Boris Johnson must explain his climate conversion

Prime Minister Scott Morrison greets British Prime Minister Boris Johnson. Picture: Adam Taylor

The Yiddish word chutzpah was famously defined as describing the man who, having killed both his parents, requests clemency on the basis that he’s recently been orphaned. So it was on a cloud of chutzpah that Boris Johnson arrived in New York to tell the world it needed to grow up.

I’m not joking; that’s what he said. Up till now, he told the UN general assembly, mankind had been infantile in its attitude towards the planet. “My friends,” he went on, “the adolescence of humanity is coming to an end.” In Glasgow in two months’ time at

the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP26), “we must show that we are capable of learning, and maturing, and finally taking responsibility for the destruction we are doing, not just to our planet but to ourselves”.

You don’t have to be lying down in the fast lane of the M25 to appreciate the ironies. There was something of a ruckus last week when it turned out the new trade secretary, Anne-Marie Trevelyan - who had been beating the drum for COP26 through the previous year - is a very recent convert to learning, maturing and taking responsibility. In 2012, for example, she posted a series of tweets stating that “hotter global warming isn’t actually happening”, that a new ice age was far more likely and there was “clear evidence” that ice caps weren’t melting, contrary to the claims of “doom-mongers and global warming fanatics”. One of whom, of course, she now is.

Johnson was taxed with these inconvenient tweets. Well, he said, “if you were to excavate some of my articles from 20 years ago”, then folk might also discover a few sentiments “not entirely supportive of the current struggle . . . But the facts change and people change their mind and change their views and that’s very important too.”

Trevelyan’s tweets of course were nine years ago, didn’t need to be “excavated” and don’t fall into the “not entirely supportive” category so much as the “total denial and mockery” one.

Naturally, Johnson’s comments prompt a look at those articles of his. After all, when he wrote them we may not have known he would one day be prime minister, but he apparently did. So in November 2000, then editor of The Spectator and writing in The Daily Telegraph about the fuel protests, Johnson ridiculed “eco doomsters” and their absurd belief that “evil gases” were encircling the planet.

Naturally, Johnson’s comments prompt a look at those articles of his. Picture: Getty

By the mid-teens he had toned down the total hostility but was claiming a mischievous agnosticism. In two articles in 2013 and 2015 he invoked the work of the climate denier (and now antivax activist) Piers Corbyn to cast doubt on claims that warming might be affecting weather. You could read them as allowing him to signal his scepticism to sections of his potential support on the Tory right, without ever quite saying what he meant.

And here we approach the nub. For 25 years or more there has been an unofficial ideology that coalesces around opponents to wokeists and busybodies who tell ordinary Old Etonians and horny-handed stockbrokers what to do. There is a big crossover here to Brexitism, exemplified in the persons of Lord Lawson, Nigel Farage and the recently ennobled Baroness Fox, whose Spiked Online sect have been deniers of climate change for decades. There are many Brexiteers who are not climate change deniers - take a bow Zac Goldsmith. But there aren’t many climate change deniers who aren’t Brexiteers. Squaring these folk and, more importantly, the constituency they appeal to, has been a big part of Johnson’s political success.

To use his own rubric, it may be that Johnson changed his mind and changed his views ("friends” have apparently put this down to Carrie Johnson’s concern for wildlife). But he has never explained his conversion and I would challenge him to find a fact that has changed. The facts of manmade global warning have most definitely not changed.

All to the good, you might say. Luke chapter 15 furnishes us with the parable of the prodigal son. Said wild child comes home having squandered his inheritance and his father lays on a party. The good son, miffed, says “thou never gavest me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends: But as soon as this thy son was come, which hath devoured thy living with harlots, thou hast killed for him the fatted calf.” And his father says, yes, sure, but whatever he’s done I’m relieved he’s back.

So, in the metaphorical sense the PM has consorted with harlots and spent our money, but now we should all be glad he’s going around lecturing the world on thrift and fidelity. After all it’s tackling climate change that really matters. To get everyone to net-zero emissions so we can stay within 1.5 degrees of warming is such an essential goal that we should welcome all helpers on board. Rejoice, rejoice!

But then there’s Australia. The second largest exporter of coal, after Indonesia, Australia was recently ranked bottom in the independent Climate Change Performance Index. The country is developing new mines, has no targets for renewables, plans on only a 26 to 28 per cent emissions reduction by 2030 and observers say that its plans don’t even meet that objective. It’s genuinely shocking.

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson addresses the 76th session UN General Assembly. Picture: AFP

Australian politics has worked in such a way that several prime ministers have in effect lost their jobs for promoting carbon reduction policies. The ultimate beneficiary has been the current prime minister, Scott Morrison. The man he ousted, the fellow conservative Malcolm Turnbull, said last year how “staggered” he was that “climate denialism still has the currency that it has, particularly given the evidence of the impact of climate change is now so apparent”.

Yet when Britain negotiated the famous trade deal with Australia earlier in the year, a clause including climate commitments and adherence to the 2015 Paris temperature goals was quietly dropped on the insistence of Morrison.

Hold the fatted calf. A full accounting by Johnson for his 180-degree shift in attitude towards global warming would be a significant prime contribution to the struggle for “learning and maturing”. As would be an insistence on building the tackling of carbon emissions into all our trade agreements and most of our diplomatic exchanges. By making such an account, Johnson could persuade the hold-outs in Oz and elsewhere - who are where he once was - that they should undergo a similar conversion. And reassure the rest of us that he’s actually serious.

The Times