By Robert Bradley Jr.
“The doomsters’ favorite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else. Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism.” – Margaret Thatcher (2002)
Margaret Thatcher changed her mind on climate alarmism–against. Current UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, responding to “populist sentiment,” is backtracking on his country’s aggressive climate policies, a long overdue, pragmatic mid-course correction.
One could tie the two events together to explain why public policies making energy more expensive and less reliable are anathema for a country that produces only one percent of global emissions. But in an article for Yale Environment 360, “Why Is Britain Retreating from Global Leadership on Climate Action?,” journalist Fred Pearce does the exact opposite.
Boo! Do read Pearce’s The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming (2010), a level-headed analysis of Climategate (review here). One longs for the old Fred Pearce, who has a scholarly side that seems to have eroded in the service of his sponsors.
Pearce’s Reconstruction
Here is what Pearce stated last week about Thatcher:
In 1988, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became the first world leader to take a stand on fighting climate change. Last month, exactly a quarter-century later, her successor Rishi Sunak tore up a cross-party consensus on the issue that had survived the intervening eight general elections and replaced it with a populist assault on what had been his own government’s environmental policies.
Thatcher, who trained as a chemist before entering politics, took her stand at a packed meeting of the country’s most prestigious science body, the Royal Society, on September 27, 1988. She told the assembly that “we are creating a global heat trap which could lead to climate instability” and promised action to curb global warming and achieve “stable prosperity”.
Pearce continues:
That speech marked the start of 25 years during which Britain led the world in cutting its carbon dioxide emissions, which are today 47 percent below 1990 levels.
But Thatcher’s advocacy on climate change was genuine and had far-reaching consequences. In 1990, she established the Hadley Centre for Climate Research, an early hothouse for climate-change modeling, whose work subsequently underpinned the newly established UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC has twice been chaired by British scientists, most recently with the appointment of Jim Skea of Imperial College London in July.
The Rest of the Story
Margaret Thatcher set the story straight in her 2002 memoir, Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World (New York: HarperCollins). Thatcher, in fact, declared war against “the doomsters’ favorite subject … climate change.”
Here is her full reconsideration (pp. 449–50):
The doomsters’ favorite subject today is climate change. This has a number of attractions for them. First, the science is extremely obscure so they cannot easily be proved wrong. Second, we all have ideas about the weather: traditionally, the English on first acquaintance talk of little else.
Third, since clearly no plan to alter climate could be considered on anything but a global scale, it provides a marvelous excuse for worldwide, supra-national socialism. All this suggests a degree of calculation. Yet perhaps that is to miss half the point. Rather, as it was said of Hamlet that there was method in his madness, so one feels that in the case of some of the gloomier alarmists there is a large amount of madness in their method.
Indeed, the lack of any sense of proportion is what characterizes many pronouncements on the matter by otherwise sensible people. Thus President Clinton on a visit to China, which poses a serious strategic challenge to the US, confided to his host, President Jiang Zemin, that his greatest concern was the prospect that “your people may get rich like our people, and instead of riding bicycles, they will drive automobiles, and the increase in greenhouse gases will make the planet more dangerous for all.”
It would, though, be difficult to beat for apocalyptic hyperbole former Vice President Gore. Mr Gore believes: ‘The cleavage in the modern world between mind and body, man and nature, has created a new kind of addiction: I believe that our civilisation is, in effect, addicted to the consumption of the earth itself.’
And he warns: “Unless we find a way to dramatically change our civilisation and our way of thinking about the relationship between humankind and the earth, our children will inherit a wasteland.”
But why pick on the Americans? Britain’s then Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, has observed: “There is no greater national duty than the defense of our shoreline. But the most immediate threat to it today is the encroaching sea.” Britain has found, it seems, a worthy successor to King Canute.
The fact that seasoned politicians can say such ridiculous things – and get away with it – illustrates the degree to which the new dogma about climate change has swept through the left-of-centre governing classes….
What changed for Thatcher in less than a decade? First, she found climate science less alarming than before. Secondly, an “ugly … anti-growth, anti-capitalistic, anti-American” political agenda had emerged around the issue. Harking back to her free-market roots, Thatcher forwarded her own version of the precautionary principle (p. 453): “Government interventions are problematic, so intervene only when the case is fully proven.”
Fred Pearce and Yale Environment 360–please present the full story.
The notion of anthropogenic climate change and its attendant guilt-trip is highly seductive. Indeed, I’ll bet the majority of sceptics – me included – when only presented in the media with one side of the argument actually started believing in it.
You believe in it until you take the – not inconsiderable – time necessary to study the subject. After that, not so much.
In the case of someone like Margaret Thatcher, even in retirement, time is not a commodity in great excess, so the delay was wholly understandable.
Most humans have a tendency to believe what other people tell them. Only growing experience and knowledge can lead one to a healthy skepticism. Since most Climageddon true believers are divorced from rational thought and reality, it is difficult for them to be skeptical of anyone except those they see as heretics.
This is why it is sooooo important to forever be nudging them with material from the real world. Those little nudges can eventually make a big difference; especially if they are standing on the edge of a cliff with the rest of the lemmings!
But they’re on the cliff pushing the lemmings off- while we’re also on the cliff trying to explain to them that jumping isn’t in their interest.
Pushing the lemmings off the cliff is a leadership – progressive style.
I agree that it is good to be continually nudging them with the real world.
However, real converts from the Green side seem to arise, among scientists and Joe Public alike, only when they ask themselves a question and go looking for the answer themselves.
That is what convinces them “Hang on. This looks like BS.”
Per a Ted Talk by I-don’t-remember, people now trust Google search results more than a good friend.
People in general are reluctant to back down from positions that they have openly and publicly supported in the past.
“… when only presented in the media with one side of the argument actually started believing in it.”
Especially if you live in place like Wokeachusetts where you’ll NEVER see any AGW skepticism in the local media. And as far a I know, there isn’t a single politician in the entire state who dares to express any such skepticism- NOT ONE. It is verboten.
Contamination By Invisible Agents
The new machines–type foundry and printing press–ministered to this devouring curiosity by a flood of broadsheets, news letters, almanacs, libellea, pasquils, pamphlets, and books. They spread the news at a hitherto unknown speed, increased the range of human communication, broke down isolation. The broadsheets and brochures were not necessarily read by all the people on whom they exercised their influence; rather each printed word of information acted like a pebble dropped into a pond, spreading its ripples of rumour and hearsay. The printing press was only the ultimate source of the dissemination of knowledge and culture; the process itself was complex and indirect, a process of dilution and diffusion and distortion, which affected ever increasing numbers, including the backward and illiterate. Even three or four centuries later, the teachings of Marx and Darwin, the discoveries of Einstein and Freud, did not reach the vast majority of people in their original, printed text, but through second- and third- hand sources, through hearsay and echo. The revolutions of thought which shape the basic outlook of an age are not disseminated through textbooks–they spread like epidemics, through contamination by invisible agents and innocent germ carriers, by the most varied form of contact, or simply by breathing the common air.
Arthur Koestler, The Sleepwalkers, ARKANA, Penguin Books, London, 1989, pg. 150
Copyright, Arthur Koestler, 1959
The quote reads forward thinking for 1959 and backward thinking for 2023. As important as the printing press was, it has been crushed by the Internet.
The first bit of evidence that comes to my mind is junk mail. There used to be enough paper advertisement “UBBM” in a mailbox that a New Hampshire man got on a news show for heating his home over the winter by burning junk mail. Today he’d have to burn Amazon.com cardboard boxes.
…paragraph 4. We haven’t been using AI again, have we?
AI was certainly used to create the cover picture for the article. You can tell because Maggy seems to have only three fingers on her left hand, and her right sleeve looks like it was morphed from a man’s jacket.
Her left pinky is just hidden below, but that right hand sleeve is really weird.
I get your point, but probably careless use of cut and paste. I’ve done it myself.
I was joking. IMO, as an occasional no-talent writer and sometime copy editor, I can assure you that copy editors are the original artificial intelligence, and the collections of software known as spell check are a close second.
The writer was obviously trying to use the mild conversational formalism of beginning an imperative statement with the gentle phrase “But, do.” Either scan-to-text or style/spell check automatically changed it to something even more ridiculous. It appears here exactly as published in MasterResource, so WUWT is correct in leaving it intact.
AI was certainly used to create the cover picture for the article. You can tell because Maggy seems to have only three fingers on her left hand, and her right sleeve looks like it was morphed from a man’s jacket. Also, behind the PM, the frowning head of Johnny England seems to float mysteriously in the corner of the gallery.
Bottom right corner looks more like Peter Sellers than Rowan Atkinson.
But the frown is pure Mr. Bean.
😐
Good spotting. Definitely the “stock” picture is a morph of two or more Thatcher picture. The right sleeve and the rest of the jacket may be both from her wardrobe, as her image has been rendered in those colors and cuts, but not simultaneously. The hands are weird, and the face looks like it may come from a separate picture than either hand. Profile angle seems a little off.
Thatcher brought Ian McGregor to the National Coal Board to close down the coalfields, which culminated in the miners strike and the infamous Battle of Orgreave. Then we had the dash for [North sea] gas.
Even so, she didn’t close as many mines as the previous Labour administrations had, but you could argue she was way ahead of the climatist curve. They carefully avoid doing that and maintain that closing the mines remains one of her most hated anti-social, anti-working class actions.
“Her new denial of the science rested on a pamphlet from the Reason Foundation published in December 1997 and titled A Plain English Guide to Climate Science.
The guide claimed that: “It is widely acknowledged that the potential temperature changes predicted by global warming theory do not pose a direct threat to human life. Human beings, and a myriad of other organisms, exist quite comfortably in areas with temperature ranges more extreme than those predicted by global warming models.”
https://theecologist.org/2018/oct/17/who-drove-thatchers-climate-change-u-turn
The media has collective amnesia on her u-turn. You don’t find many politicians now with the guts to completely change their mind on an issue. In today’s world that’s heresy of the highest order.
As for the models, they remain very, very expensive [and power hungry] white elephants.
The Dash for Gas was a bad thing forced on the country by the miners and rail unions. By using gas instead of coal, the country could not be held to ransom by left-wing unions and it worked. such a waste of gas when coal is the better fuel but when have leftists ever done anything of benefit to a country. It is likely our mining industry would still have shrunk as we deep mine and other countries like Venezuela, Russia and Australia opencast which is obviously cheaper.
I disagree
I remember the coal bunkers and the drays delivering.
You think that’s better than gas [central heating]?
I have no great affection for Thatcher, made life very difficult for me as UK industry headed east. Between them Thatcher and the Unions did a great deal of damage to the UK industry.
But thing about an open fire, or solid fuel stove, is that you don’t have to burn coal in order to stay warm. In the winter of 1962-63 we ran out of coal, and gradually ran out of pre-sawn logs. By the beginning of February we were sawing and burning on the same day the next year’s supply of wood. We did the sawing in the house as outside was too cold. I don’t know of any form of domestic heating as versatile as that.
Is central heating a thing of the past?
“”Is central heating a thing of the past?””
They’re working on it
0.042 pounds per cubic foot, mass of CH4.
Fezzes says:” …coal is the better fuel …”. Please explain how coal is better than gas.
It’s easier to store coal.
Please normalize units by mass or volume – either way works.
Coal is NOT a “better” fuel than natural gas.
On a mass basis, the heat of combustion of methane is about 21,500 Btu/lb, while that of coal varies from about 6,000 to 10,000 Btu/lb, depending on its quality (anthracite is better than lignite).
Combustion of natural gas generates about 2.75 lb CO2 per lb methane burned, while coal generates about 3.67 lb CO2 per lb burned.
Natural gas also burns much cleaner than coal, with very little emissions of sulfur oxides or particulates (ash), which need to be removed from flue gas from coal using scrubbers and baghouses.
The disadvantage of natural gas is that it is much less dense than coal, and needs to be compressed and transported to the end user in pipelines, instead of on freight trains or trucks.
This does not mean that coal should never be used as a fuel, since some nations have abundant resources in coal but very little natural gas, and should use whatever fuel is available. However, in nations that have abundant resources of both fuels, natural gas is clearly both more energy-rich and less polluting.
Ah thanks “SteveZ56” for consistent use of units for apples-to-apples comparison.
And don’t forget natural gas can be burned in CCGTs and get over 60% efficiency into electricity. Super critical coal can get over 50 but it’s not as mature tech and srubbers still have to be run to get rid of the sulphur. And it can’t adjust its output efficiently – CCGTs can still get over 50% running at half power.
The only way coal is “better” is if that is all you have. But even coal pioneer UK has vast untapped gas reserves.
JRR Tolkien wrote bad things about coal and the trains that hauled them. I was never there to see it.
Post like “strativarius” above make me wish there were a +1 pool that one could divide as one chose. I’d put all my +1’s for today there because the evident combination of knowledge and insight is what makes the comment section worth wading through.
Sort of. Socialism, in theory, should benefit everyone, though of course we know it never did and never can. It seems to me that that’s not the goal. The goal is to benefit certain classes: the bureaucracies, academics and “renewable” energy firms- oh, and of course the pliant media. And, also, the cowardly, ignorant politicians- which means most of them. This “green blob” cares not at all for the poor nations of the planet.
Socialism and Communism are a means of managing shortages. Academia is catching up?
“We present a new theory of pervasive shortages under socialism, based on the assumption that the planners are self-interested. Because the planners-meaning bureaucrats in the ministries and managers of firms-cannot keep the official profits that firms earn, it is in their interest to create shortages of output and to collect bribes from consumers. “
https://www.jstor.org/stable/2555986
“In theory” socialism, as invisioned by Marx, who refused to get a real job and let his family languish in poverty, while borrowing off rich idiot friends, was designed as a con to take over kingdoms and put them under new management, all the while entertaining the gullible masses with notions of revolution.
Nothing really changed, except the whip was now in the hands of people who didn’t care about God or morality, or mercy.
There is a more cynical interpretation of Thatcher’s embrace of ‘Greenery’. She saw a gap in the market and tried to grab it before the Labour Party.
The Green party was gaining a few percent of the vote but was too small to have any impact within the UK electoral system. She wanted those votes.
I recall a BBC interviewer asking the Green Party “She’s stolen your clothes?”
Unfortunately what she really did was invite the camel into the tent. Both major parties are now too frightened to openly offend the greens lest they lose several percent in the polls. It does not yet occur to them that they might actually GAIN votes by doing so.
“ It does not yet occur to them that they might actually GAIN votes by doing so.”
Maybe it does occur to them – media just can’t allow you to hear it.
Especially the wealthy like Gore himself! Most people I know are barely getting by.
I used to read that site but it’s 100% wrong. I finally concluded that after reading many forestry related articles – all of which were wrong- based on my half century actually working in forests.
The truly worst thing that Maggie did was to stop the ‘free school milk‘
This was where every child in Primary Education (age 5 tho 11) and at every morning break while at school, every child got a ⅓ Pint bottle of ‘Silver Top’ (full fat whole) Milk.
Automatic. No means test. No questions asked. Just given it.
Many kids, self included, had been given, by their mother’s as she left them at the school gate, a little ‘something’ to go with the drink, usually a chocolate biscuit.
Just one. Just small.
But this had to stop (prior to when Maggie became PM) – it was ‘costing too much‘ apparently.
So the kids were left with just the sugar to eat at their morning break, instead of the saturated fat.
Result being, ½ hour later the kids had rumbly tummies, they were falling asleep at their desks, they were getting grumpy and ‘hangry‘ and the very last thing they were doing was Learning
That milk, the fat within it, actually kept the kids alive and awake the whole rest of the day.
Especially it meant that when lunchtime came, they weren’t actually especially hungry – that is how fat works within the human body.
Which WAS just as well, because school dinners were just the cheapest carbohydrate mush there ever could be. Even worse now, they’re full of haha ‘nutritious’ fibre.
Fibre is Anti-Nutritious’ – if there was any goodness in what you eat, Fibre strips it out of you.
Just Like The Cows Making Methane – that’s why they do it, they’re force-fed Fibre
When the Free School Milk went, (especially important for girls of that age) we created a nation of thick, short, fat and (short legged) stumpy people, destined to spend the rest of their lives as hypertensive & obese diabetics – endlessly on ‘A Diet’
And the short fat stumpiness was not just a physical attribute – their minds, personalities, education and IQs all went down the drain at the same time.
Well Hello, welcome to Climate Science, hysterical MSM and the paranoid panic stricken politics we all now see/endure
https://www.theepochtimes.com/health/cholesterol-does-not-cause-heart-disease-5508966
I think I tend to agree with you on that.
So I guess the parents were negligent at the ballot box and in the morning rush to get to school.
Even with my poor immigrant mom, she made I start the day with some homemade eggnog – 1 whole egg mixed 1 cup of milk (2% instead of homo as it had an extra gram of protein).
While I like the idea in principle – you know that even the poor would be paying more in extra taxes to cover that tiny 1/3 pint of packaged and delivered milk than if they just bought it themselves.
Story tip
Wind farm developers off the U.K. coast say that electricity prices will have to rise by 70% in order to keep building.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2023/09/17/wind-industry-on-hold-after-auction-flop-spooks-developers/?WT.mc_id=e_DM223977&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_Cit_New_v2&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_Cit_New_v220231026&utm_campaign=DM223977
Missing word is ‘another’… rise by another 70%.
No.
Go bust, see if anybody notices (or cares) apart from your shareholders.
70% MINIMUM – the same self serving wind farm industry that agreed low CfD contracts and then never instigated them, preferring instead to sell on spot markets for 10x more income, that’s neither honesty, nor integrity
If silly wind & solar power were replaced by coal, gas & nuclear, costs, hence bills would lower, considerably
Thatcher’s initial stance on global warming has to be seen in the context that Britain’s power stations ran mostly on coal and the miners were resisting the run down in the State-run coal industry because the coal was too expensive.
A battle between the powerful mining union and Government had been underway since the late 1960 and in 1974 had brought down a Conservative Government after strikes which starved power stations and put the lights out.
By the time Thatcher came to Office, 1979, Britain’s North Sea oil & gas was well developed and a switch from coal to gas (the dash for gas) was a good tactic to break the stranglehold of the mining union.
CO2 emissions from coal was a good justification which gave some political cover for closing down the coal industry, making thousands unemployed and ruining centuries old mining communities.
It was indeed a struggle to suppress an overweening union, NUM, that was controlled and led by an agent of the KGB. NUM had been holding Britain hostage for most of the 20th century, but its militancy truly emerged under Scargill. Politicians have to deal with the problems of the day. Crushing NUM was utterly essential if Britain was to have any kind of future at all.
Just how bad was NUM? I mean- heck, it’s not a fun job. I should think coal miners deserve a higher pay than most blue collar workers. It’s dirty and dangerous. Were they really all that greedy? I have no clue- just asking.
Relatively well paid in pure fiancial terms, but compared to the health affects of working in a deep mine I’m not so sure. Certainly not a job Ior most politicians would have chosen.
The coal miners and the Union bosses were quite different entities altogether. Many of the leaders had worked in the mines for a few years then got out and into the unions. The miners, most were sons of miners, would have worked the mines all their lives but never got the pay commensurate with the dangers – many of the conditions should have been better but these issues were never raised by the unions who were involved in national politics.
Basically a national ballot was never held, many of the mines kept working and it was only Scargill and a local group that kept it going in his region.
The miners were well paid but at the end they were hacking coal out of 15cm thick seams at a cost of more than £100 per ton when the market price was around £30 per ton.
It was also a hellish job and every miner vowed to try and ensure that his son never had to go down the mine to make a living.
Read Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier. It gives you a clue as to what it was like and to the qualities of the miners themselves.
Not correct.
It is true that many UK coal mines were uneconomical. They were closing under the Labour government prior to the Thatcher ideological closures. But that was not ending the industry. When the NUM said it was a fight to save all coal mining they were telling the truth.
History vindicated the NUM.
The issue was that the coal mining strikes brought down the Tories in the 1970s. Asking the electorate “Who runs Britain?” gave the answer that it obviously wasn’t the people who were, cluelessly, asking.
Thatcher chose to destroy the coal industry in revenge. She did it. Round of applause.
Then she found that energy was useful to a modern economy. So we can go nuclear…?
BOOM!
Chernobyl made that choice unappetising.
So she hyped AGW as proof that closing the coal mines was green.
She never claimed that it was an economic benefit. It wasn’t.
The UK is still writhing in economic agony from the pain Thatcher caused.
All the “Levelling Up” or “Great Northern Powerhouse” or “Big Society” lies are the Tory Party trying to apologise for finishing the job in the 1980s that the Luftwaffe attempted to do in the 1940s.
Road to Wigan Pier is a great work, but it’s not relevant to mining conditions of the late 20th Century.
Joseph, your question is a reasonable one. But Scargill was not about working conditions. He was there to disrupt the supply of coal into Britain’s electricity system and he spent a career doing this. He was an executive member of the Young Communist League in 1955. He was stridently opposed to nuclear power.
The Pearces of this world are the typical 70 something activists, who, having had a good, wholesome life, stuffed with electrified benefits, now seems quite happy to foist a cold, hungry and poor existence on future generations
Many of the idiotic nut zero 2050 won’t be realised until these yesteryear activists have long departed the world – they won’t have to suffer the results of silly alarmist policies that will regress modern, developed civilisation to the bare existence standards of many developing nations
Its very easy to demand mass societal regressions, when they won’t affect you
As a science writer, he ought to acknowledge the truth that CO2 is not a driver of warming, it is an overwhelmingly good gas, the sustainer of life itself and our modern day atmosphere is deficient of it – at 418ppm, we are well below the 800-1300ppm needed for optimal plant growth, certainly well below the earths historical CO2 levels, by a factor of 20+x – at 200ppm, plants die, so do we
Of course while our PM Sushi has made some changes that might not last long given we are due an election next Autumn, in the detail the fines on carmakers and boilermakers for not making enough battery cars and heat pumps remain. Given that there is no mass market for either product that sounds the deathknell for both industries in the UK.
EVs and heat pumps in the UK are never going to become widespread in the next few years in the numbers the politicians expect and the manufacturers will soon be knocking at the door of No10, whichever Party is in government, and asking if the latter really want to destroy those industries and create large scale unemployment.
Story tip
https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/10/26/iberdrola-reports-17-rise-in-profit-to-e3-64bn/
At a time of historically expensive energy, energy poverty and cold related deaths, making double digit profits as an energy supplier, leaves a bad taste
Renewables are making our electricity consumption more expensive as well as introducing supply/demand concerns and increasing grid instability risks
Nut zero is taking what should be a reliable, secure and affordable national security benefit and making it a luxury the masses cannot afford, with ensuing increases in poverty and cold related ill health
Story tip:
The Cartoons by Josh Calendar 2024 is ready to order.
Story tip
https://www.energylivenews.com/2023/10/26/long-standing-gas-supply-mystery-results-in-11k-bill/
With nut zero and renewables, everyone could be paying highly inflated bills
Fred Pearce:
It is quite a turnaround. Europeans have until recently prided themselves on their green credentials and regarded U.S. administrations as climate pariahs. But now it is Biden’s America that is claiming the high ground, with Britain seemingly set to take the U.S.’s place in the climate doghouse.
Perhaps Mr Pearce would care to explain why China is never ever in the ‘climate doghouse’, not even when it boldly goes where no Sunak has gone before.
China climate envoy says phasing out fossil fuels ‘unrealistic’ | Reuters
Because it’s never been about climate change – it’s a way of crippling the free market (mostly western) countries and imposing an autocratic socialist world government on the rest of us. ‘Climate Change’ and ‘Global Free Trade’ are smokescreens.
It should be remembered that before the Argentine invasion of the Falklands Thatcher was the most unpopular PM ever up to that point. Had that not happened she would have been out of office before her first election as PM.
From 1981
Margaret Thatcher has become Britain’s most unpopular prime minister since World War II, with 70 percent of the voters dissatisfied with her and more than half the country behind the new moderate alliance of Social Democrats and Liberals, a Gallup poll released Friday reported.
Unlike a person of honour, having allowed the invasion to take place, she did not resign. In fact she didn’t give Galtieri an honorary knighthood.
“In 1988, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher became the first world leader to take a stand on fighting climate change. Last month, exactly a quarter-century later,”
1988+25 = 2013
Did centuries get extended by some sort of grid averaging algorithm?
“That speech marked the start of 25 years during which Britain led the world in cutting its carbon dioxide emissions, which are today 47 percent below 1990 levels.”
Waitaminit – the sentence tries to equate British co2 emissions with “the world” co2 emissions.
Does “lead the world” imply first place in the race or gathered support of other factios?
The writing is expertly unclear.
If the quote Thatcher attributes to Clinton were attributed to any member of an opposing party, then I would have heard it until my ears rang. Wow so many words end in “ist”.