As COP26 starts Boris Johnson & Climate Change. Changing his mind to suit
In September 2021 Boris Johnson defended comments made about climate change by the new International Trade Secretary Anne-Marie Trevelyan in 2010 and 2012 noting that just like him she now saw things differently.
A Guardian report and extract from it is here:
“I don’t want to encourage you, but if you were to excavate some of my articles from 20 years ago you might find comments I made, obiter dicta, about climate change that weren’t entirely supportive of the current struggle, but the facts change and people change their minds and change their views and that’s very important too,” he said, adding: “The fact is the UK is leading the world and you should be proud of it.”
As recently as 2015, Johnson claimed “global leaders were driven by a primitive fear that the present ambient warm weather is somehow caused by humanity; and that fear – as far as I understand the science – is equally without foundation”.
He also wrote an article in 2013 suggesting the government should consider preparing for a mini-ice age caused by solar activity, drawing on a discredited theory by the climate denier Piers Corbyn –
Piers Corbyn claimed that his theory focused on sun spots was based on Marxism (it wasn’t) and it was in any case completely wrong.
Piers Corbyn is at least consistently wrong about all sorts of things. Johnson is more slippery. Whether he actually believes in anything beyond the superiority of free market capitalism, or just says things which he appear politically expedient at the time, is at best questionable particularly as his Janus faced position on Brexit underlined.
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