As I walked out in front of Boris Johnson‘s motorcade rolling down the Mall earlier today, the thing that worried me most wasn’t the response from police or the risk of arrest. It was the heat.

Boris Johnson is taking over at No. 10 while hot temperature records are rising all around Europe and whole swathes of the Arctic are on fire. We’re in a climate emergency, and its impacts are unfolding all around us.

Climate scientists have been warning about it for decades, campaigners have been trying to amplify their concerns since the late eighties, and now, finally, Parliament has declared it.

But according to the UN’s climate experts, the IPCC, we’ve only left ourselves 11 years to get all the policies in place to fully decarbonise.

So far, we’ve decarbonised about half of one sector – electricity. It’s a significant sector, but there’s still some work to do there, and then there’s transport, agriculture, construction, manufacturing, housing and others that we haven’t got to grips with at all yet. And we’ve got eleven years to sort out all of it.

The government has gone beyond accepting the need to get rid of carbon emissions – they’ve legislated a legally binding date by which this must be achieved, starting the race to clean up our economy and setting a deadline for us to finish.

But there’s a danger of this government firing the starting gun and then following it up with with a victory lap, and missing out the rather important stage of actually winning the race.

This is the urgent message we delivered today to the new prime minister. We need transformative policies and we need them now.

The ideal time to start decarbonising was 30 years ago, but the second-best time is now.

The government has committed to begin phasing out petrol and diesel cars in 2040. 2040 is not within 11 years. 2040 is not now.

What’s Greenpeace’s solution? Well, we tried to hand it to Boris Johnson as he was being driven down the Mall today.

It’s a climate emergency plan, with the 134 policy changes we need to get the UK economy moving in the right direction. Much more wind and solar power. Planting millions of trees to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. Public transport improvements. No new roads, let alone runways. Less meat.

Some of it is going to be expensive, and some of it is going to be at least a little bit unpopular. Hence our deep concern that admitting we’re in a crisis is what this government will regard as doing their bit.

If this government lasts until 2022, then ‘their bit’ must include a lot more, starting with policies to tackle carbon in every sector of our economy. This will require fundamental changes to how we approach investment in infrastructure, as financial returns take second place to human survival.

It will require fundamental changes to foreign policy, as international cooperation is necessary to avoid civilisational collapse. It will require fundamental changes to how we view the environment, as what was once a niche concern in politics is recognised as another word for ‘everything’.

And, at the risk of repetition, we need these changes now. Not after five more years of trying to sort out Brexit, not after a two-year feasibility study or Royal Commission or stakeholder consultation, but now.

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