Andy Burnham’s cost-of-living COP

LONDON — Andy Burnham jets off to the latest global COP climate summit early next week. The last time he went to this annual meeting of the world’s climate diplomats, he didn’t like what he saw. “I’m just back from two days at COP26 and officially worried about the state of the climate debate,” Burnham, then the mayor of Greater Manchester, wrote in 2021, after a trip to that year’s U.N.

conference in Glasgow. This year’s edition, COP31, kicks off in Antalya, Turkey next week, with a focus on protecting countries hit hardest by the impacts of global warming and setting goals for electrifying world economies. Burnham will be there — now as British prime minister.

And that little-noticed article, published five years ago in the Evening Standard newspaper , says plenty about his political instincts on climate change. 2021 was the high point of the U.K. consensus on net zero.