A politician's lies should be seen as abuse. Here's how we can create a climate of truth

I’ve been working on climate change for about 20 years now. During that time, the rate at which we have been pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere has been rising steadily despite the best efforts
of many millions of climate-aware people.

We have to face the fact that we are not getting anywhere at all; in fact, we are accelerating into not just a climate crisis, but a polycrisis, which includes severe depletion of nature and soil fertility, rising inequality and social unrest, alarming increases in pollution – particularly plastics, with damaging effects on human health and many other aspects.

I don’t write these words to be depressing. I write them because only by fully facing the problem and our failure so far do we stand a chance of doing better.

I think there are many environmental campaigners and climate scientists who imagine themselves spending their whole lives calling for action, screaming ever-louder in fact, for the world to wake up, only to arrive at their death beds deeply frustrated, with possibly the one empty consolation of being able to say “I told you so”. I don’t want that to be how things turn out. So what do we do? 

In my new book, A Climate of Truth, I home in on the role of honesty in our politics, media and business as a key point of leverage for us as citizens, readers and consumers. The book focuses on honesty because it is something we can all demand: those who deliberately mislead us need to know they risk losing our vote, our attention and our money.

There have to be consequences. We have had an age in which dishonesty has become normalised, because we have allowed it to be. The brilliant news is that we don’t need to put up with it. We can insist on better. 

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A quick analogy: In the UK today, if a celebrity is found to have groped a colleague, they now know that it is the end of their career. That is because we have collectively established that we find that abusive behaviour too revolting to put up with. But if you are a politician and you are found to have deliberately misled the public, it is currently treated as business-as-normal. We can change that. 

We can move towards a culture in which, if a politician is exposed as having deliberately tried to make us believe something they knew wasn’t true, it is treated as abuse and therefore marks the end of their career. If someone is dishonest with us on any issue at all, from Brexit to climate to healthcare, it tells us that we can’t trust them on anything ever again.

Not only that, it tells us that any colleagues who are found to have stood by them, in the knowledge that they have been deceitful, are also unfit for public office. We may not succeed in creating a utopia of truth overnight, but the further we can move the dial, the better able we will be to deal with the next decade and beyond.

In the same vein, we can reward politicians who are truthful with us, no matter how difficult that truth may be to swallow. We must allow them to make mistakes and change their minds in light of new evidence. If we expect politicians to treat us with respect, we must respect them in return. And if they then abuse our trust, they need to go.

Likewise with businesses. If a company is found to have misled its customers, for example on its green credentials or the ethics of its supply chain, we can stop buying its services or products. We can vote with our wallets for the kind of future we want to see from the business world. We can boycott dishonest companies and support those who are transparent and genuine with us.

Deceit, in all its forms, is a spanner that we can no longer afford to have in the works of our problem-solving. Honesty is something we can all push for and it is essential to any effective action on the polycrisis. Only when we learn to treat dishonesty from our politicians, our media and our business leaders as abuse, can we enable, for the first time, the very high quality of decision-making we require to get us through the coming decades.

A Climate of Truth therefore, is a very practical guide for those seeking meaningful agency to create a better world, even when all attempts so far have proved fruitless.

A Climate of Truth by Mike Berners-Lee is out now (Cambridge University Press, £14.99). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.

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