Anne McElvoy - We've wasted 25 years... now we need real climate policies, not just hot air

COP26 is nearly upon us: and the diplomatic prelude kicks off today as the Government published its New Zero transformation plans. You can’t fault the va-va-vroom of the Johnsonian rhetoric promising a big bet on wind power, on hydrogen, on electric vehicles, on gigafactories, on carbon capture and storage, all those things. And that’s driving a lot of the investment. Today’s climate change moments have their own A-list, so the PM is hosting the techster turned climate curer Bill Gates at the Science Museum and has told Mike Bloomberg he is placing “a big bet” on green investment.

Boris Johnson, always the wily pragmatist, sees his chance to shake off a reputation as the wild child of the democratic world and put “global Britain” at the heart of addressing global warming.

Cutting the carbs is, however, hard work — more so than any western government has yet admitted to a public torn between vague anxiety over extreme weather events, noisy activists (whose disruptive antics can do as much harm as good to their cause) and a paradoxical sense that the matter is too big to ignore and too hard to grasp.

Any advance towards the “net zero” emissions by 2050 needed to cap the rise in global temperature at 1.5C above pre-industrial levels requires urgent steps now — and also a sustained effort by 2030, agreed by the industrial nations with commensurate support for the developing world.