“He lied and lied”. This is a bold headline to level at a sitting prime minister.

A reminder of the Seven Principles of Public Life: Selflessness, Integrity, Objectivity, Accountability, Openness, Honesty, Leadership. They’re important aren’t they? A bedrock upon which we should expect politics of any colour to be founded? Of course if you don’t believe in any or all of these principles then it’s a different basis for any serious conversation that follows.

Meanwhile, a reminder of what the fossil fuel industry tactics are in pursuit of profit as illuminated so brilliantly by Michael Mann in his book “The New Climate War: the fight to take back our planet”:

Denial – claim that climate change is not influenced by human activity (this worked well for decades and helped get us into the mess we face now)

Delay – we have time on our side to make the transition so let’s go at a reasonable pace

Distraction – Fantastical technologies are emerging that can suck up copious amounts of CO2

Deflection – It’s demand from consumers that is the problem, not the fossil fuel industry

Division – Get those pushing for more climate action to argue amongst themselves about the best way forward

I’d add to this Denial II – the form of denial that is part of the stages of grief (catastrophic climate change is too unbearable to acknowledge)

I heard a line from the series Sense 8 on Netflix yesterday: “We don’t need a politician, we need a leader”. With this in mind, look carefully at what is going on with the political class and ask yourself: when am I seeing true leadership, and when am I seeing politicians falling foul of the Seven Principles and supporting the Six Ds?

One is unlikely to see the article of the sort below in the Telegraph. Accordingly one can come to the article in the Guardian recognising that different news outlets can (selectively) portray reality in different ways. Easy to fall victim of confirmation bias if your mind isn’t open and critical. As such, I suggest reading this article for yourself. Did Sunak lie and lie to us? Is he indeed dismantling a cross-party consensus on tackling the climate crisis that has endured since the 1980s? Or is it just a different version of reality and truth?

I will say this. From reading the article it seems that money per se isn’t the issue holding us back from decarbonisation, it’s whose hands is the money in.

#decarbonisation#greenfinance#politics#integrity#transparency

Guardian article: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/09/keir-starmer-sunak-attack-climate-policy