Glasgow climate summit in chaos, says business

Russia has offered to ‘rescue’ Britain from high gas prices and said it is in no hurry to reach net zero.

Russian President Vladimir Putin attends a session of the Russian Energy Week International Forum in Moscow last week. Picture: AFP

Russia has offered to “rescue” Britain from high gas prices and said it is in no hurry to reach net zero.

President Vladimir Putin has not decided whether to attend next month’s COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Russia’s ambassador said on Sunday, in the latest downbeat assessment of the event.

The organisers are embroiled in a spat with their sponsors after companies attacked COP26 as “mismanaged” in letters to ministers. Blue-chip companies that have spent millions to sponsor the conference have attacked “inertia” and “shifting goalposts” in government planning, The Guardian newspaper said.

A letter to the event’s organisers from leading sponsors complained of delayed decisions, poor communications and inexperience among the officials planning the event.

Sky, Sainsbury’s, NatWest and Unilever – as well as four ­energy companies, Hitachi, ­National Grid, Scottish Power and SSE – are among 11 main sponsors of the event, whose payments are being used to offset a £250m ($465m) policing bill.

A source said that planning was “deeply frustrating”, telling the newspaper: “They had an extra year to prepare for COP due to Covid, but it doesn’t feel like this time was used to make better progress. Everything feels very last minute.”

The source criticised organisers’ “top-down public sector approach”, saying: “Many of them have very little experience managing relationships in the private sector, or even experience attending a COP event.”

One COP veteran hit back, suggesting that companies were more concerned about visibility of their logos than the climate. “It feels like some of these sponsors have forgotten the actual reason we’re in Glasgow,” they said. “COP isn’t about branding, it’s about tackling climate change.”

COP’s organisers insisted that most sponsors were ­“delighted with the support, ­despite the operational complexities of bringing 25,000 people to Glasgow from almost all the countries in the world.”

After Prime Minister Boris Johnson was told that Chinese President Xi Jinping would not attend COP26, Andrei Kelin, Russia’s ambassador to Britain, said that his President may not be present either. But Mr Kelin promised a “very high level” delegation of more than 200 people from Russia.

Asked on BBC1 whether Russia should aim for net zero faster than 2060, Mr Kelin said: “We are not very much in a hurry, we do not want to jump. We do not believe that putting artificial goals and not very much calculated goals will help.”

Ministers believe that Russia is exploiting a global gas shortage to force the EU to approve a pipeline under the Baltic. Mr Kelin denied that his government was withholding supplies “for political reasons”.

Although only about 2 per cent of Britain’s gas comes from Russia, Mr Kelin offered to help deal with a quadrupling of prices in recent months. “If it will be an opportunity we will come to ­rescue, we will do what we can of course to alleviate difficult conditions which are now being ­created,” he said.

The Times