Welcome to the Green Alliance podcast. We are the charity and think tank that is all about achieving ambitious leadership for the environment.

Next year the UK will be hosting the UN Climate Summit in Glasgow. It is vital for this conference to succeed,

as its outcome will determine the future and whether the world can avert devastating climate

breakdown. In a conversation recorded during our Making It Count Day of Events in November 2020,

Green Alliance's strategy director Belinda Gordon discussed the UK's role in the Glasgow Summit with the shadow

Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, and former leader of the Labour Party,

Ed Miliband. He starts by highlighting Green Alliance's contribution to UK environmental policy

and politics. I just want to start by praising Green Alliance for the brilliant work that you do.

It's been my privilege to work with you over a number of years, including when I was

Climate Change Secretary.

And you've always been, I think had a unique role in bringing together business and trade unions

and NGOs and others in a really, really important coalition around the climate crisis.

So, sort of congratulated for you for doing that and continuing such great work.

Belinda, I thought it would just be useful because I'm a sort of veteran of the not-so-successful Copenhagen cop that some people will remember in 2009.

I just thought, make a few opening remarks about Glasgow and sort of what I'm hoping for from it and what we need collectively

to be doing in the next year. I suppose my starting point is this is such an important moment. And I know that's a sort of cliche and

maybe obvious, but in a sense, this is a more important cop than Paris. Because what is the

central task that we all have to have in our minds around top 26? It's that we've got to close the

gap between the commendable high-level

ambitions of Paris, which is to keep global warming below one and a half degrees, and the

bottom-up commitments of countries which add up to something like three degrees. And that gap,

Paris commissioned the future cops to to every five years, come back, and it's a sick year because of COVID, and review an upgrade targets.

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