PM has long history of speaking out on realities of global heating but political opponents remain unnmoved
Just over four years ago, Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, visited a small town in the south-western region of Extremadura that had been affected by one of the wildfires devouring tens of thousands of hectares of land across the country.
That summer’s blazes had left two people dead in the northern region of Castilla y León and another man there fatally burned after the excavator he was using to try to dig a firebreak to protect his town was swallowed up by the flames. A street-sweeper in Madrid had collapsed and died from heatstroke while on shift in soaring temperatures that summer. The paramedics who tried to save him noted that his body temperature was 41.6C (107F).
“I want to make something very clear,” the prime minister told reporters in Extremadura that day in 2022. “Climate change kills: it kills people, as we’ve seen; it also kills our ecosystem, our biodiversity, and it also destroys the things we as a society hold dear – our houses, our businesses, our livestock.”
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