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news
The Sustainable Transport Bloc depart Kelvin Way to join the climate march © Chris RussellCOP26 finally recognises role cycling and walking can play in fighting global warming
The COP26 summit in Glasgow has at the eleventh hour recognised the role cycling and walking can play in fighting global warming, with “active travel” now added to its electric vehicle declaration.
Encouraging people to get around by bike or on foot has been conspicuous in its absence from the summit, with active travel largely confined to the fringes despite the efforts of campaigners.
However, the COP26 declaration on accelerating the transition to 100% zero emission cars and vans has now been amended thanks to Matthew Baldwin, manager of the EU’s 100 Climate Neutral Cities project and EU coordinator for road safety and sustainable urban mobility, reports Carlton Reid on Forbes.com.
The declaration has been signed by more than 30 countries, including the UK, Ireland, Canada, Mexico, Denmark and the Netherlands, as well as automotive firms such as Ford, Jaguar-Land Rover and Mercedes.
It provides for the phasing out of diesel and petrol-engined cars by 2040, but the governments of countries including France, Germany and the US declined to sign it, as did motor manufacturers including Volkswagen.
It states: “As representatives of governments, businesses, and other organisations with an influence over the future of the automotive industry and road transport, we commit to rapidly accelerating the transition to zero emission vehicles to achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.
“Together, we will work towards all sales of new cars and vans being zero emission globally by 2040, and by no later than 2035 in leading markets.”
The concluding paragraph has now been amended to include a reference to active travel, and says: “We recognise that alongside the shift to zero emission vehicles, a sustainable future for road transport will require wider system transformation, including support for active travel, public and shared transport, as well as addressing the full value chain impacts from vehicle production, use and disposal.”
Last Saturday, hundreds of cyclists from across Scotland took part in Pedal to COP feeder rides to Glasgow to join local riders and participate in the Global Day of Action for Climate Justice march.
> Pedal on COP – 1,000 cyclists ride to Glasgow to highlight how bikes can help save the planet
And earlier this week, more than 300 organisations – including the EU Cyclists Federation, campaign groups Bike Is Best and Cycling UK, the US advocacy organisation People on Bikes and the UCI – signed an open letter calling on governments to “commit to boosting cycling levels to reduce carbon emissions and reach global climate goals quickly and effectively.”
🚨 Open letter to world leaders at #COP26 🚨
Over 60 organisations are calling upon governments to commit to significantly increase global cycling levels. We must shift focus away from electric vehicles to #MoreCycling 🚲 #COP26cycling
Read the letter 👉https://t.co/WkdLOpoeNd pic.twitter.com/6eHLoPMhBr
— ECF (@EuCyclistsFed) November 2, 2021
“Our world is on fire,” they wrote. “We must urgently leverage the solutions that cycling offers by radically scaling up its use. What we need now is for governments to politically and financially commit to more, safer and integrated cycling that is equitable for everyone living in our countries, cities and regions.”
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
Latest Comments
- rogerwb 7 hours 1 min ago
Generalisations are valid in this case; there are enough boomers with negative attitudes to young people to be able to block good things like this....
- mattw 11 hours 59 min ago
This risks turning me into a hanger and flogger....
- wtjs 15 hours 59 min ago
In SE London, psychopath riders are the majority of people on bicycles Oh dear! another festive stealth anti-cyclist ☃️
- wtjs 16 hours 4 min ago
Well, you know the BMW drivers' saying: knock that house (hospital, social housing, care home, hospital...) down, could save 30 seconds on the trip!
- Spangly Shiny 17 hours 39 min ago
I had the pleasure of owning two of the featured builders here, in my history. When I joined the Army in 1971, I took with me my curly Hetchins:...
- Username 18 hours 44 min ago
Could Siobhán paint it red and noone would notice it?
- Spangly Shiny 1 day 9 hours ago
To paraphrase Field of Dreams, "Build it right and they will come: and use it!"
- Rendel Harris 1 day 11 hours ago
And a Happy Christmas to you, road.cc staff!
- Rendel Harris 1 day 12 hours ago
The odds of not being able to find a single pedestrian - just one, note, "any pedestrian" - in an area containing more than about ten of them who...
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23 comments
I've been watching the COP coverage. My wife tells me to stop being ridiculous every time I put my head in my hands and say we're f-ed. She genuinely seems to believe that Something will come up and fix it all...
CCS, don't you know?
Carbon Capture Storage, literally sucking carbon out of the air , pumping it underground, perhaps in places that have already been drilled and mined for fossil fuels and jobs a good 'un.
So far there is 1 working CCS scheme in operation worldwide in Iceland iirc. It will store the equivalent of 1000tons of CO2/annum. Unfortunately we emit something in the order of 40-60 billion tons/year depending on whose statistics you care to believe.
That's either a mahoosive rise in funding to scale CCS up or we might actually have to start dictating that people make substantiative changes to their lifestyles. Personal transport is probably the easiest win left to the politicians. Unfortunately, the vain, corrupted tossers are far more concerned with staying on the gravy train than doing anything to change the status quo.
Reduction in internal flight tax, extra runways, but electric planes.
Decades away.
Biofuel, competition with road transport.
Carbon offsetting, complete nonsense.
Electric cars, the behemoths will just clog up the roads, cheap to run and smugly green, causing the remaining dinasaur burners, and a majority will be for years, especially for freight, to sit and pollute.
I've always been a sucker for the quote about merely not taking it out of the ground in the first place. The start is often the best place to put a stop to things. Given it takes, y'know, energy to pump it in there and if we screw up and it fizzes back out that tends to be rather bad I've never been a true believer...
You're not suggesting that Lake Nyos was an example or model of CCS projects?
So another COP rolls around and once again the initiative is lost to big oil, agriculture, mining and all the other business as usual corporations standing in the shadows, doing their respective governments bidding. More a COP OUT.
I've been an environmental activist for almost 30 years, owned environmentally friendly businesses for over 20 years and have followed COP and other initiatives with great interest and increasing trepidation during that time.
This latest meeting has achieved so little it's impossible to pick out any positives. It appears that throwing mankind under the bus is perfectly acceptable now.
As both a father and a grandfather I'm horrified for their generations, this isn't a problem in 100 years time, this is right here, right now and will only get worse. We keep working to arbitrary figures of 1.5C and 2050, but the first is already lost and the latter just gives the excuse to kick the can down the road once more.
I'm normally a "glass brimming to the top" kind of bloke, preferring optimism every time, but I think we've just signed mankind's death warrant this last fortnight and it'll arrive far sooner than most imagine.
Shouldn't that be throwing mankind under a string of SUVs? A bus would be an improvement.
Electric cars aren't the answer; they will just be replacing petrol cars....That's no good - we need people out of their cars and using their legs, a bicycle or public transport; I'd even suggest small capacity motor cycles, but that's probably a 'non starter'.
I've said before, people may say they want change, but they expect everybody else to to it; they're not giving up their gas guzzling SUV to drive their kids 2 mins to school, or drive to get the weekly/daily shopping.
We've designed our lives around the car, that it's going to need drastic changes for this to change.
Electric cars are just a stop-gap measure, but big industries need to keep pushing the car agenda as otherwise they lose money and go out of business.
It's ironic, but a lot of our infrastructure would be fine to use if we just stopped clogging it up with personal cars. Most roads are plenty wide enough - make them one way for cars/lorries/buses and use the other lane for non-motorised use and we suddenly have good quality, direct, fast infrastructure.
and despite how they spin it, the declaration is to "work towards all sales of new cars and vans being zero emission by 2040"
This sends out the message that petrol cars can (and therefore, will) be manufactured and sold for the next 19 years. Even if they stop being sold on 1st January 2040, which is very unlikely in every territory, they don't magically disappear. Working vehicles will continue for years after. At the moment they account for around 15% of emissions. It might hurt a bit but they need to ban the manufacture/sale in a much shorter time-frame. Many people are unlikely to change if they think they can wait another twenty plus years with the hope that technology with bail them out by then. This will be too late for the planet and your grandkids
There is no public discussion of what a net zero world looks like. I don't believe that mass electric car ownership is in anyway possible. There won't be bangers for a couple of grand. The batteries are too valuable. I think the government know this. If it was possible why wouldn't they be putting chargers on every street. There are massive social problems on the horizon and they are not being addressed they are just being kicked down the (overcrowded) road.
Some of my favourite pictures from COP26.
Easy parking for delegates arriving by private jet.
Zimbabwean delegation go shopping.
Literally, at the trough.
Isn't that the G20 banquet though?
https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/trump-g20-summit-2018-intl/h_d8ef33c0ec760cbf041b5290d92de371
(I don't think Trump would have been welcomed at COP26)
Damn you spoiling the narrative of my photo-reportage!
"German Chancellor Angela Merkel talks to the then US President Donald Trump during a meeting of G20 countries, which include the UK, China, Russia, Brazil, and Saudi Arabia, in Buenos Aires in 2018 (Picture: Guido Bergmann/Bundesregierung via Getty Images)"
I thought that bloke looked a bit Trumpish, but he didn't look orange enough and I couldn't see his tiny hands.
Joe Biden's motorcade. Several vehicles flown in specially.
Call me defeatist at your leisure, but cop26 was just a waste of time and energy, nothing will change and mankind will continue to do what it's doing until it's way too late, which was a while back anyway lol
It's almost as if most politicians/leaders are paid lots of money to ensure that major changes don't happen and that the rich and powerful get to keep on being rich and powerful.
It certainly makes my cynicism gland tingle when I see that the dead dinosaur burners had a larger delegation than any single country: https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/fossil-fuel-lobbyists-outnumber-every-single-countrys-delegation-at-cop26/
Still, I'm sure they wouldn't lobby against saving the world: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58982445
(Incidentally, this was the first COP26 that didn't allow sponsorship by oil industries)
COP26 didn't finally recognise cycling, walking and public transport; it was forced to. Until Matthew Baldwin stood up and hassled them, they had every intention of ignoring them, and even after his intervention, they only get a single short phrase in a document dominated by electric vehicles.
The entire debate was set up to promote electric vehicles, with cycling, walking and public transport excluded; literally there were no representatives at the COP26 Transport day who weren't electric vehicle salesmen. This is no mistake, no accident, no oversight by a junior administrator; this was deliberate, conscious exclusion of the most beneficial modes of transport for climate change, at a climate change conference. This is corruption.
COP26 was run by the UK government, so recently declared by our glorious leader to be "not a corrupt country". I beg to disagree. When you exclude the best solution and only talk about things that are much less effective, that's corruption at a very basic level.
The most incredible thing was the complete lack of reporting about transport day by the msm, I saw/heard/read nothing about it, and googling finds no msm coverage at all.
I've written to my MP and Boris the Liar (yes, I'm that stupid) demanding that the transport report be rewritten in exactly the opposite proportions to the current report, with 99% devoted to cycling, walking and public transport, and 1% to electric cars. No, I'm not holding my breath, given that this government is corrupt beyond redemption.
EDIT; Just tried to get on BBC's "Any Answers" show on R4, which immediately follows "Any Questions". They spent a considerable proportion of the show debating COP26, excluding transport of course, and although I rang in plenty of time, I didn't get the call back.
It doesn't do to be flippant with things like this so I choose my words carefully:
COP is just another global trade conference.
The reason we know this is that it's as much about "new opportunity" (making money) as anything else, the big boys won't play if it's not to their advantage (standard) and the whole thing is largely about the domestic politics of the countries involved. Yes there have been some "reduction" things signed. It's telling though that the idea of "reducing resource usage" for transport only managed to creep in at the end. Walking and cycling are readily accessible, very cheap and low resource-using with lots of side benefits. However I guess there's just not enough money to be made from them since they're inherently available, cheap, simple, highly efficient and well understood. Hard to privatise / make a fast buck or carve out and occupy some new niche there. It's not "new" technology. Although we have scooters and eBikes it's still not necessary to add a computer into a bike or your legs - which maybe makes these less appealing because adding IT means things can become obsolete at the speed of fashion, driving sales. Finally I guess that being cheap and simple and old these are generally not seen as "improving our standard of living" somehow. Too democratic?
Before you accuse me of just channelling Greta, I don't think this is necessarily a disaster. I doubt more could be done than it has been because politicians are beholden to their industries and even the electorates (in countries that do...) mostly want more goods, more convenience. Certainly not anything that seems like a reduction. Everything has to fund itself somehow (e.g. keep politicians / their parties greased).
I'll just keep riding my bike and occasionally trying to charm people into joining me, or prodding the authorities to make it easier for everyone.
Exactly. It's just a bigger version of Farnborough air show or the DSEI.