Recently the UK Prime Minister Theresa May made it completely clear that Brexit is taking up all of her attention. While it may be more immediate, climate change is clearly of greater threat.
Greta Thunberg is a 16 year old climate activist from Sweden, who started the school strike environmental protests. She has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize, and is currently in the middle of a trip to the UK. Recently she met with leaders of the Westminster parties. The one notable absentee was Theresa May, as it clashed with her cabinet meeting. Now while I’m sure it is important for her to attend cabinet meetings regularly this does say something about her current priorities.
We are an island state: increases in ocean depth of the amounts laid out in the worst of the possible climate change scenarios, which at the moment it looks like we’re heading for, would suggest an increase in ocean depth of several hundred metres. This would remove much of the UK’s land.
As such, unfortunately it says something about the importance of climate change to the Conservatives at the moment. David Cameron famously said he’d had enough of all that green stuff, and unfortunately since then the Conservative Party has been very much against doing anything that would make significant changes to the climate outcome for fear that it might have a minor impact on the economy (never mind that flooding of a substantial portion of the UK potentially turning it into a nation of islands would have a far bigger one).
With Brexit going so poorly it is highly unlikely that the Conservative Party will have attention for anything else in the near future.