Climate & Environment

John Gibbons: The meek will inherit a ruined, dangerous, inhospitable earth

When today’s children look back at our lack of effort to stave off the looming climate disaster, they’ll wonder at how docilely we accepted our fate, and theirs

Dr Charlie Gardner (third from right) and other scientists protesting outside Britain’s Department of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy in London: ‘We have departments making decisions that lead us to calamity’

In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher, the British prime minister, famously denounced Nelson Mandela’s African National Congress as a “typical terrorist organisation”. And even after meeting Mandela, she never retracted those remarks.

It wasn’t until 2006 that David Cameron, another Conservative prime minister, formally acknowledged that Thatcher had got it wrong about Mandela, describing him as “one of the greatest men alive”. Some three decades on from Thatcher’s comments, history has been rather kinder to Mandela ...