Prime Minister Boris Johnson addressed the Accelerating Clean Technology Innovation and Deployment Event at COP26.
Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen it’s fantastic to see you all here.
I know you will be paying attention scrupulously to everything I’ve been saying throughout this extraordinary summit.
But I want to remind you of some key figures that are worth remembering.
I just want to remind you that when I was a kid in this country, we got 80% of power from coal.
When I was Mayor of London - when I first met some of my fellow world leaders - we got
40% of our power from coal.Today, that figure is down to 1% and is going to 0% by 2024.
We are going to zero emissions for our vehicles, for our new cars for 2030.
We are going to net zero for our whole power generation sector by 2035 not even making use of gas.
How is it possible to do this?
It’s through technology, through the promethium power of human invention.
That is what’s enabling us to make the progress that we are.
And I want to see here from the Glasgow breakthroughs a new surge of initiatives to deal with some the outstanding problems.
Let me give you one in particular and that is aviation and it’s a tough nut to crack.
Bill Gates and I agreed jointly to spend £400 million trying to solve problems of low carbon aviation, zero guilt free aviation and we’ve got to fix it.
I’m going to be flying in a plane quite soon I think that has 35% sustainable aviation fuel, the target at the moment is to get to 10% sustainable aviation fuel for the whole world by 2030, how pathetic is that?
We can do better than that folks. It was 100 years ago that Alcock and Brown flew the Atlantic for the first time with about 865 imperial gallons of petrol.
We’ve made virtually no progress technologically since then in our approach since sending a plane up over the Atlantic.
I want to see Alok, never mind Alcock, I want to see Alok as the skipper of the next net zero plane that will not rely on fossil fuels at all and I think we should be far far more ambitious.
I just want to thank his royal highness the Duke of Cambridge because I think the Earthshot Prize is a terrific initiative and I’ve just met some young people who have got plans for getting rid of…
…there’s a machine over there that looks like a microwave, looks suspiciously like a microwave, that apparently can make very cheap hydrogen.
I believe it. I’m a taker. She gave me her card. This could be the future - we can crack these problems.
There’s basically five key areas where we want to see the breakthroughs take place, they’re in transport, they’re in steel, they’re in hydrogen, they’re in agriculture and above all they’re in power generation.
And we can fix it, go back to the initial statistic that I began with. We can do extraordinary things.
You may not think weather is particularly beautiful here in the UK, actually its wonderful isn’t it? The weather it’s not too bad today it’s been fantastic. Hasn’t been quite up to Kenyan standards but it’s been pretty sunny today.
And there are many days that, thanks to combination of solar and wind, we produce more than 50% of our energy from renewables.
What we want, the whole objective of this summit now is to take these inventions, take these breakthroughs to get the finance and get the support to make sure they are disseminated and spread across the whole world….
….so that the whole world shares in the Glasgow breakthrough and shares in our agendas….
….and that we unite across the whole planet to tackle climate change.
There’s one guy who particularly understands how to do that and shares that agenda and understands that a single hour of sunshine provides enough energy to power the whole earth for a year, to power all human activity for a year I should say.
The one man who understands that so well and has achieved absolutely extraordinary things in his own country of India is the Prime Minister of India.
Ladies and Gentlemen, excellencies there is one sun world, one grid, one Narendra Modi and I have great pleasure handing over to Narendra.
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