Damian Reilly Damian Reilly

The cynical brilliance of Boris Johnson’s green conversion

When did Boris swap Piers Corbyn for Greta?

Does Boris Johnson really believe, as he told COP26 a few days ago, we’re at ‘one minute to midnight’ on the man-made climate change doomsday clock, and that ‘if we don’t get serious about climate change today, it will be too late for our children to do so tomorrow’?

I ask only because in 2013 he used his Daily Telegraph column to write: 

As a species, we human beings have become so blind with conceit and self-love that we genuinely believe that the fate of the planet is in our hands – when the reality is that everything, or almost everything, depends on the behaviour and caprice of the gigantic thermonuclear fireball around which we revolve.

Writing in the same space in 2010, he asked

Is it possible that everything we do is dwarfed by the moods of the star that gives life to the world? The Sun is incomparably vaster and more powerful than any work of man. We are forged from a few clods of solar dust. The Sun powers every plant and form of life, and one day the Sun will turn into a red giant and engulf us all. Then it will burn out. Then it will get very nippy indeed.

Is Boris’s conversion to environmentalism really no less enormous than the one undergone on the subject of Christianity by St Paul on the road to Damascus?

In both columns, Boris told readers his thinking had been informed by ‘the learned astrophysicist’ Piers Corbyn, brother of Jeremy.

He wrote: 

According to Piers, global temperature depends not on concentrations of CO2 but on the mood of our celestial orb. Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines, said Shakespeare, and often is his gold complexion dimmed. That is more or less right. There are times in astronomical history when the Sun has been churning out more stuff – protons and electrons and what have you – than at other times.

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