IN June 2019, to frustrate the quorum necessary for a new cap-and-trade climate Bill, GOP Oregonian senators fled state lines and vanished, disappearing into the vast American countryside where they went into hiding.

The game was to run out the clock until the Bill expired, some even claimed to have their passports ready if need be.  In an effort to retrieve the lawmakers, state troopers were dispatched — a development to which one of the absentees, Republican senator Brian Boquist, responded that opponents should “send bachelors and come heavily armed… I’m not going to be a political prisoner in the state of Oregon.”  

Going back further, to 2014, the US Senate floor watched as senator James Inhofe attempted to disprove the validity of “global warming” by producing a snowball from a plastic bag and proudly flaunting it to his legislative colleagues. 

Here in Britain, the political right — via less surreal but equally determined means — have also done their bit to frustrate the consensus for necessary climate policy.  Sir David King, the government’s leading climate expert, was repeatedly blocked from talking to the media by prime ministers Cameron and May and described how Boris Johnson oversaw “severely damaging” cuts in Britain’s fight against the climate crisis.

King told the Guardian that Mr Johnson’s term as foreign secretary coincided with a 60 per cent cut in his team of climate attaches across the world. “The cuts were devastating,” said King, “because it was just at the point that we had to deliver the Paris agreement.”