Climate Promises Cost Nothing. Change Will Cost a Fortune.
Glasgow translates as “dear green place.” At COP26, they’ll find that going green is dear indeed.
Well?
Photographer: Jim Watson/AFP/Getty Images
We’re all going to a dear green place for the sake of averting climate change. The place is Glasgow, host city for the fast-approaching Conference of the Parties 26. The parties are the countries that have signed the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, which came into force in 1994. This will be the 26th UN climate change conference. And I can promise that it will be both green and dear.
As a boy growing up in Glasgow, I was taught that the name meant “dear green place.” According to the encyclopedias, Glasgow is Brittonic (an ancient language close to Welsh) in origin, combining glas, meaning “grey-green” and cou, “hollow.” Hence “green-hollow,” which may refer to the ravine to the east of the city’s cathedral. Or it may just describe the way Glasgow nestles on the banks of the River Clyde, with the wilds of the Highlands to the north, and the gentler Lowlands to the south. Either way, as COP26 attendees may soon discover, the location is a perfect rain trap.