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As a non-Brit, I spared the world my opinion on the own-goalness of Brexit, and the follow-up own-goal of electing Boris Johnson. Not my circus, not my monkey. But as a speaker of the English language, among other reasons, I have always cared about and paid attention to the civic affairs of the UK more than I do those of many other countries. I was reflexively optimistic with the baton passing to Rishi Sunak. He could not possibly be as terrible as his two immediate predecessors, right? In some ways right, but in the way that matters most to the entire world, shame on him. The Economist weighs in heavily, as does the New Yorker’s correspondent in the UK, the great Sam Knight:

Photograph by Justin Tallis / Getty

Rishi Sunak’s Self-Serving Climate Retreat

The British Prime Minister has rolled back the country’s policies on reducing emissions. To what end?

Since Rishi Sunak became Britain’s Prime Minister, almost a year ago, in the middle of a national financial breakdown, his premiership has been defined by trying to make things go away. He wants inflation to halve. He wants the gigantic waiting lists for treatment on the National Health Service to shrink. He wants refugees to stop risking their lives by crossing the English Channel in unsafe inflatable boats. He wants to make the climate crisis somebody else’s problem. On Tuesday evening, the BBC reported that Sunak was preparing to either renounce, or soft-pedal, some of the country’s most important policies to reduce its carbon emissions: a ban on the sale of new gas- and diesel-driven cars would slide to 2035, from 2030, while other plans to phase out gas-and-oil-fired boilers would be relaxed. In an unusual, late-night response to the leaked information, Sunak insisted that Britain was still committed to reaching “Net Zero by 2050 . . . but doing so in a better, more proportionate way.”

If Sunak’s track record on climate is anything to go by, then “proportionate” means new licenses for oil-and-gas exploration in the North Sea; Britain’s first new deep coal mine for thirty years, which was approved last December; and the scrapping of a range of incentives to improve home insulation or to switch to electric vehicles, which Sunak oversaw as Boris Johnson’s Chancellor of the Exchequer. Sunak has never seemed to take the future of the planet seriously. Johnson, to give him his due, brought his customary, shallow bluster. In 2021, Johnson treated the cop26 climate-change summit, in Glasgow, to the joys of his egomania and manic charm. In 2022, weeks after becoming Prime Minister, Sunak had to be shamed by party colleagues and international criticism into attending cop27, in Sharm el-Sheikh, at all…

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