This January, California burned as wildfires swept through the state at what should’ve been its winter peak. At the same time, Washington DC and much of America’s south had a virtually unprecedented cold snap – cold enough that the USA’s new president was sufficiently deterred by snowflakes to move his inauguration indoors.
Closer to home, the UK and Ireland were hit by their worst storm in a decade, with hurricane-force winds leaving more than a million homes without power. As ever, there are always local explanations – California’s fires were made worse by uncleared scrubland, and no storm has only one cause. Nonetheless, there should be no doubt: climate change is not a problem for the future. It’s a real and present danger today.
The consequences of climate change are visible to anyone who watches the news. The time remaining to avoid catastrophe is dwindling. The world agreed to hit “net zero” – emitting no more carbon into the atmosphere than is taken back out – by 2050. There are only 25 years, or 300 months, left to reach that goal.
Progress, though, feels like it’s stalling at best and going backwards at worst. The most obvious obstacle is Donald Trump – the US is the world’s largest economy and the second-largest carbon emitter, producing just under 15% of the world’s CO₂.
On day one, Trump withdrew America from the Paris climate accords, having done the same during his first term, only for Joe Biden to re-enter the treaty during a cooling-off period. The US has essentially done the climate hokey-cokey for four years.
The impact of that is negative, but symbolic. His other actions are far more concrete: Trump has not only signed executive orders enabling the US to, in his words, “drill, baby, drill” but he has banned all new solar and wind power projects on federal lands, as well as offshore wind.
That solar ban is particularly damaging, as solar energy is cheap and extremely effective in much of the USA. Solar is marginal at best in the UK: we are hilly, densely populated, and much further north than many of us realise (the UK is on the same latitude as Siberia), meaning we don’t get much sunlight. None of this is true of much of the American South and Midwest.
Texas, hardly known as a bastion of wokery, is America’s solar powerhouse – having installed far more than liberal California. If Trump’s longstanding animosity to wind power is extended to solar, the USA’s rapid progress on green, clean energy could stall entirely.
But Trump is just the obvious side of a much wider malaise: even politicians who accept the reality of climate change seem increasingly unwilling to stand by their convictions. Foremost among those is the UK’s Labour government.
In opposition, green policies were put at the very centre of the Labour strategy to put growth first. Ed Miliband was allowed to develop a strategy that involved the now-notorious £28bn of investment a year towards net zero – bringing with it clean energy, more industry, more experts, and high-skilled jobs.
For a time, Labour had the confidence not just to have a bold climate policy, but to make it the centrepiece of their theory of change: the UK needs growth, and this could be jump-started by public investment, focused towards creating jobs as well as decarbonising the country.
Sadly, Labour lost its nerve. When Danny Beales narrowly failed to take Boris Johnson’s former seat of Uxbridge – which had been one of the safest Tory seats in the nation – in a by-election, Labour correctly concluded that the extension of the Ultra-Low Emissions Zone had probably cost them the election.
In reality, this was the result of unlucky timing: the by-election was held just weeks before the ULEZ extension, when both concern and misinformation about it were at their height. As if to confirm this, ULEZ was rolled out as planned, and Beales won the seat at the general election just months later.
But some of the advisers closest to Starmer decided drastic action was needed: if voters didn’t like ULEZ, they didn’t like green policies. Never mind that the £28bn green investment polled better than almost anything else Labour was offering.
Starmer’s office launched into a public fight with London mayor Sadiq Khan – the country’s second highest-profile Labour politician – over ULEZ, and Starmer’s office engaged in a months-long briefing war to kill off the £28bn green investment policy. Despite repeated public commitments from Starmer, Reeves and Miliband, the briefing worked and the policy died.
As a result, Labour has arrived in government with an agenda reliant on growth and no real plan to actually deliver it – resulting in the obvious scramble from Rachel Reeves and the Treasury for pro-growth policies.
The growth agenda is now presented almost as a challenge to Labour’s green ambitions, with a third runway at Heathrow airport suddenly coming back on the agenda – a very public kick in the teeth to Miliband and Khan, even if it is a defensible policy position to hold. Such is the antipathy to climate policy that the Sunday Times’ Tim Shipman was recently told: “Ed is the one minister we don’t want to be a success if we want to win the next election.”
Labour has abandoned what should have been golden political territory. Voters like the idea of green growth and investment, and want some good news on climate. They do not want to see the world’s greatest challenge left to a screaming match between soup throwers and climate deniers.
It is at risk of falling into a mealy-mouthed version of that artificial conflict, presenting its pro-growth policies as being in opposition to pro-climate policies – a false dichotomy that will only benefit its political rivals, while frustrating voters who expect results on both.
Keir Starmer says he doesn’t tolerate bullying and briefing, but his actions say the exact opposite: it is his office that has briefed relentlessly against Labour’s initial growth agenda, and which is now baiting Miliband to make his position untenable, just as other internal rivals have already been hounded out of their posts.
Right now, Labour is short on inspiration, and its internal battles have left it fumbling for a coherent pitch to the public. The party needs a galvanising cause that resonates beyond Westminster.
Embracing a pro-growth climate strategy is surely the best way to capture both hearts and minds – if it can only overcome the naysayers.
