Lucinda Creighton: The glorified UN talking shop of Cop26 is set for ultimate failure

With the biggest emitters conspicuously absent, and the burden of transition resting most heavily on those least able bear it, international buy-in will quickly evaporate

All a bit of a game: activists wearing masks of world leaders demonstrate outside the Cop26 summit in Glasgow. Picture: Getty

The attention afforded to the Cop26 climate change conference last week was wildly excessive, and not because the issue is not real or does not merit attention. Never has one event with such a low probability of success generated such saturation coverage.

The gathering is the latest United Nations attempt to align the world around specific climate action targets. It is especially focused on the Paris Accord, which was adopted at Cop21 in 2015, and ...