Cop27 shows the world is still addicted to fossil fuels

We are now 27 summits deep into the United Nations’ annual climate change Conference of the Parties”, and the almost 200 countries represented can’t agree that the world needs to phase out fossil fuels.

- HARRY COCKBURN

It is a staggeringly poor record that casts the whole Cop process not as any kind of international cooperation achievement but perversely as an extremely well-publicized archive detailing decades of human failure to address the biggest threat to life on our planet.

This year in Sharm El-Sheikh, glimmers of optimism came in the form of an agreement for wealthy nations to provide financial assistance to the poorer ones already bearing the brunt of climate breakdown. But the key takeaway from the two-weeklong summit was a massive failure to find a way of agreeing real cuts to the climate-altering greenhouse gases supercharging our planet’s runaway warming problem.