John Ashton, who served as special representative for climate change to three successive U.K. governments between 2006 and 2012, told me that he would often point out to his colleagues making energy policy that their approach to the development of fossil fuels contradicted the government’s claim to be “running a 2 degree climate policy.” But when he did, they “simply ignored my efforts and carried on as before—I might as well have been speaking in Attic Greek.” From this Ashton concluded, “In government it is usually easy to rectify a slight misalignment between two policies but near
...more
