“We need to completely reset the idea that it’s OK to be dishonest in public life,” Mike Berners-Lee told me on a bright spring afternoon at the New Statesman’s offices in London’s Hatton Garden. The 61-year-old environmentalist radiated with the same quiet rage I recognised from his latest book, A Climate of Truth. In it, he argues that misinformation and dishonesty have become normalised in British politics, which has had a calamitous effect on any discussion of the climate crisis. “We have a political culture in which you can get away with saying things that don’t honour the truth,” he said, “and it becomes harder to defend arguments that don’t stack up.”
One crucial example of this, outlined in the book, is the moment in September 2023 when the then prime minister, Rishi Sunak, announced the government’s intention to grant new oil and gas licences. In doing so, he advanced the persistent but flawed idea that by increasing domestic production, the UK could become self-sufficient using oil and gas extracted from the North Sea, ending our reliance on imports and lowering UK consumers’ energy bills. What this argument fails to take into account is that British fossil fuel prices are set by international energy markets and have little, if anything, to do with North Sea output. In other words, the prime minister’s reasoning was at best a distortion of the truth and at worst, a lie.
Fed up with Sunak and other politicians’ “abusive dishonesty”, Berners-Lee, who is a professor in practice at Lancaster University, set out to compile a handbook for readers feeling similarly furious. In A Climate of Truth, he criticises those who, he believes, have helped to sow confusion over the severity of the climate crisis. Berners-Lee spent much of his career as an academic, specialising in carbon pricing, the system that aims to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by assigning a cost to carbon dioxide. In recent years, however, Berners-Lee’s role has evolved beyond academia: he’s published four books in five years, drawing on his expertise to warn of the consequences of humankind’s “failure to find an anthropocene-fit way of living”.
His 2019 book There Is No Planet B already feels as though it was published in a different era of climate action: one in which Greta Thunberg led hordes of children in her Skolstrejk for Klimatet and Theresa May signed the UK’s “Net Zero by 2050” target into law. It is an entertaining to-do list of preventative measures to stave off the most pernicious effects of climate change. In contrast, A Climate of Truth is angrier and more direct. It was published just nine days after the Conservative leader, Kemi Badenoch, denounced Net Zero 2050 as “impossible”, telling a press conference on 18 March that the target could not be achieved “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”.
Sunak and his energy secretary, Grant Shapps, both come in for criticism in the book, but it is Boris Johnson for whom Berners-Lee saves the most vitriol, describing him as a “serial propagator of bullshit”. Two of the most egregious examples of this – the partygate scandal and the £350m for the NHS Brexit promise – are both neatly catalogued in an appendix at the back of the book. It is Johnson’s election as prime minister in December 2019 that Berners-Lee holds up as the point at which deceit was “normalised”. Berners-Lee told me that since then the public has been “in an abusive relationship with our politicians”.
Mike Berners-Lee was born in London in 1964 to Mary Lee Woods and Conway Berners-Lee, two computer scientists. The pair met working on the Manchester Mark One computer, one of the earliest stored-programme computers, in the late 1940s. Mike is the youngest of four; his eldest brother, Tim Berners-Lee, created the World Wide Web in 1989. “I look back now and particularly think what my mum would make of the trajectory computing has taken,” he said. “I think she’d be horrified by the unintended consequences.”
Those unintended consequences include not only the rapid, often unregulated development of artificial intelligence, but also the political and cultural power of tech barons. Berners-Lee points to Elon Musk, the billionaire owner of X, who last year reposted content from the far-right agitator Tommy Robinson during the riots in Southport. Musk also accused Keir Starmer of two-tier policing following the Prime Minister’s crackdown on the rioters. “I think he’s nuts,” Berners-Lee told me. “Being a billionaire has a tendency to make people go nuts.” In A Climate of Truth, Berners-Lee accuses tech barons and other “malign influences” of “creating targeted fake content to corrupt democracies”.
Berners-Lee writes that to break out of this fake-news doom cycle, users must take their data elsewhere (he has abandoned X for its more progressive, if duller, successor, BlueSky). But his tirade against fake news does not end with the digital world. He also rebukes the mainstream media, noting a recent Daily Mail headline in which the paper described the latest report by the UN-mandated International Panel on Climate Change as “climate hysteria”. This type of coverage, he claims, feeds into the normalisation of dishonesty in public life. the Times, the Telegraph and even the BBC have all, in Berners-Lee’s view, allowed this atmosphere of dishonesty to grow. His bolshy vision for overcoming these cycles of “bullshit” is to make it “socially unacceptable” to get news – any news – from these kinds of sources by ostracising people who read them.
His orders are clear, but the challenge is obvious. More than two million people read the Mail every day. Convincing readers to abandon the paper will take more than pointing out instances of dubious coverage, especially those who likely now believe that the very lines they have been reading are true. While he does not encourage boycotting the BBC (it is “not yet completely useless”) Berners-Lee warns viewers should engage with the public broadcaster with a “large pinch of salt”. Channel 4, in his view, is better.
Though Berners-Lee wears his political biases openly (his dislike of the Conservative Party is obvious), his criticism is not limited to the right. We discussed the government’s decision to allow a third runway at Heathrow, spearheaded by Rachel Reeves in her plan for growth. “Reeves has been saying some things that are either not well informed or are really badly informed,” he said. “In which case, you have to question the competence of her and her advisers.”
He pointed to the pushing of Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) as a way of making air travel more environmentally friendly. “You don’t have to spend very long with somebody who properly understands Sustainable Aviation Fuel to understand it’s not sustainable at all,” he said. One method of creating SAF, he explained, is by using waste cooking oil and “there’s nowhere near enough of that to make even the faintest dent in our aviation fuel needs”. Berners-Lee said this is simply another example of greenwashing to secure political gain, fulfilling the government’s coveted growth mission at great cost to the environment.
Where does Berners-Lee see his place in all of this? Dismantling the climate scepticism that has taken hold in the political-media class will take a lot of time and effort. He doesn’t want to be “stuck going around year after year just trying to shout more loudly about how much trouble we’re in,” he told me. Understanding where it stems from is vital and “that’s what the book is about”. The lack of progress on climate change “doesn’t have poor judgement at its root,” he told me. “It has flat-out deceit.”
[See also: Inside No 10’s new dysfunction]
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This article appears in the 04 Jun 2025 issue of the New Statesman, The Housing Trap