People
True blue green
John Gummer
“The young are very concerned about the future we’re creating for them,” John Gummer says of the world’s slide towards a three-degree temperature rise. “Just think about what 1.1°C means already: at this moment, there’s 11.5m acres on fire in Canada; there were just floods in Emilia-Romagna of a kind never seen before in Italy.” Not far away, “the Spanish can’t produce much soft fruit or salad because there’s no water; at the same time, vast areas of Pakistan are submerged, with millions of lives disrupted…”
It’s an alarming assessment from the Thatcher-era minister once best known for a show of intergenerational nonchalance: feeding his daughter a beefburger—on camera—early in the BSE crisis. The spritely 83-year-old, now Lord Deben, has spent 11 years chairing the Climate Change Committee (CCC) that holds the UK to account. He blends relaxed affability and urgent moral conviction. “You shouldn’t be drinking bottled water,” he tells me with only half an avuncular chuckle, as we Zoom— “particularly at home.”