“Climate change is as big a threat to world peace as war,” the UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, recently told the UN Security Council, as he committed the UK, host of this year’s key climate conference, COP 26, to leading the world on action.
Yet the UK’s own influential Public Accounts Committee (PAC) comprised of UK Members of Parliament says ministers have “no plan” to meet climate change targets, two years after setting them in law.
Renowned economist Andrew Simms lays all of this bare in a brilliant article settings recent UK spending commitments in perspective: “What that leadership currently looks like is a government which announced an increase in its military spending of £16.5 billion in November 2020, and in 2020-21 spent at least £41.2 billion on the military and just £3.1 billion on reducing carbon emissions.”
Strip away the green rhetoric and what lies beneath looks very much like business as usual with all its toxic legacy for our children and grandchildren.