In the words of James Baldwin, “Nothing can be changed until it is faced”. Renowned writer, researcher and keynote speaker at our upcoming annual conference, Mike Berners-Lee reflects on how we can face the failure of climate action to date, what we can do about it, and on how CAT has helped serve as inspiration.

CAT was where, as a teenager, I encountered my first straw house; first compost loo and probably my first wind turbine. I went back several times for inspiration over the next few years. So it was wonderful to be back again in November for the first time in over a decade, and to have a chance to talk about my book to an audience that really cares about the issues I’m trying to address.

I wrote A Climate of Truth because I’d been working on climate and sustainability for a couple of decades, and in that time, I had seen the world accelerating in the wrong direction. This was despite all my efforts, and the efforts of so many others – many of them absolute heroes in my eyes.

But between us all, we have to face the fact that humanity is degrading climate and nature by a larger amount every year. I’m not saying this to be depressing but because, in the words of James Baldwin, “Nothing can be changed until it is faced”.

By facing our failure to date, we give ourselves a dramatically higher chance of doing better in the future. In fact, we can turn that failure into the essential learning that paves the way to doing much better.

The National Emergency Briefing on Climate and Nature

Just after my talk at CAT, I chaired the National Emergency Briefing on Climate and Nature at the Central Hall in Westminster. We brought together around 1,000 people, including 15% of all MPs and a similar number of peers. We put them in front of nine briefings from some of the UK’s, or even the world’s, top experts in their fields. They heard about crises in nature, climate, tipping points; the implications for extreme weather, food insecurity, health, and national security – not just globally, but right here in the UK.

Paul Behrens looked at our food and farming system and what actions we can take to be future-fit. The climate that gave us reliable harvests is gone – three of the five worst cereal harvests on record have occurred this decade. A food system transformation is unavoidable – and beneficial. By leading the transition now we can avoid being forced into it later by food shocks, rising prices and instability.

A running theme was how everything is connected to everything else, and part of the power of the event was to join the issues together. The biggest threat to the economy comes not from single elements of the polycrisis or individual events, but from how these are likely to reinforce each other.

We heard from Professor Hugh Montgomery that the main health threat turns out not to be from heat strokes, but arises because in a collapsed economy, there is no health service. The national security threat arises from an increasingly desperate world. Another theme was the central role of misinformation in blocking our progress so far.

Facing the problem

There were some very stark messages, but the overall sense was one of rising excitement in the room. Was that weird? Not really. Here’s why.

Firstly, there was a widespread sense of relief to have the problem looked fully in the eye; by doing so, we transformed it from something too awful to look at into something we could take on. Most people get it, deep down, that our society and our politics is heading in the wrong direction and largely ignoring the problem, so it was refreshing to hear this called out.

Secondly, everyone in the room saw how everyone else also understood what was going on. When I asked for a show of hands to see who thought the problem was as serious as they’d heard, who thought it was worse, and who thought it had been exaggerated, not a single hand went up to say that things had been exaggerated. The same thing happened at CAT. In fact, it is the same picture at every talk I do, to every kind of audience. There is robust evidence to say that all over the world, most people want to see far more action on climate change, but they don’t realise that the people around them feel the same. This leads to everyone waiting for everyone else to make the first move.

The third reason for so much energy in the room was a sense that, despite our failure so far, there is real hope that we can do better.

How can we do better?

To do so, a top priority is to put straight the misinformation that has been blocking almost everything. As Hugh Montgomerry said, drawing on his years running emergency responses in a central London hospital; “I know what an emergency looks like. This is one, but we are not treating it like one.”

So the immediate call to action is for a government-backed national information campaign on the climate and nature emergency. Every MP can sign up to this, and everyone reading this piece can urge their MP to support that campaign. Please do go to www.NEBriefing.org to see how you can help.

A film is also being produced, and workshops and film screenings will be taking place up and down the UK. Please feel very free to help organise one of these events as well.

Inspiring action

This takes me back to the central message of my book. If we want to start getting somewhere on the issues that matter most for humans in 2026; climate, nature, inequality, health, AI, democracy and much, much more, we need to understand the reasons behind the reasons why, for example, 30 climate COPs have failed to stop the rate of emissions from rising as if those conferences had never happened.

Why did we almost open up a new coal mine in Whitehaven, Cumbria when the arguments for it were not just wrong but knowingly bogus? Why are we talking about new oil and gas fields in the North Sea? Why has the global plastics treaty got nowhere?

The common thread is dishonesty in our politics, media and businesses. Examples include industry lobbying and misinformation, a press largely owned by nefarious billionaires who use their platform to talk the public into doing things in support of their own vested interests, and politicians who have routinely got away with saying things (not just lies) which are intended to make the public believe things that they themselves don’t believe to be the case.

We have to lay down some principles of what honesty looks like in public life and insist on them as baseline standards. If a politician misleads us once, it tells us all we ever need to know about their fitness for the role. If a media source is owned by a billionaire with a nefarious track record, that is all you need to know not to trust it.

In the UK, and elsewhere, we have been careless over standards of honesty in public life and the media. As a result, we now face a flat out fight against fascism. The US has lost that fight, with dark repercussions for years ahead. But in the UK, we still stand on the brink with everything to play for. We need to wake up now.

When I first encountered CAT, it was a source of huge inspiration to me as the cutting edge of green technology. CAT has transformed wonderfully, into not just a place of green technology, but into a centre of cutting-edge future thinking. It continues to inspire future generations.

If you are reading this article, it is because you care about this stuff. If you haven’t already, please do roll up your sleeves to face the emergency.

About the author

Mike Berners-Lee is a professor at Lancaster University, the founder of Small World Consulting and the author of books including There is No Planet B and A Climate of Truth. He is also a keynote speaker at CAT’s 2026 Conference.