“Britain is back and ready to play its full part,” Andy Burnham has said at the opening of today’s summit. The UK prime minister celebrated domestic clean energy projects including windfarms and electrified steel factories, stressed the need to make the transition affordable, and announced the UK’s first special representative for climate security, Madeleine Alessandri. “The climate crisis is not a distant threat, it is upon us now, devastating lives and livelihoods everywhere,” he said. Pointing to the effects of two global wars on energy prices, he added that the “common thread running through all of this is fossil fuels.” Burnham repeated the UK’s commitment to meeting its 2050 net zero emissions target and said he would work with all of partners to reach theirs. “In that spirit, I am proud to support this Cop’s focus on electrification,” he said. “If we depend on energy we do not control, we depend on prices we cannot control. The shift to clean energy is the only route to energy s