We are in our twenty-sixth year of United Nations climate change conferences. It’s over forty years since oil companies discovered and then suppressed knowledge of climate change. Generations of schoolchildren have been taught about our warming world. And yet the crisis continues unabated. The last IPCC Working Group report set out five emissions scenarios — but even in the most optimistic case, global surface temperatures will surge for decades.

From the Joe Biden administration’s climate-finance pledges to China’s commitment not to build new coal-fired power plants, we are at last seeing some commitments from the world’s great powers. Yet there remain three problems. The level of change is inadequate; big polluters remain entrenched and capable of holding back progress; and the people first and worst hit by climate impacts are being left to suffer.

Actions lag behind words. In the United Kingdom, Boris Johnson has gone from past climate skepticism to stealing the language of the “Green Industrial Revolution” pioneered by Rebecca Long-Bailey under my leadership of the Labour Party. Sadly, he has not stolen the substance attached to the words. The government’s climate-change targets are insufficient and risk not being met, and the money they have committed is orders of magnitude less than their spending surge for weapons and war.