Will coal still be the ruin of us all?

John Kerry, tall immaculately haired climate change special envoy for President Biden, has sounded a reasonably opimistic note about the Glasgow COP26 summit of 200 nations. I like John Kerry, he has serious gravitas and that's good in this flippant world. He believes that coal production has to be phased down before it can be phased out, and that what was agreed at the summit should prevent the world from suffering climate catastrophe. Like Boris Johnson, he regretted the last-minute change of language in the final draft of the communique, after India and China insisted on "phase down" instead of "phase out". But at least coal was high on the hitlist and without that agreed change in text there probably wouldn't have been an agreed text at all which would have been disastrous. So I prefer to go along with Kerry's reasoned optimism rather than Greta Thunberg's summing-up of COP26 as just blah blah bah. There was a helluva lot more than blah blah blah but to realise that you have to read the text and I somehow doubt the Swedish climate activist spent enough time reading the whole deal. If Kerry is convinced that the agreement will prevent the sort of catastrophe that has been predicted on the BBC almost every night then I'll go along with that. Provided of course every nation who signed up to the deal actually implements the agreements and, even more important, continues to find ways of improving on the deal. No one can stop the world's temperature from rising by 1.5 C but everyone can do their bit to prevent it rising above that level.