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Two decades of ground-breaking research into carbon accounting have led Mike Berners-Lee to a stark realisation: the root of the climate crisis comes down to “flat-out dishonesty”.
Piecemeal actions from individual companies have failed to even make a dent in global emissions this century, while politicians continue to ignore scientific facts as they look to prop up the status quo.
“We’ve got to get past this post-truth experiment,” he says. “Every year, the rate of fossil fuel burning is higher than it was the year before. You can draw a line through all the COP conferences over the past three decades on the carbon curve, and you don’t see any evidence that they’ve done anything to reverse the trend – something’s clearly not working.”
Climate-sceptic political parties are gaining unprecedented support across the western world as the media bombards us with misinformation and businesses push polluting goods and services that we don’t need.
In his latest book, A Climate of Truth, Berners-Lee explains how these dishonest actors are accelerating us into a polycrisis of climate change, food insecurity, biodiversity loss, pollution and inequality, and offers a route out of the quagmire.
As founder and director of Small World Consulting, he is acutely aware of the widespread greenwashing that takes place among the business community and the importance of honesty in the climate discussion. “It can be done through story lines around carbon accounting and focusing on trivial things, like an airport going on about its LED light bulbs and not talking about the flights,” he says. “Or it might be supply chain carbon accounting that’s not counting everything to get a story you like.”
In 2010, he wrote the critically acclaimed How Bad Are Bananas?, which details the carbon footprints of a wide range of activities and helps guide people towards less-polluting lifestyles. However, it became clear that this everyday knowledge was not enough to bring about the change needed, with the “carbon curve rising exponentially”.
“Everything about how we do economics, politics and run our lives dates back to an era in which we could just expand, and if we made a mess, we could survive,” he explains. “We’re not in that context any more. We are in the Anthropocene; doubling our energy demand every 30 years or so and creating different ways of messing up the environment. We need to be so much more careful than we’ve ever needed to be.”
Indeed, he says that climate change is just one of many cascading risks we face in an era of polycrisis, with plastic pollution another challenge that is “threatening to get out of hand” as more science emerges on the impact on human health and that of every other species.
“Every year the science is giving a more serious picture of the threat to planetary boundaries, which is being ignored. We can’t keep going round with this script until we are on our deathbeds. A Climate of Truth sounds like a book on climate, but it’s actually about anything you might care about.”
He describes the book as “emphatically not party political”, but singles out the previous UK government for spreading mistruths on the need for new oil and gas licences in the North Sea to bring down energy prices, and for approving a Cumbrian coal mine on the grounds that it would be a ‘net-zero mine’ and was necessary to extract coking coal for steel production.
“The arguments were fundamentally dishonest from the start. They claimed ‘perfect substitution’ – in other words, that the mine would lead to an equal and opposite closing of coal mines globally, flying in the face of every economist in the world.”
The current government has also been accused of rolling back environmental regulations in an effort to boost growth, particularly those that are perceived to be ‘unnecessary blockers’ to housebuilding.
Berners-Lee says that both parties are now “playing really fast and loose with the truth”, and must be taken to task.
“If we can’t get on top of this routine dishonesty, we can’t get anywhere on climate or anything else you might care about.” He wants to see leaders held to a higher standard, and calls for an “evolution of how political systems function”.
“We need a cultural shift. It’s a must-have if we’re going to steer our way through the complex joined-up challenges we’ve got in this fragile world that’s currently careering towards disaster.”
Although the public can remove politicians at the ballot box, the media often does a poor job of highlighting dishonesty when it arises. Berners-Lee explains how much is owned by “nefarious billionaires” with a track record of doing things that are “absolutely poisonous”, and that the public needs to be very discerning about that.
Returning to the business world, he adds: “If a company is trying to corrupt the debate through lobbying politicians to do things that fly in the face of the science, then don’t support them – spend your money elsewhere.”
This is no mean feat, with carbon-intensive products and services pushed on us by companies constantly. “The Advertising Standards Authority was set up by the advertising industry itself, which is in the business of persuading us to buy things regardless of whether they’re actually in our best interests,” Berners-Lee explains.
A new standard for high-carbon advertising could help limit the ubiquitous marketing. “It will give local authorities and outfits like Transport for London a clear basis for ending some of the adverts they’re currently putting on bus stops and just inflicting on the public at every turn.
“We’re being pushed into this consumerist, terrible lifestyle that doesn’t make us happy and trashes the planet – clearly madness. It takes a lot of psychological persuasion to keep us in this position, and that comes from all these adverts.”
We are now little over a month away from COP30 in Belém, Brazil, with last year’s climate conference in Azerbaijan widely considered a failure and described as “one of the most poorly led and chaotic COP meetings ever”.
The summit was shrouded in controversy from the very beginning after footage emerged showing the host nation’s deputy energy minister, Elnur Soltanov, using his role to broker fossil fuel deals, while Saudi Arabia was accused of blocking progress throughout.
“The best thing that came out of COP29 was a much more widespread realisation that this process is broken, and that it’s been corrupted by vested interests in a very cynical way,” Berners-Lee says.
“At least two things are going badly wrong. One is the need for consensus, because you only need to have one country like Saudi Arabia – which should have been rejected from the last COP right away – to ensure they fail, so that’s got to change.
“The other is the massive influence of lobbying from companies with vested interests. They are very skilled, sophisticated and effective, using the playbook from the tobacco industry, and we need to get that out of the system.”
Speaking of vested interests, former UK prime minister Sir Tony Blair created a stir earlier this year when he argued that limiting energy consumption and fossil fuel production is “doomed to fail”.
However, Berners-Lee says: “He’s getting a lot of money from sources that we absolutely shouldn’t be trusting, such as Saudi Arabia and a US Department of State that’s got a ‘drill, baby, drill’ narrative going on. That should straight away make us realise he is a source of information that we shouldn’t be taking particularly seriously.”
Addressing the elephant in the room, he describes the Trump phenomenon as a symptom of the economic pain many Americans are feeling today. “If you can persuade someone that you can make America great again by drilling, and your life is rubbish, it can be nice to indulge in a bit of fantasy. I like seeing fiction films occasionally, but this is not going to be an American dream for the masses – no way.
“What we have to establish now is whether the truth matters or not. This is not just about climate. If you care about inequality between and within countries, for example, we can’t have these bogus narratives around levelling-up being pushed by politicians who know they are engineering a widening of the gap between the rich and poor.
“This is especially important when the arguments can be plausibly swung either way in the space of a radio interview. It’s so easy to do bullshit on the radio, and so hard for serious scientists to explain why it isn’t true. So we’ve got to have a culture in which we’re absolutely insistent on the principle of not being misled.”
Like his brother, Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web, he has a keen interest in computer science, and is concerned about the environmental impact of artificial intelligence (AI) as it permeates our lives.
Google estimates that AI could help mitigate 5%-10% of global greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 through efficiency advancements. However, Berners-Lee is sceptical. “It’s not an enabler of climate targets, unfortunately,” he continues. “Our relationship with technology has taken us to a very dangerous place.
“The capitalist economy as it currently works – and I’m not anti-capitalist per se – doesn’t give us agency over the trajectory of any technology and the impact on carbon emissions. The default of an unconstrained system is to increase environmental impacts, because the activity goes up by a larger proportion than the efficiency improvement.
“We’re millions of times more efficient than we were in the 60s, but we do billions of times more of it, with the result being that the carbon footprint of ICT is now one of the highest rising parts of the global economy.”
However, he stresses that there is a world in which AI could be an enabler of climate targets, if we apply a constraint. “All roads lead back to the carbon price. There’s no internal regulation of this industry that will ever end up being as effective, because there are so many ways around it. It’s not enough to say that a technology can be used for good things. You also have to be able to say it won’t be used for bad things. And unfortunately, in the case of AI, that is the glaring gap.”
Returning to carbon accounting, ISEP and the Carbon Accounting Alliance plan to launch a Carbon Accounting and Auditors Register and recently published a competency framework setting out the skills needed to qualify.
Berners-Lee says that the register can’t come soon enough, explaining how “we’ve been stuck in a fragmented madness of supply chain carbon accounting”.
“If you don’t have competent auditors, then all carbon footprinting is just a fundamentally random question of what you have decided to include and exclude,” he continues. “There’s a step change for the industry that’s waiting to happen, and we can bring it about now.”
However, he stresses that all businesses must be playing by the rules. “If they don’t, there’s a lot of leakage and you can create a competitive advantage for those that are not playing the game if you’re not careful. You’ve got to be cutting your carbon, and if not, you get isolated from the economy.”
This goes back to the fundamental question of honesty and avoiding the tendency to greenwash. “The trouble with any consultancy is that the easiest way of making a living is to tell your client what they want to hear.
“I’ve had consultants say to me that they’ve been working with a business on carbon accounting, and admit they know it’s rubbish, but they’ve got a mortgage to pay and just go along with it. It is really incumbent on our industry to honour the science as best we can, and tell the story like it is, even when that’s inconvenient for our client, and that principle applies for wider society too.”
Order A Climate of Truth at www.climateoftruth.co.uk
Image credit: Adam Tatton-Reid and Hay Festival
