Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announcing last month that the U.K. will delay the phaseout of gasoline and diesel cars. JUSTIN TALLIS / POOL VIA AP

When leadership is most needed, the special relationship between the UK and the USA should count for something, but so far no sign of the USA pressing back on the UK’s awful reversal on their already tepid recent leadership on climate. We knew that leadershsip was lacking in the UK. The Orwell-worthy podium messaging in the photo to the left says all you need to know about efforts to obfuscate, but read Fred Pearce‘s account in Yale e360 anyway:

Demonstrators in Edinburgh protest the government’s recent approval of drilling in the Rosebank North Sea oil field. PRESS ASSOCIATION VIA AP IMAGES

Why Is Britain Retreating from Global Leadership on Climate Action?

While Britain has long been a leader in cutting emissions, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak is now implementing a stunning reversal of climate-friendly policies, with new plans to “max out” oil production. Business leaders have joined environmentalists in condemning the moves.

In 1988, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became the first world leader to take a stand on fighting climate change. Last month, exactly a quarter-century later, her successor Rishi Sunak tore up a cross-party consensus on the issue that had survived the intervening eight general elections and replaced it with a populist assault on what had been his own government’s environmental policies.

Thatcher, who trained as a chemist before entering politics, took her stand at a packed meeting of the country’s most prestigious science body, the Royal Society, on September 27, 1988. She told the assembly that “we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climate instability” and promised action to curb global warming and achieve “stable prosperity”.

That speech marked the start of 25 years during which Britain led the world in cutting its carbon dioxide emissions, which are today 47 percent below 1990 levels.

But on September 27, 2023, another Conservative prime minister, former banker Rishi Sunak, sounded what many regarded as a retreat from climate leadership and the pursuit of “stable prosperity.” As part of a new policy to “max out” oil production, his government gave the go-ahead for exploiting Britain’s largest untapped oilfield in the North Sea.

It was his latest step in a concerted unraveling of existing climate policy. In recent weeks, he has also postponed a range of emissions-cutting measures, including delaying by five years a switch to electric vehicles, and cancelled a major expansion of the country’s high-speed rail network in favor of more car-friendly investments.

At his party’s annual conference in Manchester in early October, Sunak declared that the new climate policies were a “pragmatic, proportionate, and realistic approach to reaching net zero” emissions by 2050. But most political analysts saw them as an attempt to mollify his right-wing critics and seduce cash-strapped voters wary of the potential costs of climate action ahead of a general election next year…

Read the whole article here.