Why is Rishi Sunak going to Cop?

Whoever Rishi Sunak is taking his advice from, evidently it isn’t me. Last Friday I wrote here supporting his decision to skip Cop27 in Egypt, arguing that it is futile trying to persuade the big carbon emitters like China and the US to follow our example and make a legal commitment to eliminating net carbon emissions by 2050 or by any other date – unlike us they simply aren’t going to take a blind leap into a green future without first knowing how they are going to achieve it without ruining their economies.

This week’s announcement by German industrials giant BASF that it is to reduce operations in Europe, where it says energy has become too expensive, and invest in a £10 billion factory in China instead ought to come as a very loud warning that Europe is in danger of simply exporting its industry as it doggedly tries to stick to unachievable net zero targets. Sunak’s time would be better spent on the much more immediate crisis of salvaging the public finances.

But the Prime Minister has now performed a U-turn and decided that he will go to Egypt after all. Maybe, just maybe, he will go to Sharm El-Sheikh and make the point I have made above. But I doubt it. More likely he will turn up, deliver a few platitudes, shake a few hands and then take a plane home again – emitting 1.65 tonnes of CO2 in the cause of achieving not a lot.

Sunak will gain little in the way of praise for his U-turn. Angela Rayner has already called it ‘embarrassing’. Lib Dem Wera Hobhouse has called it a ‘debacle’, saying he only changed his mind because Boris Johnson said he was going, adding ‘we need action rather than just attendance’. There is a big problem with Sunak going to Cop27. As a former Goldman Sachs man and hedge fund manager he epitomises everything that critics of gatherings such as Cop27 like to despise. He will look like a member of the global elite following a high-carbon, jet-setting lifestyle while preaching to the rest of us that we must compromise our lifestyles in order to save the planet. If you are struggling to pay your food and heating bills, this is not the message you will want to hear – you would rather have the PM at home addressing the very serious issue of inflation. The fact that this year’s Cop is being held in a resort on the Red Sea just as winter is beginning in Britain will make the optics far worse. There are shades of Jim Callaghan in Sunak swanning off to an international conference at a time of crisis – the former Labour PM possibly sealed his fate by travelling to an economic conference in Guadeloupe during the Winter of Discontent in 1979 and appearing to question the seriousness of Britain’s situation on his return.

You don’t have to be a climate sceptic to be turned off by Cop meetings. Yesterday, Greta Thunberg announced that she would not attending, saying Cops were more about greenwashing than making serious progress on cutting emissions. Moreover, Cop meetings have a serious problem with their own emissions. Last year’s Cop26 in Glasgow was measured to have added 102,000 tonnes of CO2 to the atmosphere, twice as much as Cop25 in Madrid two years earlier. One would have thought, given the message they are supposed to be sending, that the organisers would at least have tried to set an example. Sunak could have set an example himself by staying away, but sadly has chosen not to.