How Theresa May’s Vacation Revelation Convinced Her on Climate Change

(Bloomberg) -- British Prime Minister Theresa May only has a few weeks left in her job -- she’s decided to spend them trying to tackle climate change. A new law took effect Thursday committing the U.K. to reducing greenhouse gas emissions to “net zero” by 2050.

May said she was persuaded to act not by influential lobbyists or environmental campaigners, but by the hiking holidays she’s taken with her husband over the past decade.

“Philip and I, as you know, go walking, not just in Wales, but also in Switzerland and there is a particular place we go to where over the last decade you have seen the glacier retreating quickly,” May told reporters on her plane to the G-20 summit in Osaka, Japan. “This has brought home to me the importance of the issue of climate change.”

The premier said she was “very pleased” that the new emissions target entered U.K. law while her plane was in the air. She said she will tell her counterparts at the summit they should be “following the U.K.’s lead and acting on this issue.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Tim Ross in London at tross54@bloomberg.net

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Stuart Biggs, Thomas Penny

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