Claim: London Mayor Sadiq Khan’s Tree Planting Campaign will Save the Global Climate from President Trump

Essay by Eric Worrall

A hilariously incoherent TDS laden communique from the Mayor of London.

This burning summer is the proof: the voices of climate denial aren’t just delusional, they’re deadly

Sadiq Khan
Sat 8 Aug 2026 18.00 AEST

Look at our blazing forests and parched cities. Green policies aren’t a ‘luxury’, and we can’t burn more oil and gas. People need the truth

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With Tuesday marking Britain’s 34th day of temperatures exceeding 30C (86F) this year, the UK has also found itself reckoning with ferocious heat. Wildfires have forced evacuations in Suffolk and the Cairngorms. In London – where parks have become burnt, brittle and brown – hundreds of grass fires have put our firefighters under pressure like never before. In July, the weather station at Kew Gardens recorded its first ever month without rain since it started operating in 1871. As rivers run dry and reservoirs run low, farmers are warning of food shortages amid the deepening drought. With thousands of deaths already estimated to be linked to the extreme heat we saw in May and June alone, it’s likely this figure will climb higher still.

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Looking back now, it feels like the fierce fight over Ulez marked the beginning of something else: a new age of extreme climate scepticism. In the years since, the horrifying reality of the climate crisis has come into sharp relief – and yet somehow the clamouring voices of denial and delay have grown louder than ever. Having dismissed climate change as a “con job”, Donald Trump has sought to sabotage global climate action, withdrawing the United States from the Paris agreement for the second time, cutting support for clean energy, and boosting oil and gas production. In the UK, where cross-party consensus on the climate crisis has collapsed, his ideas have been echoed by opposition politicians and rightwing populists who veer wildly between denialism and fatalism. As some claim the climate crisis is a hoax, others insist it’s too late to act.

Both arguments are bogus. The climate crisis is getting worse, but in London we’ve shown that – with courage and creativity – we can prepare ourselves for its impacts. We’ve planted more than 640,000 trees across the capital, shading our streets from the summer sun. We’ve embraced rewilding while creating and improving more than 2,000 football pitches’ worth of green space, providing natural drainage to prevent flooding. And just last month, we set out a plan to clean up our rivers and create safe swimming sites where Londoners can cool down in the heat. We have more zero-emission buses than any city in Europe and about a third of our country’s electric charging points.

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/08/burning-summer-climate-denial-green-policies-sadiq-khan

Lets see if I’ve got this right:

Mayor Khan is claiming the drought is now so severe, Britain is on the brink of food shortages, and all the parks are either on fire or dried to a crisp, but the Mayor’s plan to address this crisis is to plant hundreds of thousands of trees and create more green spaces, and use the ULEZ programme to drive up costs from people who are already at risk of food insecurity.

Mayor Khan, wouldn’t that be brown spaces, given this severe drought? Or is your plan to divert more water from farmers who are already running short, so your trees and green spaces survive?

Doesn’t the climate crisis drought you allege is killing everything green mean your green space and tree planting initiatives were all a colossal waste of resources?

What is your plan to help poor people in London survive the food shortages you claim are imminent?

Are people in your mayoral office really this incompetent, or did you write this article yourself? Or was the entire article generated by an AI?

I can’t help thinking London would right now be in a better place if some of that green cash had been spent improving London’s food and water security.

But there is something the mayor could do right now to bring immediate relief to people’s suffering: suspend or cancel London’s punitive ULEZ congestion charging scheme, so commuters from outer suburbs have more cash to pay bills and buy food.