I rarely disagree with Greta Thunberg, but—while she won’t know it—we temporarily parted ways over the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow. Before the event even opened its doors, she had insisted that: "We are tired of [leaders'] blah, blah, blah." And of course I agreed. Later she said that the event was a "PR exercise"—and, again, I agreed. Of course it was. Pretty much everyone we met there was doing PR of some sort.

But then she insisted, before the summit had closed its doors, that COP26 was a "failure.”

Hold on a minute, I thought as I trudged along as part of the rainswept Fridays4Future march she would shortly address. My instant reaction was to conclude: “No! No. 1, it’s too soon to know. And No. 2, COP26 may just have succeeded in opening a window on a very different political landscape.” An unintentional, but critical outcome.

A Place for Youth

COP26, I believe, marked the crossing of a critical psychological threshold, indeed a political threshold, where older people who run—and have often screwed up—the planet are being forced to acknowledge that young people should have a voice. Will have a voice.

The question now is not so much whether, but where, when and how?

But first let’s step back in time to consider how young people fared in earlier stages of our industrial economies. Some days before our CEO and I joined the 100,000 people of all ages at the Climate March, I rode the train to Glasgow. As we sped north, I began reading Jeremy Paxman’s new book on the critical role coal played in Britain’s rise to global power. Fascinating.

Black Gold begins with an early example of the truly awful price that endless mining communities paid in life and limb. The book’s opening pages tell the frightful story of the Hartley mining disaster of 1862. This single catastrophe created 103 widows and left 257 children and 47 dependent adults with no means of support. The ages of the dead ranged from seventy-one down to ten—indeed, a single family lost seven children and teenagers.

Clearly, the Industrial Revolution was no paradise for young people, but perhaps they had it easy in contrast to the future prospects of many young people now alive as the consequences of all the coal, oil, and gas we have burned come home to roost.

It was striking, in fact, how many voices at COP26 were busily heralding the end of coal as a fuel. New agreements unveiled in Glasgow included a pledge signed by 25 countries, including the United States and Canada, to stop public financing of overseas fossil fuel projects by the end of 2022. The UK also unveiled its Global Coal to Clean Power Transition, featuring new commitments from 23 countries, including Poland, South Korea, and Indonesia, to phase out coal power.

One Minute to Midnight

"Today, I think we can say that the end of coal is in sight," said Alok Sharma, President of COP26, but where were the biggest coal-burners, China in particular? Conspicuous by their absence—and busily burning more coal than ever in the midst of the latest energy crisis.

"It's one minute to midnight on that doomsday clock, and we need to act now,“ intoned Britain’s Johnson, no great friend of climate action in the past. “If we don't get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow." Well-informed people in his audience knew that he was actively considering the first new coal mine in the country since decades.

Dubbed “a clown” by some politicians from other countries, he was soon enmired in yet another “sleaze” scandal, very much of his own making. And his declared, laudable intention of “uniting the world to tackle climate change” proved something of a damp squib—with the presidents of countries like China and Russia, no slouches when it comes to burning fossil fuels, refusing to even show up in Glasgow.

But one theme kept surfacing in my brain as I watched fireworks screech into Glasgow’s night skies for several nights running, first for Diwali, then for Guy Fawkes night. In headlines: the shape of a new and very different political settlement is now beginning to emerge. Yes, in places like New Delhi, with millions of people ignoring firework bans, air pollution monitors literally went off the scale as toxic clouds built up across the region. But, as they say, it often gets darker just before the dawn.

You Figure it Out!



It’s interesting how some major businesses are now picking up on the theme of child eco-anxiety and activism. An Amazon TV ad currently running has young people from around the world encouraging businesses to clean up their act. And one line that still rattles around my brain came from a small boy awed by the scale of what needs to be done to fix all of this: “I’m only six!” he protests. “You figure it out!”

One afternoon, I walked out to the Green Zone in Glasgow’s Science Centre. There I watched a new film, Here We Are, designed to get children thinking about our home planet. Based on a book by Oliver Jeffers, who took the audience through a range of iPad-based drawing exercises during the Apple-sponsored event, the film contained well-rehearsed lines like, “Take care of our planet—it’s the only one we’ve got!” But I was forcefully impressed by the quality of Apple TV+ production—and it seemed the audience was, too.