Boris Johnson, unlikely eco warrior

Boris Johnson is famously a politician who sees the glass half full, and whose instincts are to hope that a crisis solves itself before he has to impose painful sacrifices on himself and us. So it is all the more curious that he is strikingly gloomy that far too little is being done across the world to halt global warming. What’s more, his plans to ‘green’ the British economy are more ambitious than many other governments’ and relatively expensive. 

Why then is Johnson being less Micawberish and more pre-emptive on climate change than he was – for example – when Covid-19 arrived here in February 2020? Why does he ‘get’ the catastrophic logic of global warming, when he didn’t – till too late, many would say – appreciate the merciless logic of a viral pandemic?

The other day he said it was because the scientists showed him a chart demonstrating that above a certain level of warming, the desertification, flooding and species extinction becomes catastrophic and irreversible.