You turn to us for voices you won't hear anywhere else.

Sign up for Democracy Now!'s Daily Digest to get our latest headlines and stories delivered to your inbox every day.

World Leaders, Activists Descend on Glasgow for COP26 as Future of Humanity Hangs in the Balance

HeadlineNov 01, 2021

World leaders and activists have arrived in Glasgow, Scotland, for COP26, a critical United Nations summit aimed at averting the most catastrophic effects of the climate crisis. A recent U.N. Emissions Gap Report showed that current contributions and commitments by nations to reduce emissions aren’t nearly enough to avert a planetary disaster. This is U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres.

Secretary-General António Guterres: “There is a serious risk that Glasgow will not deliver. Several recent climate announcements might leave the impression of a rosier picture. Unfortunately, this is an illusion. The current nationally determined contributions, formal commitments by governments, still condemn the world to a calamitous 2.7 degree increase. … There are serious questions of credibility. We see dangerous levels of mistrust among the big powers, among members of the G20, between developed and developing countries.”

Some 30,000 people are expected to take part in the two-week summit, which was postponed for a year by the pandemic. Climate activists have been gathering in Glasgow to push world leaders to take more drastic action, like ending government subsidies for fossil fuels and divesting from coal, oil and gas.

Lewis Coenen-Rowe: “So, we know that our whole financial system at the moment is embroiled with the fossil fuel industry, and we need to find a way to get out of that and to move the money into climate solutions rather than the causes of climate change.”

The original content of this program is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. Please attribute legal copies of this work to democracynow.org. Some of the work(s) that this program incorporates, however, may be separately licensed. For further information or additional permissions, contact us.

Non-commercial news needs your support

We rely on contributions from our viewers and listeners to do our work.
Please do your part today.
Make a donation
Top