around us in the boardrooms
as well as the classrooms.
In government departments
and on trading floors
all around the world.
In every country that I visit
as COP president,
I meet young people and activists.
And everywhere I see the same passion
and the commitment to act on climate.
Companies in every sector
are throwing themselves
behind a clean, green future,
and rocketing public concern
is encouraging governments
and businesses to act.
And shareholders, they’re forcing
companies to change.
And the move to clean technology
is accelerating
faster than anyone anticipated.
I mean, let’s take the sale
of clean cars and vans
that outstripping predictions.
Solar and wind power are now cheaper
than coal and gas in most of the world.
And three times as much solar power
was built in 2020 than analysts predicted
just back in 2015.
In my old industry, finance,
climate is now mainstream, too.
And there is a simple reason for that.
Investors try to predict the future.
Because if you can do that,
you can make money.
And increasingly,
they think the future is green.
More and more financial firms
are committing to make their investments
consistent with a 1.5-degree world.
And investors are asking
for much higher returns from coal power
than they are from renewables
because they’re worried
that coal power stations
are going to become worthless.
In February 2020,
when I helped launch our COP26
finance campaign here in the Square Mile
to get finance moving to climate action,
the place was packed to the rafters.
You know, when I worked in banking,
certainly at the start,
the room would have been near empty.
And what all of this adds up to,
this mainstreaming of climate,
is a quiet revolution
in the global economy.
A green industrial revolution is underway,
taking us to a clean future,
showing that we can create jobs
and prosperity without harming the planet.
Our challenge is
that it’s not going fast enough.
Limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees
requires us to move much faster.
And we can only succeed if we act now
and we work together to speed up
the shift to our green future.
And that’s what COP26 really stands for.
Now, in the run up to the conference
and at the conference itself,
we need governments to take the lead
and get the green transition moving faster
to keep 1.5 degrees alive.
We need them to set targets
to reduce emissions,
to make this the COP that consigns
coal power to history where it belongs.
The COP that signals the end
of polluting vehicles,
the COP that calls time on deforestation.
We need developed countries
to deliver the finance
they have promised developing countries.
And we need to help protect
people and nature
from the impact of our changing climate.
And we need to work together as one planet
to agree how we’re going to meet
the scale of the climate challenge
and to get every sector going green.
Now, this isn’t going to be easy.
First, because our understanding
of the climate is developing all the time.
And as the science tells us,
we need to move faster.
We’re going to have to respond.
Second, getting people to agree
can be challenging.
And at COP26, we have
almost 200 countries.
And although the UK
is leading this process,
it’s up to all of us
to find solutions together.
It’s like hosting a disco, a bop.
And look, I apologize
that these terms show my age,
but you can get a hall
and you can hire a DJ,
but to make it work, your friends
have to turn up and dance.
And so it will be tough,
but we simply cannot afford to fail.
The stakes are just too high.
And when ex-bankers like me lie awake
thinking about climate change,
when activists and businesses
around the world
have moved climate to the mainstream,
we can all be hopeful.
A green revolution is on the march.
The clean future is within our grasp,
but we need to actively pull it forward.
And we need world leaders
to take this chance
to turn hope into certainty,
to mold the future,
to come together at COP26,
and to continue my disco analogy, dance.
Thank you.