COP26: the Glasgow conference source of intoxication and climate-skeptical information

Audio 03:27

Infox, around the COP 26. (Illustration) Graphic studio FMM

By: RFI Follow

3 min

Three days before COP26, which will last three weeks, climate-skeptical information and poison are circulating around the international climate summit to be held in Glasgow on Monday and Tuesday next, where more than 120 leaders are expected.

Overview of the true and the false.

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with our correspondent in London,

To discredit the organizers of the summit, information circulated everywhere on social networks with articles and posts on Facebook, telling that the delegates will travel in Tesla ... The Scottish government has even spent more than 2 million euros euros to equip the delegates with these cars - certainly electric - but which cost the modest sum of 120,000 euros each.

Well, that's wrong.

According to the government, delegates will even be encouraged to take public transport.

Cars will still be available to them, but they will not be as luxurious and the electrical terminals for the chargers will be powered by recycled frying oil.

Boris Johnson's climate-skeptical remarks

The summit and conference are being held in Glasgow, across the Channel, on the land of Boris Johnson, who previously had climate-septic comments while writing for the

In January 2010, he gave his support to

known in the United Kingdom for denying the existence of global warming. Boris Johnson wrote then that Piers Corbyn's climate predictions were correct 85% of the time and that maybe he should listen to what he had to say.

And three years later, in December 2013, he wrote that certainly the winter was particularly mild, but that humanity just had this unfortunate tendency to believe itself at the center of uncontrollable cosmic events.

He even went a little further, when commenting on the

: he wrote that extreme weather events had nothing to do with humanity.

However, we must remind our listeners that a study by the University of Birmingham is unequivocal: 99% of researchers and climate specialists agree that climate change is caused by humans.

Pressure from some countries

Admittedly, the British Prime Minister does not hold the same speech any more. But other countries are worried like Saudi Arabia, Japan and Australia, which have pushed to change a scientific report on how to tackle climate change. The BBC has managed to consult this document and some passages are quite edifying. Riyadh thus lobbied for certain sentences to be removed from the report. According to the country, which is one of the world's largest oil producers, the world does not need to reduce its use of fossil fuels as quickly as the current version of the report recommends.

There is also Australia, a major exporter of coal, and Japan, a major consumer of coal, who do not see the need to close coal-fired power stations.

Or Brazil and Argentina, two of the world's largest beef producers who refuse to see a link between meat consumption and greenhouse gas emissions.

According to the BBC, government comments are meant to be constructive and to improve the quality of the final report.

But with less than three days of the opening of the climate conference, this kind of questioning does not fit into the logic of the COP26.

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