COP26: Daily briefing from UN summit on climate change for Tuesday, November 9

The Scotsman takes a wry look at events as they unfold at COP26

Maryhill is not the most likely spot for a gathering of the great and the good.

The Maryhill Mob

An area of Glasgow perhaps best known for its infamous street gang of the 1960s – the Maryhill Fleet – the district has become more gentrified over recent decades largely thanks to student flat developments and eye-watering prices for a tenement in nearby Partick.

One ambitious estate agent even went so far as to recently advertise the location of a flat in a particularly notorious street as ‘Upper Partick’.

So perhaps it was not entirely predictable that some of the great and the good attending the Glasgow summit found themselves in Maryhill for their dinner, sparking a demonstration by climate change protesters.

What no one reckoned with was the dogged attitude of the Glasgow motorist who decided that he was fed up with all the fuss and simply drove at the mob, very slowly, forcing them to part.

When Police Scotland’s finest arrived on the scene they were greeted with much baying and yelling and proceeded to make 16 arrests, insisting officers were removing protesters “to balance the right to protest with public safety and rights of the wider community”.

A rainbow of zones

How many different coloured zones are there at COP26?

In addition to the COP26 blue and green zones, there's a yellow and pink zone too. Yellow apparently between the outer perimeter fence and the security check hall. Pink are adjacent hotels within the outer perimeter, but within separate fences, which confusingly includes the Radisson RED. Maybe there are other colours of which we have yet to learn?

BOGOF ScotRail

Having narrowly averted a crippling strike that embarrassingly threatened to derail travel to and from the summit, ScotRail is now giving customers who’ve been inspired by the Glasgow evening the chance to continue cutting their carbon footprint while taking advantage of savings on November tickets.

The train operator is launching a Buy One Get One Free offer for two whole weeks from November 14 – just as the regular rail user is starting to get used to the idea of services once again on a Sunday.

Old Sparky: ScotRail's hydrogen-powered (it ran on electricity) train.

Bad news for boozers

In the good old pre-pandemic days, a conference attracting up to 30,000 people to the city would have been a welcome boost to the coffers of many a city pub, club and restaurant.

However, it appears that many delegates and other attendees got cold feet, largely due to coronavirus it is said, and stayed in their accommodation of an evening, denying the shot in the arm Glasgow’s hospitality industry so badly needs.

One licensee who was disappointed at the low numbers turning up for a night on the tiles bemoaned: “We expected it to be stowed out, but instead it’s the same regular old faces sitting with a hauf ‘n a hauf talking about fitba and nothing to get the bank manager excited about”.

Hardly a scramble to get to the bar as summit crowds don't mob Glasgow's bars.

Starman’s space travel blues

Astronaut Tim Peake is generally an enthusiastic, glass-half-full bloke, which is probably why he survived intact after so long in space.

But Mr Peake, who famously ran the 2016 London marathon on a treadmill on board the International Space Station, told the summit he was “disappointed” space travel was starting to be seen as luxury tourism for the super-rich, and warned we will never tackle climate change without it.

Asked how he feels about space travel becoming the preserve of billionaires, he said: “I personally am a fan of using space for science and for the benefit of everybody back on Earth ,so in that respect I feel disappointed that space is being tarred with that brush.

“It is important to get the facts right as well – rocket fuel, some of the most efficient rocket fuel is hydrogen and oxygen.

“[Jeff Bezos’s] Blue Origin is using that, so it is not 300 tonnes of carbon, there is no carbon, it is water vapour – if you burn hydrogen and oxygen, it’s water vapour.

“Now water vapour in itself has problems. I am not trying to defend it or deny it, but we also have to get the facts right about what people are doing.”