Donald Trump's victory has triggered fresh calls for a rolling back of climate action, but such arguments are based on lazy and dangerously flawed assumptions - in an end of year essay BusinessGreen editor James Murray asks, what next for the climate movement?
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
The Second Coming - W.B. Yeats
How bad could it get? The second Trump presidency brings with it an avalanche of potentially existential questions. Is the NATO Charter no longer worth the paper it is written on? Will Trump repeal the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) and pursue policies that result in an additional four billion tonnes of carbon emissions by 2030? Is polio about to make a comeback? Are we entering a new era of brutal realpolitik and nuclear sabre-rattling? Or is nuclear brinkmanship now the best-case scenario?
The more serious-minded apologists for Donald Trump - yes, Boris Johnson, in this instance you qualify as serious-minded - who argue the West would benefit from a US President with a foreign policy that mixes isolationism with muscular self-interest, should acknowledge none of these questions are unreasonable. The worst-case scenario is now apocalyptic in a literal sense. Comparisons between the current period and the 1930s have become tired to the point of cliché, but that doesn't make them any less valid.
We are entering a new and considerably more dangerous era, assuming we haven't been living in it for the best part of a decade already. You can make a strong case the age of post-Cold War multilateralism reached a high-water mark at the Paris Agreement of 2015 and has been rapidly ebbing ever since. Through Brexit, the first Trump presidency, the chaotic response to the covid pandemic, Russia's war in Ukraine, the horrific violence in the Middle East, and now Trump again, values of diplomacy and internationalism have taken a fearful battering at the hands of a revanchist, reactionary, and even genocidal nationalism.
At the same time, living standards across much of the Global North have flat-lined since the 2008 financial crash, while governments of all political persuasions have struggled to develop a new economic model to replace a neo-liberal order that has stopped delivering the dynamism and prosperity that was once its primary selling point. In the Global South emerging economies have delivered rapid economic progress, but often under autocratic regimes that are positioning themselves as a vigorous alternative to liberal democracy. They are actively working to appeal to those poorer nations still caught in debt traps not entirely of their making and offer an alternative development model to that espoused by liberal democracies. Numerous studies suggest the strategy is working, with democracies seen to be in retreat on multiple fronts.
Consequently, too many books for comfort are being written currently about the Thucydides' Trap, a theory named for an Athenian general during the Peloponnesian War and popularised by the American political scientist Graham T. Allison. It posits that when a superpower feels threatened by a rising power - be it Athens and Sparta then, or the US and China now - war becomes almost inevitable. According to Allison, in 16 historical examples dating back to the 15th century, 12 instances ended in war. The most recent examples of the Thucydides' Trap being triggered gave us two World Wars. The most recent example of rival geopolitical powers managing to avoid a military conflagration was the Cold War, although recent events suggest it may not have really ended.
We have become used to waking up and checking our phones to find out what terrible things have happened overnight, which, as a brilliant recent essay from Rebecca Solnit on the tyranny of the smart phone points out, may well be a big part of the problem.
Meanwhile, climate impacts continue to escalate, greenhouse gas emissions are still rising, and temperatures will for the first time this year spiral above the critical 1.5C threshold set by the Paris Agreement. This is having a direct impact on food security, economic development, and migration, with the OECD reporting that permanent migration to its member countries reached a new record high last year. As a recent influential article by James Dyke and Laurie Laybourn pointed out, the inflation that delivered Donald Trump the White House was driven to a surprisingly large degree by escalating climate impacts.
We are living through the 'climate theory of everything' where all issues are shaped by anthropogenic global warming, because how can they not be? Governments look increasingly helpless in the face of these mega-trends, with some responding to the resulting sense of powerlessness by lashing out. Meanwhile, escalating limate impacts serve to make multilateralism harder and the risk of conflicts greater.
At the recent UN Climate Summit in Baku the big fear was of 'contagion', as observers warned a second Trump withdrawal from the Paris Agreement could provide a template for others to follow. Canadian Conservatives and Australian Liberals could follow Trump's lead and turn upcoming elections into de facto referenda on the Paris Agreement. Add in Argentinian President Javier Milei's vocal criticism of the accord and Saudi Arabia's position as a perennial roadblock within the negotiations and it is not inconceivable that within a year a quarter of G20 nations could be either outside the Paris Agreement or actively working to weaken it from within. Even France may one day quit the treaty it brokered if the electoral fire wall keeping the far right out of the Elysee is ever breached. That December night in Paris feels a very long time ago.
The anti-climate action consensus
The post-mortem following Trump's victory among liberals, environmentalists, democrats, and Democrats has followed the time-honoured tradition of quickly concluding 'this event proves what we always thought, only more so'.
The centre-left wants centrism, just better and without any 'wokery'. The left wants socialism, with a side order of global awakening. The right wants to turn the clock back to 1950, and crush its enemies and salt the earth in the process. The centre right just wants it all to stop and wonders if there might be a gap in the market for another podcast.
But the consensus among political operatives is coalescing around two central and related conclusions on how Trump pulled off his comeback. Firstly, Trump won because of inflation and the failure of the Biden administration to translate economic success into real world gains for working households. And secondly economic dissatisfaction was compounded by concerns over immigration and the perception Democrats are obsessed with 'woke' issues that are seen as at best far removed, and at worst actively hostile towards, most voters' daily concerns.
There are plenty of polls and focus groups that validate these conclusions. The Blueprint polling organisation, which was set up to carry out message-testing in support of Kamala Harris' campaign, found the top three reasons for people not to vote for the Vice President were inflation, illegal immigration, and the (arguably erroneous) belief "Harris is focused more on cultural issues like transgender issues rather than helping the middle class". Racism and sexism undoubtedly also played a role, but when asked by pollsters why they failed to cast their vote for Harris, the answers from voters were clear.
The implications for global climate action are potentially disastrous. The fact of Trump's victory is bad enough for global efforts to tackle the climate crisis, but now the very specific reasons for Harris' defeat are being extrapolated into calls for a downgrading of climate efforts across the political spectrum, both in the US and elsewhere.
Governments that want to win re-election are being routinely advised to deprioritise anything not laser focused on improving living standards. And because climate change is still seen by much of the political and media establishment as an environmental issue, or because climate policies are blamed - sometimes fairly, often not - for pushing up the cost of living, there is a perception decarbonisation has become a luxury governments can no longer afford.
There is also a lazy assumption amongst parts of the commentariat that the voter backlash against 'cultural issues' takes in climate issues, because climate change is 'woke', right? The conventional wisdom seems to be that if some voters feel alienated or judged by debates about pronouns or statues, then they must also hate wind farms and think the climate crisis is overblown, because all these complex and nuanced issues are basically one and the same thing.
The result is a fillip for those politicians and professional opinion-havers who have always regarded bold climate action with suspicion or antipathy.
The high-profile US blogger Matthew Yglesias' snap response to the Democrats defeat was a set of nine "principles for Common Sense Democrats to reform governance in the blue zones and be competitive in the red zones". At number two in the list was the declaration "climate change is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey". It sat alongside points on the importance of economic growth, the reality of biological sex, and the unpopularity of "obsessive language policing". Tim Shipman, the chief political commentator at the Sunday Times and one of the UK's most influential journalists, approvingly described Yglesias' manifesto as "a pretty decent set of principles for any political party to be successful in today's world".
Neither offered an explanation as to what "climate change is a reality to manage, not a hard limit to obey" means in practice, nor an estimate as to how much it would cost to "manage" the more than 3C of warming the world is currently on track to experience this century - warming scientists predict would have catastrophic consequences for food production, geopolitical stability, and the global economy.
Meanwhile, Trump's victory has triggered a fresh wave of attacks on the political wisdom of climate action. Andrew Neil recently thundered that "Starmer's climate change obsession will be his downfall". The Times leader page has repeatedly implored the government to keep decarbonising, but slower and with less ambition. New Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch proudly describes herself as a 'net zero sceptic'. The annual wave of right-wing condemnation aimed at the COP Summit felt even more visceral than usual this year. It was notable how recent attacks on the Prime Minister for being out of the country too much just so happened to coincide with his decision to attend the climate talks in Baku.
Consequently, there are whispers some senior people in Number 10 want to dial back the green pledges that helped deliver a landslide election victory less than six months ago. Even some of those who recognise the need to reach net zero emissions are calling for a fundamental rethink of the UK's climate strategy and advocating for reforms that would guarantee a slower decarbonisation trajectory.
Recently, the right-wing pundit Konstantin Kisin neatly exemplified the conflation of these issues, writing: "Britain and Europe need to take inspiration from the decision the American people made to say ‘NO!' to managed decline, self-inflicted poverty and woke insanity. We need leaders who are unapologetically pro-growth, pro-business, anti-woke and pro revival. We will know them when they say things like: 'Our efforts to tackle climate change cannot get in the way of ensuring prosperity for our people. Economic growth is my #1 priority'."
These arguments against climate action are simple and seductive - telling people they don't have to do anything always is - but they are also largely reliant on the false premise the public has no interest in climate change and denialist assumptions global warming will not be that bad and clean energy technologies do not really work. The truth is the latest cultural and economic critiques of climate action are as dangerously flawed as they always have been.
Untangling the 'woke bucket'
Climate change is not 'woke'. There is a legitimate argument nothing is 'woke' - that the term has become a reductive label weaponised by reactionaries to attack any vaguely progressive cause they do not like. But if you accept there is a set of values characterised by an "awareness of important societal facts and issues (especially issues of racial and social justice)" to borrow the dictionary definition, then climate change is not one of them.
Or to be more precise climate change is one of them, given it is obviously inextricably linked to issues of racial and social justice - but it is not limited to that. It is very different to many other issues that have been branded as 'woke' (and yes, I will be using quote marks throughout).
In a viral post on LinkedIn recently, the environmental consultant Brendan May argued "modern environmentalism needs to entirely reinvent itself", lamenting how climate change had been pushed into a 'woke bucket' where it never belonged. "We can spend the next four years harping about what's happened in America (and will soon happen elsewhere) talking about stars in the dark sky, or we can build a movement based on pragmatic policy, personal economic aspiration, and ruthlessly disentangle climate change and biodiversity protection from the 'woke' bucket into which we have let them creep," he wrote. "This is absolutely fundamental - they do not belong there and never did. But they are now inseparable, in the minds of many, from other topics which are matters of personal opinion, not scientific fact. This is deadly for our cause."
Many campaigners will contest whether other 'woke' issues are simply a matter of opinion and it is also unclear whether climate change was placed in the 'woke bucket' by environmentalists or pushed there by cynical reactionaries who regard anything involving government intervention as part of a communist plot. The unofficial libertarian definition of 'woke' is 'anything that asks people to think beyond their own concerns and desires for even a nanosecond'. Under that definition, climate change is extremely 'woke'. Indeed, so is everything that stops society collapsing into Mad Max warlordism.
Equally, there is a compelling case environmentalists should stand in solidarity with a wide range of progressive causes that are under constant political and media attack. As the writer Katie Feeney asked on social media platform X in the wake of Trump's victory, "is the left 'obsessed' with gender, sexuality, race, etc, or are they just constantly having to defend people in marginalised groups against a right wing that's ACTUALLY obsessed with gender, sexuality, race, etc?"
But May is definitely on to something. There has been a category error. Climate change overlaps with 'woke' issues, but it is not the same as them. Climate change is what the philosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject - an event so large in relation to human life that it is difficult to see or understand in its entirety. It is, as the US writer Alex Steffen argues, "an era, not an issue".
Rightly or wrongly, much of the discourse around 'woke' topics has become defined by arguments about terminology, philosophy, competing versions of history, and rights and responsibilities. These are critical issues and are often centred on burning injustices that should be addressed or complex and painful debates that deserve a good faith attempt at resolution. But we won't crash the economy or destroy the only habitable biosphere in the known universe if we struggle to reach a workable compromise on contentious nomenclature or revisionist histories. Recognising the wisdom and moral imperative of treating all people with respect and dignity is a very different project to re-engineering the global energy system and building out gigatonne-scale carbon removal capacity inside 20 years. Both projects should be advanced, but they are not one and the same thing.
Any attempt at disentangling the 'woke bucket' will need to tread very carefully. I once spoke at an event where I tried to sketch out how the sheer breadth of the climate crisis and our response to it - the way it takes in economics, technology, politics, society, and the environment - make it more complicated than many previous change movements. At which point a woman in the front row asked, 'James, have you met the patriarchy?' You don't come back from that - the argument was lost, and rightly so. If you try to claim one issue is more important than another you quickly get into very uncomfortable conversations about privilege and prioritisation. There are lots of different wrongs that need to be righted and debates that need to be aired at the same time.
Unpicking these issues is further complicated by the fact many of them are genuinely interlinked. There is an explicit intersectionality here. The uneven distribution of climate impacts has an enormous social component, with developing economies, poorer communities, women, children, disabled people, and minoritised groups all more exposed to climate risks than wealthier and socially privileged communities. It is inevitable attempts to tackle climate change will try and tackle social injustices, and vice versa. If we are going to decarbonise economies or enhance climate resilience we should do so in ways that protect and benefit those most at risk, and that means engaging with social injustices and their root causes.
Similarly, there are social issues at play in many decarbonisation efforts. The winding down of carbon intensive industries and practices will have to wrestle with both the economic and social fallout from job losses that is already triggering a backlash against climate policies. Attempts to encourage green behaviour change, such as the shift to less meat-heavy diets, will always have a large socio-cultural component.
But we can recognise the intersectionality at play without reductively lumping every issue together and then condensing them down into a 'woke' caricature. Climate change needs to extricate itself from the 'woke' label, not by repudiating or belittling social issues, but by recognising how different issues often require precisely targeted responses. There will be instances and audiences where it makes sense to try and tackle climate and social issues in conjunction. But there are also instances and audiences where conflating the language of climate action and progressive politics makes it harder to build the 'big tent' coalition required to normalise and accelerate decarbonisation efforts.
I once spoke to a senior Conservative MP who was hugely supportive of climate action, but wary of talk of a 'just transition' or 'green industrial revolution', arguing such terms were almost perfectly designed to alienate his Tory colleagues and conservative voters who are inherently sceptical of government intervention and grand historical projects. The perception of climate action as a 'woke' endeavour risks denying the environmental movement a lot of allies.
If the global economy is to be fully decarbonised within three to four decades then purity tests must be avoided. If you want to buy an EV or a heat pump there is no questionnaire to first check your stance on gender politics or veganism. The sad truth is that if we make decarbonisation contingent on an end to global injustice then we are setting the bar too high. As the co-founder of Oxford Climate Journalism Network, Wolgang Blau, recently observed, "we need many more imperfect environmentalists".
This is not to say the myriad fights against injustice should be compromised or tempered. They must continue and ultimately they must succeed. But they will often require very different strategies to those used to accelerate the real-world adoption of clean technologies, low carbon infrastructure, and sustainable lifestyles. A distinction needs to be drawn between climate action and wider progressive causes, even if such a move risks accusations of cowardice and betrayal. There has to be a pragmatic response to a world in which carbon emissions are still rising and progressive political movements keep losing elections. And just maybe, faster progress on decarbonisation can create economic and political conditions that help build the coalition in support of bolder efforts to tackle social injustice.
Thankfully, there is a lot of polling to suggest that beyond those with a newspaper column to fill most of the public remain resistant to the attempts to pull climate change into the culture wars. The public may or may not be increasingly hostile to 'woke' issues - the polling, even in the wake of Trump's victory is highly variable and depends massively on how questions are framed - but there is scant evidence of a backlash against climate action. Polls in the UK, US, EU, and pretty much any country you can name, confirm clear majorities are worried about climate change and want leaders to tackle it.
Research earlier this year from Nature Climate Change, based on a sample of nearly 130,000 people in 125 countries, found 86 per cent of people "support pro-climate social norms" and 89 per cent would like to see their governments do more to tackle climate change. In 119 of the 125 countries studied, the proportion of individuals who state that people in their country "should try to fight global warming" exceeds two-thirds, while in more than half the countries the demand for more government action exceeds 90 per cent. Over two thirds of the global population expressed a willingness to contribute one per cent of their personal income to tackling climate change.
More recently, YouGov this month revealed how environmentalism is by far the most popular ideology among the British public. Nearly two thirds of people had a favourable opinion towards environmentalism, including 20 per cent who had a very favourable opinion. It was also the most popular ideology for all age groups, with support ranging from 62 per cent for 25- to 49-year-olds to 69 per cent for 50- to 64-year-olds. Feminism was the only other ideology where a majority of the public expressed support. Fascism was the least popular ideology with a net favourability rating of minus 80 per cent, which is something to cling to the next time the fascists decide to riot.
People care about the environment and want to see bolder action to tackle the climate crisis. If 'woke' issues are divisive, climate change is not 'woke'.
Financial realities
The calls to deprioritise climate change on economic grounds have proved less headline-grabbing than the never ending 'war on woke', but they arguably have more potential to resonate with political and business leaders keen to avoid a right-wing, anti-business backlash, not least because some of them raise legitimate concerns.
Decarbonising the global economy within a generation will require trillions of dollars of investment. This investment will unlock enormous economic and environmental benefits, but the costs are frontloaded and can impose significant financial pressure in the near-term. The roll out of clean energy technologies will result in a degree of disruption for millions of households and communities as boilers are replaced with heat pumps, petrol stations become charging stations, and transmission lines criss-cross the landscape. Too many decarbonisation policies remain regressive in nature, imposing disproportionate costs on poorer households. Carbon intensive industries face a future of 'transform or die' with millions of jobs potentially at risk.
None of these challenges are insurmountable. The costs remain marginal in the context of a global economy worth around $110tr a year. Millions of new jobs will be created as fossil fuel jobs are lost. Enormous benefits will flow from a clean energy transition that improves health, enhances energy security, and drives long term economic prosperity.
But for Chancellors and CEOs facing a constant barrage of short-term financial challenges and five-year cycles it is always easy to defer investments that will only deliver a payback in the long term.
The COP29 Climate Summit in Baku nearly imploded because Treasuries in industrialised nations baulked at the idea they should go beyond a heavily caveated commitment to provide $300bn a year in climate finance for the most climate vulnerable nations. Few dispute it is in everyone's interests to ensure the Global South has the capacity to both decarbonise and enhance its resilience in the face of worsening storms and droughts. Without such investment temperatures will ratchet ever upwards and climate-induced migration will reach biblical levels, plagues of locusts and once-in-a-millennia floods very much included. But the governments of industrialised economies also fear directing more than a tiny fraction of public spending towards poorer nations could prove politically toxic on the domestic front, especially when their own populations are angry at flat-lining living standards. Actual polling on public attitudes towards international development aid tends to be more nuanced than the media narratives suggest, but narrow electoral concerns once again thwarted hopes for a genuinely ambitious climate finance deal.
Meanwhile, back at the domestic level the upfront costs associated with electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, energy efficiency upgrades, and clean energy projects, combined with the failure to reform regressive policies, make it easy for populists to characterise the whole net zero mission as a financially profligate elite endeavour. To provide just one simple example, the continuing failure to move green levies off electricity bills and into general taxation remains an act of craven political cowardice masquerading as fiscal rectitude. It makes energy bills higher than they need to be, weakens the financial case for switching to heat pumps and EVs, and exacerbates already disgraceful levels of fuel poverty. Necessary investment in clean energy infrastructure could be catalysed through a mix of progressive taxation and government debt, but it is instead largely delivered through a levy on energy bills that hits the poorest hardest. The result is a green lightning rod for wider discontent at a political class that has delivered 15 years of economic stagnation.
The backlash against climate action then means it takes real political courage to resist the temptation to cut green public spending and taxes, defer clean tech investment, and, if you are particularly cynical, characterise supporters of decarbonisation as out of touch eco-warriors imposing unnecessary costs on working families. The risk is that a doom loop of climate nihilism could quickly build momentum.
Climate realities
But the problem with a strategy of climate inaction is it is guilty of the original sin of so much economic analysis: the failure to recognise the entire global economy is built on environmental foundations.
Attempts to precisely quantify the impacts of climate change several decades hence are inherently flawed. There are simply too many variables and long tail risks to present projections with any real confidence. But there is a reason why all the attempts to model the financial impact of climate change point in the same direction.
The World Economic Forum this month warned climate impacts could put a seven per cent dent in corporate earnings by 2035. A paper in the National Bureau of Economic Research this summer reckoned economic damages from climate change could be six times greater than previously thought, with a further 1C of global warming potentially wiping out 12 per cent of global GDP. Even those notorious hippies at global consultancy giant Deloitte reckon the 3C warming trajectory the world is currently on could knock 7.6 per cent off GDP by 2070, dealing a $178tr blow to the global economy.
Arguably the most granular analysis of the economic impact from climate change comes from the Potsdam Institute, which assessed the real-world fallout from climate-related impacts in over 1,600 subnational regions worldwide over the past 40 years. By marrying empirical data with the latest climate projections through to 2050 it was able to calculate how under a central scenario the global economy could face $38tr a year in climate damages by 2050, which would knock 19 per cent off projected per capita incomes. Under scenarios where emissions keep rising, climate damages could reach $59tr in 2050 and incomes could be 40 per cent lower than expected, rising to 60 per cent lower by 2100.
Of course, these projections could be wrong. Climate impacts might prove less severe than expected. Infrastructure and food systems could quickly adapt to ever more intense heatwaves, floods, and storms. The insurance industry may not collapse. But equally, the economic models suggesting rolling storms, rising sea levels, and failed harvests will only shave a few percentage points off future growth rates could easily prove too optimistic.
Under a 3C warming scenario, the costs are unquantifiable, but we know with a high degree of confidence they will be gargantuan. Desertification and flooding will erode agricultural yields. Countless coastal cities will face the risk of inundation. Heat waves will push 20th Century infrastructure beyond breaking point. Sixteen years ago the entire global financial system nearly collapsed because of stranded property assets, and the world is still struggling with the economic and social repercussions. The one question those who are dismissive of climate action never answer, is what happens when entire seafronts go underwater, when bread baskets stop producing, when entire regions become practically uninhabitable? Everyone calmly and efficiently adapts to the new reality? Is there anything from the last 20 years that suggests that is a likely outcome?
The truth is millions of people will die from the escalating climate crisis, and many millions more will move. Rates of hunger and levels of forced migration are already heading in the wrong direction, reviving 20th Century demons the world thought it had vanquished.
Market realities
Climatic instability is further complicated by the acceleration of the clean energy transition. If ignoring climate risks amounts to a denial of scientific and geopolitical reality, clinging to fossil fuel-reliant business models amounts to a denial of technological and market reality. Multiple industries, investors, and governments are continuing to invest in polluting technologies that are about to go into structural decline as they are outcompeted by clean technologies that are inherently more efficient even before you consider the environmental benefits they offer.
The on-going debate in the UK over the Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) mandate provides an illustrative case in point. Policymakers and automakers face a difficult balancing act as they manage the transition away from an internal combustion engine technology that has defined the industry for over a century. As such, there is a legitimate debate over the mix of sticks and carrots required to tackle the market failure that enabled the dominance of polluting technologies in the first place.
But much of the criticism of the ZEV Mandate implies the UK auto industry's problems could be quickly solved if the government would simply drop the threat of fines for manufacturers that fail to sell a rising share of EVs and allow them to go on selling petrol and diesel models for decades to come. Admittedly, much of this criticism comes from media commentators, rather than from auto manufacturers who understand the depth of the predicament they are in. But it fails to acknowledge that if UK auto firms delay the switch to EVs they will simply hand more market share to the likes of Tesla and China's BYD.
According to recent data from analysts New Automotive, global sales of petrol and diesel vehicles have fallen by almost a fifth in the past two and half years, while EV demand has risen to account for over 17 per cent of the auto market. Internal combustion engine vehicles share of the global market slipped from 78 to 63 per cent market share, while EVs' share jumped from 10 to 17.4 per cent. With market trends like these, doubling down on internal combustion engines is to knowingly select the Betamax option.
The same dynamic is seen right across the clean energy transition. What do those arguing for a deliberate slowdown in the roll out of clean technologies expect to happen? That China will stop manufacturing the wind turbines, solar panels, EVs, and heat pumps that are cementing its 21st century economic dominance? That a reliance on gas imports will suddenly become a risk-free strategy? That low cost nuclear or carbon removal technologies will magically materialise? That climate change will stop?
As BloombergNEF founder Michael Liebreich argued in a recent riposte to Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch's description of herself as a 'net zero sceptic', the UK does not have a "get out of jail free card" from the realities of climate change and the clean energy transition. "In the world of reality, one in two new cars in China are electric: cheaper and better than anything our car companies are making," he wrote. "In the world of reality, gas, not renewables, is responsible for our high energy prices. And even if fracking were to produce a trickle of gas, it would disappear into the maw of the commodities markets. In the world of reality, wind and solar produce twice as much electricity as nuclear power. And when there's no wind and sun, batteries are cheaper than natural gas."
The increasingly vocal critiques of climate action urgently need to reacquaint themselves with the world of reality.
Time to wake up
Against this backdrop, the consensus building among very serious people on both sides of the Atlantic that climate change should be deprioritised as an issue is not just misguided, it is actively dangerous. It is a recipe not just for environmental disaster, but also for geopolitical irrelevance and economic decline.
A populist case is being made for a course of action that promises to reduce energy bills, under the banner of a full spectrum assault on the 'woke' elite and its 'tofu-eating' environmental preoccupations. But in reality the argument economies should persist with their fossil fuel reliance for several more decades threatens to lock in 3C of warming and decades of escalating disasters, hand competitive advantage to those countries investing in clean technologies, and further fuel geopolitical tensions that could yet end in civilisation-level tragedy. It will also do next to nothing to reduce energy bills.
There is only one viable response available. Advocates for climate action need to push back against the climate sceptics masquerading as net zero sceptics and their populist attempts to peddle false solutions. They need to maintain a constant drumbeat that emphasises how environmentalism is uniquely popular, green industries are booming, and fossil fuels are on the brink of an historic decline. They need to highlight how detached so much of the right-wing media and political discourse has become from both public opinion and objective reality.
But above all else, climate hawks need to visibly and vocally deliver on the promise that climate resilience and the net zero transition will deliver prosperity and security. Climate activists in both the boardroom and on the streets need to demonstrate that decarbonisation is not an alternative to improving living standards - it is the means to improve living standards.
As the writer Naomi Klein observed recently: "We all need to become eco-populists. That means championing policies that significantly lower daily costs while lowering emissions. Heat Pumps for All, alongside much more robust tenant rights; free and better public transit; price caps on green energy; make polluters pay for the transition. The right has successfully painted climate action as an elite cause driven by the Davos Class, and the Democrats avoided rather than confronted that narrative. It's our urgent job to show that people don't need to choose between caring about the fires and storms threatening their homes and their equally urgent need to economically survive."
You can question whether 'eco-populist' is a useful term, given the damage populism is wreaking. You may also disagree with some of Klein's specific policy proposals. But her central conceit is indisputable. Climate action will only succeed if it delivers on its promise of lower energy bills, happier and healthier communities, and enhanced economic and national security. Regressive policies need to be phased out and there needs to be a laser focus on interventions that deliver rapid and visible cost-savings. Every green policy and investment needs to see itself as both part of a grand global mission that will define the 21st Century and a mechanism for improving lives and livelihoods in the near term and at the local level.
Climate change is not an elite concern - it is a threat that is already touching everyone's lives and a cause of grave concern for the vast majority of the public. The real elite here is a billionaire President, his network of shadily funded think tanks, and the pollutocrats of the fossil fuel industry who are trying to convince voters scientific and economic truths can be ignored.
Climate change isn't ‘woke', but we do need to wake up to how climate action is under threat.
