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New Statesman
2 days ago
- Business
- New Statesman
Mike Berners-Lee: 'Being a billionaire can make people go nuts'
Illustration by Ellie Foreman Peck 'We need to completely reset the idea that it's OK to be dishonest in public life,' Mike Berners-Lee told me on a bright spring afternoon at the New Statesman's offices in London's Hatton Garden. The 61-year-old environmentalist radiated with the same quiet rage I recognised from his latest book, A Climate of Truth. In it, he argues that misinformation and dishonesty have become normalised in British politics, which has had a calamitous effect on any discussion of the climate crisis. 'We have a political culture in which you can get away with saying things that don't honour the truth,' he said, 'and it becomes harder to defend arguments that don't stack up.' One crucial example of this, outlined in the book, is the moment in September 2023 when the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced the government's intention to grant new oil and gas licences. In doing so, he advanced the persistent but flawed idea that by increasing domestic production, the UK could become self-sufficient using oil and gas extracted from the North Sea, ending our reliance on imports and lowering UK consumers' energy bills. What this argument fails to take into account is that British fossil fuel prices are set by international energy markets and have little, if anything, to do with North Sea output. In other words, the prime minister's reasoning was at best a distortion of the truth and at worst, a lie. Fed up with Sunak and other politicians' 'abusive dishonesty', Berners-Lee, who is a professor in practice at Lancaster University, set out to compile a handbook for readers feeling similarly furious. In A Climate of Truth, he criticises those who, he believes, have helped to sow confusion over the severity of the climate crisis. Berners-Lee spent much of his career as an academic, specialising in carbon pricing, the system that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by assigning a cost to carbon dioxide. In recent years, however, Berners-Lee's role has evolved beyond academia: he's published four books in five years, drawing on his expertise to warn of the consequences of humankind's 'failure to find an anthropocene-fit way of living'. His 2019 book There Is No Planet B already feels as though it was published in a different era of climate action: one in which Greta Thunberg led hordes of children in her Skolstrejk for Klimatet and Theresa May signed the UK's 'Net Zero by 2050' target into law. It is an entertaining to-do list of preventative measures to stave off the most pernicious effects of climate change. In contrast, A Climate of Truth is angrier and more direct. It was published just nine days after the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, denounced Net Zero 2050 as 'impossible', telling a press conference on 18 March that the target could not be achieved 'without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us'. Sunak and his energy secretary, Grant Shapps, both come in for criticism in the book, but it is Boris Johnson for whom Berners-Lee saves the most vitriol, describing him as a 'serial propagator of bullshit'. Two of the most egregious examples of this – the partygate scandal and the £350m for the NHS Brexit promise – are both neatly catalogued in an appendix at the back of the book. It is Johnson's election as prime minister in December 2019 that Berners-Lee holds up as the point at which deceit was 'normalised'. Berners-Lee told me that since then the public has been 'in an abusive relationship with our politicians'. Mike Berners-Lee was born in London in 1964 to Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee, two computer scientists. The pair met working on the Manchester Mark One computer, one of the earliest stored-programme computers, in the late 1940s. Mike is the youngest of four; his eldest brother, Tim Berners-Lee, created the World Wide Web in 1989. 'I look back now and particularly think what my mum would make of the trajectory computing has taken,' he said. 'I think she'd be horrified by the unintended consequences.' Those unintended consequences include not only the rapid, often unregulated development of artificial intelligence, but also the political and cultural power of tech barons. Berners-Lee points to Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, who last year reposted content from the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson during the riots in Southport. Musk also accused Keir Starmer of two-tier policing following the Prime Minister's crackdown on the rioters. 'I think he's nuts,' Berners-Lee told me. 'Being a billionaire has a tendency to make people go nuts.' In A Climate of Truth, Berners-Lee accuses tech barons and other 'malign influences' of 'creating targeted fake content to corrupt democracies'. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Berners-Lee writes that to break out of this fake-news doom cycle, users must take their data elsewhere (he has abandoned X for its more progressive, if duller, successor, BlueSky). But his tirade against fake news does not end with the digital world. He also rebukes the mainstream media, noting a recent Daily Mail headline in which the paper described the latest report by the UN-mandated International Panel on Climate Change as 'climate hysteria'. This type of coverage, he claims, feeds into the normalisation of dishonesty in public life. the Times, the Telegraph and even the BBC have all, in Berners-Lee's view, allowed this atmosphere of dishonesty to grow. His bolshy vision for overcoming these cycles of 'bullshit' is to make it 'socially unacceptable' to get news – any news – from these kinds of sources by ostracising people who read them. His orders are clear, but the challenge is obvious. More than two million people read the Mail every day. Convincing readers to abandon the paper will take more than pointing out instances of dubious coverage, especially those who likely now believe that the very lines they have been reading are true. While he does not encourage boycotting the BBC (it is 'not yet completely useless') Berners-Lee warns viewers should engage with the public broadcaster with a 'large pinch of salt'. Channel 4, in his view, is better. Though Berners-Lee wears his political biases openly (his dislike of the Conservative Party is obvious), his criticism is not limited to the right. We discussed the government's decision to allow a third runway at Heathrow, spearheaded by Rachel Reeves in her plan for growth. 'Reeves has been saying some things that are either not well informed or are really badly informed,' he said. 'In which case, you have to question the competence of her and her advisers.' He pointed to the pushing of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) as a way of making air travel more environmentally friendly. 'You don't have to spend very long with somebody who properly understands Sustainable Aviation Fuel to understand it's not sustainable at all,' he said. One method of creating SAF, he explained, is by using waste cooking oil and 'there's nowhere near enough of that to make even the faintest dent in our aviation fuel needs'. Berners-Lee said this is simply another example of greenwashing to secure political gain, fulfilling the government's coveted growth mission at great cost to the environment. Where does Berners-Lee see his place in all of this? Dismantling the climate scepticism that has taken hold in the political-media class will take a lot of time and effort. He doesn't want to be 'stuck going around year after year just trying to shout more loudly about how much trouble we're in,' he told me. Understanding where it stems from is vital and 'that's what the book is about'. The lack of progress on climate change 'doesn't have poor judgement at its root,' he told me. 'It has flat-out deceit.' [See also: Inside No 10's new dysfunction] Related
Business Mayor
25-05-2025
- Politics
- Business Mayor
Challenge use of ‘nefarious' news sources, says environmentalist
People should confront their family members who read news from 'nefarious' sources, suggests the environmentalist Mike Berners-Lee. 'Challenge your friends and family and colleagues who are getting their information from sources that have got nefarious roots or a track record of being careless – or worse – with the truth, because we need to make this sort of thing socially embarrassing to be involved in,' said Berners-Lee, the brother of the World Wide Web inventor Tim Berners-Lee. Speaking at Hay festival on Saturday about his most recent book, A Climate of Truth, the writer encouraged people to ask themselves 'really discerning questions' about their basis for trusting the media they consume. Berners-Lee, 61, said that lack of progress on climate issues comes down to political 'deceit', which he likened to abuse. If a media personality 'is found to have groped someone even once, that's the end of their career, because we've decided collectively that that's abuse, and it's disgusting, and we're not having it', he said. 'If a politician abuses us' by being deceitful, 'we need to start screaming about that' too. Though there have been 29 Cop conferences in the past 30 years, there is 'no evidence whatsoever that those Cops have made any difference' to the rising trajectory of the global emissions from fossil fuel use, he said. 'Those 29 Cops have been totally corrupted and destroyed by the very cynical, very well-funded, very calculating, very sophisticated efforts of the fossil fuel industry to make sure those Cops don't get where they need to get to,' he said. While energy companies argue they are helping the world meet rising energy needs, Berners-Lee said: 'We don't have rising energy needs, not at the global level.' Technology is not the obstacle to solving the climate crisis, he said. 'We've got all the technology we need, for example, for an energy transition and vast improvements to our food system.' The 'simplest mechanic by a mile' for 'helping the fossil fuel to stay in the ground' is a carbon price, he suggested. This creates a revenue stream which can be used for 'all kinds of great things' including relieving poverty and supporting 'all the technologies that we need'. He said that humanity's 'time is going to be up' if we carry on business as usual. 'We've got all this energy and technology at our fingertips, and we don't yet have the wisdom and care to be able to wield it,' he said. 'We're like children running around the playground with machine guns, and we've got to put that straight, otherwise we're going to be in for a very, very, very nasty time, and I don't think it's too far away.'
The Guardian
24-03-2025
- Politics
- The Guardian
A Climate of Truth by Mike Berners-Lee review – a white-hot takedown of environmental policy
In July 2023, prime minister Rishi Sunak and energy secretary Grant Shapps issued a defence of their decision to expand UK oil and gas production in the North Sea. The move was necessary to prevent household energy prices from rising sharply across the nation, they claimed. It was a manifest distortion of the truth, to say the least. British oil and gas prices are set by global energy markets, which are barely affected by what the UK does in its heavily depleted North Sea oilfields. Changing production there would have made little difference to domestic bills though it would have damaged our attempts to reach net zero by 2050. So were Sunak and Shapps merely incompetent, albeit to a spectacular degree? Or did their dissembling have a more unpleasant root in optics for their party faithfuls? Mike Berners-Lee is in no doubt. The pair were guilty of deliberate and cynical dishonesty, which he says is part of 'an eruption of deceit unlike anything I've known in my lifetime'. Berners-Lee does not mince his words, it should be noted. His disdain for the last Tory government, Boris Johnson, climate change deniers, rightwing columnists, newspaper owners, Donald Trump and fossil fuel companies is visceral and intense. It is thanks to the malignant influence of these groups and individuals that humanity has continued to emit ever increasing amounts of carbon dioxide despite decades-old warnings from scientists that our planet, species and most other life forms on Earth will suffer dreadfully as a consequence. According to Berners-Lee, we face 'a Polycrisis', a rather unfortunate term that has nothing to do with an impending parrot pandemic but is his name for the combined catastrophes of the climate crisis, food security disruption, biodiversity loss and pollution that awaits us in the near future. A Climate of Truth is his attempt to pinpoint those who have led us to this frightening state of affairs and to offer ways to find salvation from global calamity. In the former task, Berners-Lee – a fellow of the Centre for Social Futures at Lancaster University and brother of Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the world wide web – is hearteningly robust in naming those responsible. Villains include bogus fig leaf thinktanks such as the 'appallingly dishonest' Global Warming Policy Foundation; fossil fuel companies who are 'the godfathers of climate chaos'; the gambling, aviation and food processing industries; a host of different politicians, most of them Tories, and almost every newspaper in the UK apart from the Guardian (and, presumably, the Observer, which – at the time of writing – is still its sister paper). It is a sweeping list of denunciations but a pretty fair one, in my view. Less satisfactory is the list of actions that Berners-Lee provides as a plan for changing the fact that 'even after 28 [now 29] climate Cop meetings, we are still sleepwalking towards disaster'. Suggestions include picking your choice of media more carefully, tackling individual MPs about their voting choices and finding employment 'if you possibly can' in an organisation that is enabling a more sustainable future. This is tame stuff for a work that claims to be a practical book. On the other hand, it is hard to see what the world can do as we hurtle towards a future of melted ice caps, drowned coasts, flooded cities, droughts, soaring heatwaves and wrecked coral reefs, not to mention catastrophic loss of biodiversity and widespread starvation. It is not that people are unwilling to act, it should be stressed. In a 2024 survey, carried out in 125 countries, a substantial majority said they would sacrifice income to fund more vigorous environmental responses from their governments though, intriguingly, these individuals under-rated everyone else's readiness to act. A total of 69% said they would pay to address the climate crisis while they reckoned that only 43% of others would do the same. In other words, willingness to act to tackle the coming climate crisis is significantly underestimated across the planet, a fact happily exploited by world leaders. As James Baldwin – quoted by Berners-Lee – once put it: 'Not everything that is faced can be changed but nothing can be changed until is faced.' Sadly, we are now approaching the point when it will be too late to confront, never mind resolve, an issue that will determine how future generations live on Earth. A Climate of Truth: Why We Need It and How To Get It by Mike Berners-Lee is published by Cambridge University Press (£14.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at Delivery charges may apply
The National
08-02-2025
- Science
- The National
World is ‘accelerating into the problem' of climate change amid global temperature surge
The news that last month was the hottest January on record offers further evidence that the international community is a long way from getting to grips with the pressing threats posed by climate change. Temperatures in January were about 1.75°C above pre-industrial levels, indicating that the world is likely to breach the 2015 Paris Agreement's target of keeping increases below 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels. The El Nino weather system in the Pacific, which involves cyclic increases in temperature caused by changes in water circulation patterns, has ended, so scientists thought January 2025 might be cooler than the same month last year, which also set a record. But this was not the case. 'We have no understanding of why it's got so high, and the scientific community doesn't understand. It might be that we've triggered cascading tipping points,' said Prof Mike Berners-Lee, a climate researcher at Lancaster University in the UK. Prof Berners-Lee, author of There is No Planet B and How Bad are Bananas: The Climate Footprint of Everything, outlines why the world has failed to deal with climate change, and what is needed to get to grips with the issue, in a book published to be next month, A Climate of Truth. 'Our species is operating in a different context, now, from the one we always used to be in. We haven't learnt to adapt to it,' he told The National. 'We're very powerful compared to the ability of the planet to put itself back together again.' Prof Berners-Lee said people around the world 'haven't got anywhere with the climate crisis', with the use of fossil fuels increasing. "We're making the climate crisis worse by a larger amount every year than we did the year before. We're accelerating into the problem," he added. Scientist believe efforts have so far fallen short of what is needed to prevent severe effects from climate change, despite most of the technology needed to achieve net zero being available already. Dr Delf Rothe, of the Institute for Peace Research and Security Policy at the University of Hamburg in Germany, and author of Securitising Global Warming: A Climate of Complexity, said renewable energy sources such as solar power were becoming more competitive and 'could take over' from fossil fuels. 'That's very positive,' he said. '[But] my perception is it's not sufficient, because there are not enough cuts in energy use in total. As long as energy consumption is increasing, due to digital technology, artificial intelligence and so forth, the degree and speed of the transition isn't sufficient.' Figures from the International Energy Agency show that in 2022 global electricity demand rose by 2.4 per cent, while in 2023 it increased by 2.2 per cent. Without relying on technology such as carbon capture and storage – where emissions are captured from industrial plants and stored underground – or direct air capture, where carbon dioxide is taken from the atmosphere and stored, Dr Rothe said there had to be 'some political steering' so growth in energy consumption was phased out. Countries often put off making the 'really difficult decisions' about dealing with climate change, said Dr Phillip Williamson, an honorary associate professor in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia in the UK. 'Then the crunch comes and there are costs involved and there's quite vocal opposition,' he said, adding that people in effect say they 'believe in net zero, but not yet'. 'The climate disaster might happen sooner,' he explained. 'The climate science isn't sufficiently well defined. The uncertainties are that natural systems can have a life of their own.' Prof Berners-Lee said climate breakdown was only one of myriad environmental problems facing the planet. He said the world was in the midst of a polycrisis, because of the 'haemorrhaging' of biodiversity, plastic pollution, especially microplastics, and loss of land fertility. The key thing needed to deal with climate change is 'reducing the rate at which fossil fuels are taken out of the ground and used', Prof Berners-Lee said. He added that changes in people's diets – with a reduction in the quantities of meat and dairy foods consumed – were also important. If the necessary changes are to be made, he said more truth was required in politics, business and the media. Obscuring the truth could prevent the necessary action from being taken. 'We have this post-truth [culture] in the UK, and US. We've been pretty careless about the truth and we don't need to be,' he said. He called on the public to highlight instances of 'greenwashing', when a product or service is described incorrectly as being environmentally friendly. 'There's so many people saying, 'The problem is so big.' [People ask] is there anything meaningful they can do? I say, 'Yes there is, if you insist on high standards of honesty,'' he said. While Prof Berners-Lee said there were failings in the world's approach to climate change, he lauded efforts in the UAE to transition away from a reliance on fossil fuels. 'I was there a few months ago,' he said. 'It's transitioned in quite a remarkable way. It seems to be a global role model on what it looks like to transition away from fossil fuels while having a vibrant economy. There is so much opportunity to grow further in the desert using new technologies and take us away from fossil fuels.'
