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. But the then-future prime minister criticized the summit for giving a “pulpit” to billionaire Jeff Bezos (who had earlier that year “burnt more carbon in a trip to space than most people consume in a lifetime”) and took aim at protesters “with the time to glue themselves to roads … reprimanding ordinary people under work and time pressures for using their cars.” Burnham backed climate action, he insisted. But with its technocratic focus on “percentages and far-off dates, with remarkably little reference to the struggles of ordinary families,” there was a danger COP would send the wrong message: “That the drive to net zero will mean cost and inconvenience for ordinary people.” Several years and one big job change later, those views have not changed. Interviews with more than a dozen advisers, government officials, pollsters and MPs around Burnham reveal a PM convinced of the dangers posed to Britain and the world by runaway global warming — yet whose first instinct, sometimes to the frustration of climate advocates, is to prioritize cost of living and energy security worries at home. “I think Andy does get the big picture climate emergency, the urgency with which we need to act,” said Dale Vince, a clean energy entrepreneur and former New Age traveler who has advised Burnham on energy. But “millions of people in our country are asking: ‘How do I pay the bill?’” Many politicians are “out of touch with that,” Vince argued. “Andy doesn’t forget it.” Mr Pragmatic Burnham has been putting that approach into practice since taking power in July. Like his predecessor Keir Starmer, he believes the long-term solution to Britain’s cripplingly high energy costs is cutting dependence on expensive, foreign-controlled fossil fuels. But Burnham is also readier to drive down costs associated with the net-zero transition, many of which also end up on voters’ bills. U.K. Chancellor of the Exchequer John Healey, left, Burnham meet constituents at a Westminster community center on Oct. 28, 2026. | Pool photo by Richard Pohle via WPA/Getty Images In last month’s budget, Burnham’s Chancellor John Healey announced a new mantra: “first and foremost cheaper energy.” Renewables projects like solar and wind farms must now show how they’ll bring down bills if they want to get government support. A subsidy pot for low-carbon electric heat pumps was cut by up to £2.5 billion. Healey has promised to overhaul how energy costs are paid via bills in the new year. Most controversially, Burnham has presided over the decision by Energy Secretary Miatta Fahnbulleh to approve a new gas field in the North Sea, Jackdaw. Ministers argued more gas drilling off the Scottish coast would give a short-term boost to energy security, with some of its tax revenues routed into developing clean power. A decision on the oilfield Rosebank, where climate-damaging emissions will be even higher, is expected by the end of the year. There is a big difference, Burnham told MPs last month, between the “ideological” opposition of his anti-drilling Green Party rivals and his own “pragmatic approach.” The team of