The inconvenient truth about climate change is that it does not fit into domestic politics. The protesters of Extinction Rebellion have been disrupting human traffic in London and other cities to draw our attention to the fact that the world is warming up. Yet we know this and have known it for a long time. There’s another reason why climate change has not become a big political issue.

On November 8, 1989, in a speech to the general assembly of the United Nations, Margaret Thatcher warned that careless human custody of the planet was creating “change to the sea around us, change to the atmosphere above, leading in turn to change in the world’s climate, which could alter the way we live in the most…