To say that the euphoric sights that greeted the gavel coming down on the Paris climate agreement in 2015 were such that no one who was there will ever forget the sensation is an understatement. Cheers, tears, and people almost dancing in the aisles were all part of the celebration. More than twenty years of arduous negotiations under the auspices of the United Nations resulted in the globe finally having a worldwide treaty that compelled states to take action regarding the climate catastrophe.
It was a credit to the hard work that a tiny group of climate negotiators put in that everything came together on a Saturday night in a former airfield on the outskirts of Paris. What happened was that everything came together. In the meantime, the bureaucrats made their way back to their hotels in order to get some rest while the world leaders and politicians were taking the credit in front of the cameras.
Among the major public officers who contributed to the drafting of the Paris agreement and shepherded it to safety, Peter Betts, who passed away at the age of 64 due to a brain tumour, was one of those individuals. In spite of the fact that the United States and China were the ones who made headlines, he served as the chief negotiator for the European Union (EU), which was the driving force behind the Paris agreement. He was a veteran of the British climate team.
As a trim figure dressed in white shirts with short sleeves, he was an old-fashioned civil servant. He was the kind of person who was educated in the necessity of speaking the truth to power, but to do it in a courteous manner, with impartial advice, and while acknowledging that elected politicians are the ones who make the decisions. He retired from the civil service in 2018, a few years after Paris, after having served for 35 years. However, he did return for a short period of time to serve in an advisory capacity for the United Kingdom’s hosting of Cop26 in Glasgow in 2021.
George Betts, who was a member of the Salvage Corps and a component of the Fire Brigade, and Joyce (née Pedder), who worked in the charity sector, gave birth to Betts in Battersea, which is located in south-west London. Following his time at Emanuel Grammar School, he continued his education at Mansfield College in Oxford, where he majored in history. Following the completion of his education in 1982, he performed a variety of odd jobs, including a brief stint on the East End News (1982–1983), before transitioning into the civil service in 1984. From the very beginning of his tenure at the Department of the Environment, he was given a posting to Brussels for a period of three years beginning in the year 1994.
Defra, which stands for the Department of Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs, appointed him to the position of director of international climate change in 2008. This was the year that he made the transition to the climate team in the United Kingdom.
In the latter part of that year, the responsibility for climate change was transferred to the newly established Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), then beginning in 2016, it was transferred to the Department of Business, Energy, and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
