Britain’s new foreign secretary, David Lammy, has been in office for 11 weeks. Restless and energetic by nature, he had been preparing for the job for two-and-a-half years. He is now impatient to reshape U.K. foreign policy and show that the recently elected Labour government is very different from its Conservative predecessor.

Lammy is a political veteran. He became a Member of Parliament a quarter of a century ago at the age of 27 and was a government minister under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. A Harvard Law School alum who practiced as an attorney in California in the late 1990s, he is a forceful speaker who knows how to grab headlines. This flair for publicity was on full display on Sept. 17, when he made his first set-piece speech on international affairs at the Royal Botanic Gardens on “the most profound and universal source of global disorder — the climate and nature emergency.”

Today, even to address the issue of climate change is to make ears prick up on both left and right. Where once there was widespread consensus on the case for global warming, there is now sharp division. Former President Donald Trump has downplayed the extent of the human contribution to climate change and dismissed global warming as a "hoax," while five years ago this week an angry Greta Thunberg blinked back tears and........

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