Mike Berners-Lee. Image: Marcus Rose
UNISON has a long record in combatting climate change. This year’s national delegate conference, in Liverpool, reaffirmed its commitment to a rapid and just transition away from fossil fuels to net zero. And, as a clear statement of intent, the union has declared 2026 as the Year of Green Activity.
But UNISON is only one cog in a global wheel. And there’s a growing understanding amongst scientists and climate activists that the international community is failing to meet the challenge.
During a climate fringe in Liverpool, guest speaker Mike Berners-Lee was adamant in his assessment that, despite innumerable COP climate conferences and grand-sounding government targets, global warming isn’t getting better, but worse. In fact, we are “accelerating towards the crisis”.
He’s also clear that the reason is not a lack of technical know-how, but political will. And the title of his new book suggests what is most needed if humankind is to avoid disaster: A Climate of Truth.
The name Berners-Lee may sound familiar to many who don’t engage with the climate crisis. But Mike is not be confused with his brother Tim, the computer scientist who invented the World Wide Web. High achievement, an ability for thinking outside the box and a keen interest in society and community clearly runs in the family.
Image: Marcus Rose
Mike wears three hats, each addressing the massive problems that society faces in the 21st century. He’s a ‘professor in practice’ at Lancaster University, where his research includes emissions modelling, sustainable food systems and the impact of information and communication technologies. He’s an author. And he’s the founder of Small World Consulting, which helps organisations of every size and type to play a positive role in the world.
These roles interconnect, Berners-Lee feeding his university research into both his books and his practical client work. As an author, he combines scrupulously researched detail and analysis, with an accessible and engaging writing style. His first book was How Bad are Bananas? The Carbon Footprint of Everything. The second, There Is No Planet B, was described by the Financial Times as “a handbook for how humanity can thrive.”
A Climate of Truth, with its second heading, Why We Need It and How to Get It, is also meant as a practical guide and inspiration, predicated on a warning. It opens by putting climate in the context of what Berners-Lee identifies as a ‘polycrisis’ of problems that includes food security for an ever-growing population, increasing pollution (notably of plastics), and a loss in biodiversity.
But climate is the focus, with the writer painting a gloomy picture. Taking 2023 as an example, he cites horrendous and damaging wildfires from Canada to Hawaii to the Greek Islands, a heatwave across Asia that saw a high of 52.2C in China, both droughts and floods in Europe, and a dramatic, climate-induced fall in global potato crops.
“If I had to make an instinctive guess, I’d be very surprised if we can carry on business as usual for another couple of decades, without it becoming incredibly uncomfortable for all of us,” he tells me. “And I wouldn’t be surprised if we can’t carry on for 10 years.”
‘We are literally getting nowhere at a global level’
For Mike, the Conference of the Parties (COP), the annual UN gathering aimed at shaping international policy to combat climate change, epitomises the failure to address the problem.
“We’ve had 29 COPS over a 30-year period. But if you have a look at the rate of carbon emissions from fossil fuel over the last 60 years, what you see is a rising line, with COP 1 in the middle of that line, and the greenhouse gas emissions have just been going up and up and up, as if those COPS had never happened.
“And to be clear, the height of the line represents the speed at which we’re making the climate worse. We are literally getting nowhere at the global level.”
While trade unions and others have some presence at the COPs, he suggests it is the fossil fuel companies, manipulating behind the scenes, which have the biggest impact on government decision-making.
“The COPs have been corrupted from the very beginning by cynical, dishonest manoeuvring from fossil fuel vested interests. When you unpick why we’re not getting anywhere on climate and other elements of the polycrisis, it’s always dishonesty at the root. It’s not poor judgement or different philosophies, it’s flat-out dishonesty. If we can’t nail that, we can’t begin to get anywhere.
“Or to put it more positively, if we can nail that, we stand a chance of beginning to get somewhere for the very first time.”
Image: Marcus Rose
He talks of the tactics used, “players who try to make it look more complicated than it is to deal with the problem” while distracting attention from a carbon price on fossil fuel extraction that would be “the simplest and most effective mechanism for ensuring that fossil fuel stays in the ground.”
And he makes one striking observation at the heart of the dilemma. “You can have a COP that comes up with a policy of tripling the rate of renewables production. That’s fine, but the climate does not care how many renewables we have, it only cares how little fossil fuel we burn. And the fossil fuel companies have worked out that more renewables do not restrict the rate of fossil fuel burning; we simply have them both.
“If you look at how the global energy supply has changed since COP 1 in 1995, we have grown the non-fossil fuel energy supply by 75%. That sounds good, until you understand that, over the same period, we have grown the fossil fuel energy supply by 66%.”
Mike’s solution to these failings is a “system reset” in society, which reconfigures the way we make decisions and “our relationship with truth”. He believes that a respect for truth in politics, business and the media – truly holding people to account for lies or their support of lies – is “our point of maximum leverage”.
‘the consequences of dishonesty are now catastrophic’
The book mentions an array of politicians caught out in lies, misinformation or – a favourite Berners-Lee word – “bullshit”, not least Boris Johnson, a serial offender who rose to the UK’s highest political office regardless.
He says that our accepting such people in power has become untenable, and instead proposes a clear rule: one lie and you’re out.
Keeping politicians and employers honest is one of a trade union’s primary tasks. In the past few years, UNISON has tripled the number of green reps in its branches. They work hard to keep employers mindful of the ethical quality of their pension schemes (for example by divesting from fossil fuels) and ensure that green action plans are the real deal, rather than a cynical greenwashing of achievement. Mike believes that such work typifies the righteous response to the crisis that the world needs.
“How can socially minded people win the day? By cooperating, by coming together and insisting on things. And that is what unions do. Unions are about decent, socially minded, empathetic people coming together to insist on standards and rights and values, for the common good.”
But I ask him if the ship hasn’t sailed on truthful politics, given we live in an age when Trump is no longer challenged on his lies, Putin can claim that Russia is defending itself in Ukraine, and Brexit architect Dominic Cummings could admit that his successful campaign was won on a lie, written on the side of a bus.
“No, absolutely not. But it’s a huge challenge, we’ve been lazy about it, we’ve been complacent, we’ve lost track of how much it matters. I don’t want to be utopian, but we have to raise the standards to higher than they’ve ever been, because that is what humanity needs now.
“These are complex, difficult, global problems we’ve got to solve. We haven’t got the room for anyone in the system to be misleading. And alongside honesty, we need kindness. Those are the two characteristics we need of people in powerful positions. We’ve got to ask, do they actually care about us?”
And, as he says in the book, “The reason honesty matters more than ever is that the consequences of dishonesty are now catastrophic.”
A Climate of Truth is published by Cambridge University Press