Welcome to the inquiry on Charmaine Cozier, each week four expert witnesses, one question

and an answer.

It's the last day of October, nearly 200 countries arrive for a crucial two-week conferencing

Glasgow Scotland called COP26, their mission to save the planet.

They've met before but unified action on climate change and its negative impacts is much more

urgent now. They need to keep the global average temperature rise well below two degrees

Celsius to avoid the worst impacts of climate change. Harmful heat trapping greenhouse gases

must be reduced. Different parts of the world have very different carbon footprints,

development goals and responsibilities for where we are now. So this week we're asking

amongst China, India, Africa and the developed world. Why aren't countries doing more to stop

climate change? Part one, Europe, the US and power play.

What we've done over the last 10 or 20 years is essentially pick all the low-hanging fruit,

all the easy bits of the carbonising and our economy in Europe have basically been done.

Richard Toll is a professor of economics at the University of Sussex. He also specialises

in climate change. The easy bits are essentially adding a little bit of wind and a little bit of solar

to power generation but actually pushing that to 50 or 60 or maybe even 100% renewables

that requires an enormous amount of storage capacity and that would be essentially

be batteries and batteries are still fairly expensive and also fairly dirty.

A recent climate change performance index listed Denmark, Sweden, Norway and the UK as its top

four performing countries in the world. However for others the time to make progress is running out.

The European targets are extremely ambitious. Over the last decade or so,

greenhouse gas emissions in the European Union fell by some 2% per year and by 2030 that rate

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