As climate change lengthens its stride, our response is becoming increasingly polarised. Nigel Farage’s talk of “Net Zero lunacy” helped Reform win hundreds of council seats and a by-election earlier this month, while Tony Blair’s comment that Net Zero is “doomed to fail”, which he later revoked, was seized on by environmentalists as evidence of betrayal. Meanwhile, in Germany, Alternative für Deutschland was pushed to its current position — the second largest party in the federal parliament — partly by a widespread aversion to heat pumps. And in Brazil, farmers consider President Lula to be an enemy of the people because of his record in protecting the Amazon rainforest.
The messaging is haywire. A recent newspaper headline announced with stentorian gravity the hottest May Day since records began; that same headline loomed over a photograph of swimmers frolicking in the surf. And my sheep-farmer neighbour in Cumbria — this year of all years, when the lambs were born onto bone-dry hillsides — leaned on the handlebars of his quad bike and said to me: “The thing is, Chris, when it comes to climate change, I don’t know what to believe.”
Well we do know that the world is getting hotter. Forget restricting the rise in temperature to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels, as envisaged by the 2015 Paris Agreement; depending on the time period you base your monitoring on, we’ve either already breached that limit or are about to do so. In March, the French government announced measures to prepare the country for a rise of 4°C. Even 3°C would, in the words of Lord Stern, a respected British climate economist, be “way outside the experience of Homo sapiens” and “life-changingly, civilisation-changingly, awful”.
Let nobody say we weren’t warned. In 2006, Stern wrote a report about the economics of climate change for Blair’s government that was widely read — and, as it turned out, widely disregarded — both in Britain and abroad. While Stern argued that “the benefits of strong and early action far outweigh the economic costs of not acting”, the most powerful government at the time, that of President George W Bush, believed more in regime change than climate change.
“Let nobody say we weren’t warned.”
Extrapolating from Stern’s figures, the $4-6 trillion that Bush and his successors spent invading and immiserating Afghanistan and Iraq would have paid for 10 years of the relatively inexpensive transition to a low-carbon global economy that was then on offer. Now, after two more decades of intensive fossil fuel consumption, ever-higher concentrations of greenhouse gases, and many political false starts, this transition has become both more costly and less assured of success. In 2024, the Independent High-Level Expert Group on Climate Finance costed the necessary climate measures at around $6.5 trillion a year by 2030, rising to as much as $8 trillion by 2035.
On 29 April, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI) published a paper entitled “The Climate Paradox: Why we need to reset action on Climate Change”. In the paper’s foreword, Blair wrote that voters are fed up with being asked to make “financial sacrifices and changes in lifestyle” that have “minimal” effect on global emissions, and that the UN’s annual COP talking shops “will not deliver change at the speed required”.
Coming from a former prime minister who prided himself on his reading of public opinion and his prioritising of “delivery” over dogma, these points were well made. Blair’s conclusion, however, was doctrinaire and unwise: “Any strategy based on either ‘phasing out’ fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.” Environmentalists erupted.
The paper itself was authored by Lindy Fursman, a former climate adviser to the New Zealand government. Besides advocating for more investment in adaptation and technological fixes such as carbon capture and removal — both eminently sensible, though regarded by hardline environmentalists as tantamount to “giving up” on efforts to cut emissions — Fursman divided humanity’s attitude to the crisis into three historical phases. First came an age of activism in the Nineties, which was followed by a decade or so of optimism; now, we’ve entered a far more ominous age of apathy.
The age of optimism peaked in Britain in June 2019, when the nation became the first G7 economy to commit to Net Zero by 2050. The amendment to the 2008 Climate Change Act was so uncontroversial that MPs waved it through without a vote. It was a rare moment of bipartisanship in the premiership of Theresa May. It was also a year of activism. Extinction Rebellion occupied public spaces, Greta Thunberg scolded the UK parliament, and in September, in cities around the world, at least four million youngsters, many of them truants grinning in their school uniforms, took to the streets to demand radical action. So rattled was the aviation industry by flight shame that a nervy KLM ad asked customers, “Could you take the train instead? Next time, think about flying responsibly.”
Then Covid arrived, followed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which laid bare, in Fursman’s words, “a fundamental reality: when faced with financial hardship, domestic economic stability and living costs take precedence over climate action”.
In the furore that followed the TBI’s intervention, Stern described Fursman’s paper as “muddled and misleading”. “If the UK wobbles on its route to Net Zero,” he went on, “other countries may become less committed.” Yet regardless of whether the UK government “wobbles”, the future of the world will not be determined by climate action here.
Britain’s share of global emissions is 1% and falling. Its self-image as a decarbonisation success story owes less to Net Zero policies than it does to the fact that Britain is a post-industrial economy offshoring emissions to Asian countries that make the processed food, clothes, and electronics we like to buy. By and large, we and much of the rest of Europe have done our emitting, while China surpassed America as the world’s biggest emitter more than 20 years ago.
Instead, it’s the increasingly populous emitters of the developing world — China, India, Southeast Asia, and Africa — that will decide what happens next. These markets should now be receiving an unprecedented inflow of affordable climate finance to enable them to feed, house and provide energy to their people without frying the world. And yet, for reasons of indebtedness, poor credit worthiness and superior returns on Wall Street, this isn’t happening except in the case of China. According to the International Energy Agency, 90% of new clean energy investment has gone to the rich world, plus China, since 2021. Just 2% has gone to Southeast Asia. And in 2024, investments in green energy in Africa, whose population is expected to double by 2070, totalled a nugatory $22 billion. This is the most significant factor in our current predicament. But it is not the only one, and, again, politics is to blame.
Far from being the subject of an international consensus, Net Zero has become as divisive a notion as Bush and Blair’s “war on terror” in the early 2000s, and without good reason, for while the war on terror was a mendacious enterprise dressed up as an elevating mission, Net Zero was once a more or less attainable goal undone by politics. As prime minister, Blair compared the fight against climate change to the battle against fascism in the Second World War, and it was his government that published the first draft of the climate change bill that went on to become law. But he also refused to end the tax-free status of aviation fuel because it would have imperilled the great British summer holiday.
Few politicians have the integrity and wherewithal to handle an issue that would test the capacities of the greatest visionary. Nor do we ask them to. But the proposition so cogently laid out by Stern in 2006 — essentially, pay not very much now in order to avoid a world of pain later on — was ignored by our leaders, and many electorates. Planning for the long term, it seems, is anathema to our instantaneous approach to capital allocation, communication and electoral success. Indeed, it may be that electoral democracy in its current state of degeneration is fundamentally unsuited to the kind of systemic change that the crisis demands. That China continues to bring coal-fired power stations online shouldn’t obscure the fact that the People’s Republic has developed by far the most plausible plan for the transition to renewable energy of any major economy.
Given that the Chinese model cannot easily be adapted in the West, and that meaningful change here will only come from popular pressure on political and economic elites, what is lacking most obviously from the current debate is the loud and ungovernable clamour of those who have the most to lose.
For while climate anxiety may course through our tracked and cosseted young people, there is no sign of further mass protests. Extinction Rebellion activists are referred to Prevent. Greta agitates for Gaza. Parents advise their offspring to concentrate on their exams. As I was told by a theology teacher at a large London secondary school, the exuberance shown by pupils during the protest of September 2019, and the school’s support for their cause, has given way to “hopelessness”.
An infantilised and emasculated youth is no driver of revolutionary change. And yet there are two reasons for young people to act. On the negative side, and to descend into the vernacular, while the planet is to some extent demonstrably and unavoidably shafted, if no action is taken it will become worse than shafted. It will become increasingly uninhabitable.
The second reason isn’t negative at all. It’s an inspiring message of emancipation that can be summed up in the words of Jeremy Oppenheim, whose company, Systemiq, funnels investment and expertise into climate measures around the world. “Sustainability,” he writes, “is a promise of freedom: freedom from polluted air, from unaffordable energy, from food systems that harm our health and ecosystems, and from plastics and chemicals that trash our environment… It’s not about restrictions or fear — it’s about the possibility of a better life.” This “better life” is one of abundance in which the weather is our friend, our food actually tastes of something, and we thrive in intelligent partnership with the forces of nature. What could be more thrilling than that?
It’s telling that the most significant intervention on the climate in recent times has come from a septuagenarian former prime minister with a trust problem. It’s time for young people to start owning this crisis; time for them to throw off the noise-cancelling headphones and try for a better life.
