The UK’s year of climate U-turns exposes a deeper failure
JVL Introduction
In January 2025 the government published its determination to keep the UK within its commitments to “limiting global warming to 1.5°C”. It claimed that the world was “off-track”, but it was “back in the business of climate leadership”.
Climate scientists Kevin Anderson, Chris Jones and Gaurav Gharde expose the hollowness of such claims, with the government reversing green policies on home and industrial energy use and airport expansion.
It also fails to honour its commitments to root carbon budgets in a principle of equity. Even the government’s own advisory Climate Change Committee is out of alignment with promises made at international COPs and allocates the UK a carbon budget three times larger than the equity principle would permit.
The authors sees such calculations as climate colonialism placing the UK’s interests above nations most vulnerable to environmental collapse.
The UK clings to a political and economic model powering the world to environmental catastrophe when what is needed is social and economic transformation.
TB
This article was originally published by the Conversation on Thu 21 Aug 2025. Read the original here.
The UK’s year of climate U-turns exposes a deeper failure
Loading article text…
Good reminders, thanks.
I was briefly climate change officer for our local Labour Party until I got thrown out for supporting a fellow executive life-long member when the purge first started.
It is about time we started preparing for the future we are going to get, not the one we like to assume. And its not just climate change. There are reasons for the unfavourable trend lines in the UK from roughly 2001 with a steeper incline from 2005 and ‘austerity’ from 2010.
We have done the easy stuff first. I find this international data worth getting our heads round… sense of proportion…
https://lambwf.github.io/Countries-that-reached-peak-emissions