As Rishi Sunak watered down the UK’s net zero plans this week, the prime minister promised ahead of 2024 elections that he would shun efforts to decarbonise faster than other countries.
“When our share of global emissions is less than one per cent, how can it be right that British citizens are now being told to sacrifice even more than others?” said the leader of the ruling Conservative party on Thursday.
Similar scenes are playing out across the world. As 2030 approaches — the year by which scientists say the planet must almost halve greenhouse gas emissions — governments face pressure to take rapid action. But that pressure has prompted a reaction in which politicians from Germany to the US are promising a rollback of green measures they believe will prove unpopular.
In many industrialised countries, an issue once peripheral to hard-fought election battles has moved to the centre. EU voters frequently cite climate change and energy among the three issues most important to them. The latest political wrangles follow the hottest season on record and a global spate of wildfires, floods and heatwaves, all worsened by global warming.
“Climate is being weaponised by some political opponents,” says Mathieu Lefevre, chief executive of non-profit More in Common. “This is the story of the climate agenda becoming central [to politics].”
After the 2015 Paris accord, in which almost 200 countries agreed to limit global temperature rises to well below 2C and ideally 1.5C, a wave of governments set targets for emissions cuts, often with aiming to reach so-called net zero by 2050.
But there is a growing realisation among politicians that goal will require immense effort, says Lefevre. This week Sweden, pioneer of the net zero target, said it would miss its 2030 interim aim, as well as its 2045 target. Germany’s fragile governing coalition was almost broken this year by proposals to ban domestic boilers run on oil and gas.
Some politicians on the right are making a softening of climate-related policies central to their pre-election strategies. In the UK, where the opposition Labour party is promoting its green credentials, Sunak is betting he can win public support for his package of net zero delays.
In the EU, centre-right politicians point to the bureaucratic burden of the bloc’s sweeping Green Deal climate law ahead of European parliament elections in 2024. They argue that as companies face inflation and skills shortages, they need more support, not legislation. French president Emmanuel Macron called this year for a “regulatory pause” on green measures.
In the US, Democrats are playing up the $369bn of green subsidies on offer in the country’s landmark climate legislation, the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA). At the same time, Vivek Ramaswamy, a Republican presidential hopeful, has pushed back against the existence of human-made climate change. Frontrunner Donald Trump has repeatedly minimised the risks, saying this year that the risk of nuclear war was far greater than that of global warming.
Leftwingers hope, however, that attempts to link climate action with people’s anxiety over the economy will fail. Frances Colón, who focuses on climate policy at the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think-tank, said the IRA was bringing huge investment into so-called Red states controlled by the Republican party. “People are seeing those investments. They’re seeing jobs being created,” she said.
While opinion polls indicates that voters care about climate change and often want governments to do more, their attitude can change in the face of policies directly affecting their daily lives, especially those they believe could cost them money.
Polling by YouGov ahead of Sunak’s changes found that half of voters support delaying a ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 to 2035 — even as those believing that the government was not doing enough to achieve net zero far outnumbered those believing their plans were sufficient.
In Germany, the proposal to ban oil and gas boilers was seen by analysts as a key driver of a decline in the popularity of Olaf Scholz’s ruling three-way coalition and a surge in support for the far right AfD.
The Inflation Reduction Act has so far largely avoided these pitfalls because it avoids imposing direct costs on voters, instead offering subsidies and grants such as a tax credit of up to $7,500 to buy electric cars. Republicans have characterised it as government overspending, but have been less able to capitalise on the idea that it will hurt voters’ wallets.
Michael Jacobs, professor of political economy at the University of Sheffield and a former climate adviser to the UK government, said some far-right or populist parties believe they can “mobilise a certain political base around a cultural-cum-economic pocketbook argument” that climate change is a preoccupation of the wealthy, while the poor will be forced to pay.
Catherine McKenna, former Canadian climate minister, said politicians using climate change as a “wedge issue” do so at their peril. Conservative politicians tried this in Canada, she said, pushing back against the Liberal government’s introduction of a carbon price, and lost the 2021 election in the process.
“Most people actually want smart action on climate change,” she said.
Steve Akehurst, a polling analyst specialising in attitudes to climate change, said tackling global warming has been a “consensus issue” in the EU and UK for voters for years, while the US has been more polarised.
“I don’t think there are many votes to be won on an anti-climate agenda . . . in Europe and the UK,” he said. Some voter pushbacks have resulted from “mis-steps” such as the German government’s failure to pledge adequate funding for the transition away from fossil fuel boilers, he said.
Yet in the Netherlands, the success of an upstart farmers’ movement in local elections in March — thanks to a backlash against EU nitrogen pollution rules — has prompted fears of similar support for its anti-climate agenda when the Dutch hold national elections in November.
“The risk is that is that climate becomes a football in the culture wars,” Lefevre said. “That would be a great disservice to what is a shared challenge to all of us.”
Additional reporting by Laura Pitel in Berlin
Read the full article here