Pilita Clark writes with her customary verve and clarity on the dangers ahead from climate inaction and special pleading by the corporate sector (“Magical thinking on fossil fuels endangers safety”, Opinion, FT Weekend, April 30).

Separately, you report that resolutions demanding stricter fossil fuel financing policies at three big American banks were backed by only 10 per cent of shareholders.

Climate change became a public policy issue a generation ago in 1988, when it was known as “the Greenhouse Effect”. Since then, the names of politicians have changed. The names of the “solutions” — taxes, emissions trading schemes, voluntary schemes, offsets, divestment, carbon capture and storage — have waxed and waned. The targets have moved from low carbon to “net zero” (which is not, as one of Clark’s interviewees makes clear, “zero carbon”).

Two things have not changed. First, institutional resistance to dramatic reductions in fossil fuel use. Second, the effectiveness of that resistance — human emissions of greenhouse gases are over 60 per cent higher globally than they were in 1990, despite all the fine words and vaunted technological and policy fixes.

Marc Hudson
Stone, Staffordshire, UK