Thank God for Englishmen!
This Sceptred Isle reigns supreme in climate sanity. For now.
Well looky here. You’re not taking crazy pills. You’re actually in, to coin a phrase, the Climate Majority1. You think climate change is real? Well 86% of Brits agree with you. And if you think humans burning fossil fuels is the primary cause? And 75% of people here agree with you on that.
Those were just a couple of highlights from a survey of more than 10,000 people in the UK in a report today by the Yale Program for Climate Communication. And if you’re Keir Starmer or Rachel Reeves and thinking, hmmm I wonder if there’s a wildly popular political position that more than two thirds of the country, or even better >80%!, support, have a word with your colleagues Ed Miliband and Chris Stark.
According to the Yale data, 68% of people here believe climate should be a “very high” or “high” priority for the UK government.
And more than 80% support the use of renewable energy for electricity, fuel, and heating:
We’ve just gone through a few electoral cycles around the world. And in most places, while climate and energy may not have had Main Character Energy they were not relegated to cameos. Unfortunately the results were…mixed.
But here in the UK, you’d be forgiven for memory-holing the fact that with an explicit agenda to decarbonise electricity by 2030 the current governing party won an historic majority. Because the various opposition factions talk about climate as if that had not happened. The previous ruling party is now foursquare against the policies it put into law over 14 years to lower emissions. And by some accounts the repeated flooding events due to emissions-altered-extreme-weather threatening the viability of entire towns is driving up support for the good aul climate denying lads in Reform UK.
In reality - and can we just acknowledge that a 10,000+ sample in a population of 69 million is pretty effing robust - people are not just aware of extreme weather and flooding…
They are, and this is where it’s just bloody lovely, as an 88/8 split, aware that climate change is exacerbating the flooding.
This data should be a bit of a slap for editors and political strategists going a bit wobbly because Nick bloody Robinson and Laura freaking Kuenssberg remain in “it’s all the game, yo” mode while retaining the commanding heights of British broadcasting.
So Why?
These figures in the UK - which reflect similar majorities in France, Ireland, Germany and other mostly sane places - haven’t shifted for years.
And that’s the dilemma for right-wing populist parties in Europe. Voters may have questions, some of them legitimate, about the pace and cost of the energy transition or steps to reduce emissions. What they also have is a finely honed sense of bullshit.
Yet they keep at it. Even putting Kemi Badenoch in the shade this week is Alice Weidel, the newly-crowned Chancellor candidate for the, erm, not mainstream party Alternativ für Deutschland (AfD). Like Reform UK, AfD has been blessed by Herrenvolk Billionaire Elon Musk as the Great White Hope [sic] for its Heimat.
ICYMI, here’s her moment while accepting her party’s nomination last weekend where she announced the plan2 to tear down every wind turbine (aka “Windmill of Shame”) in Germany and replace the lost generation capacity with a restored NordStream pipeline of Vladimir Putin’s gas. So….cool cool cool.
Why would you campaign on a position - like anti-renewables, pro-climate-denial - that only 20% of voters support? Your mileage may vary depending on whether your political system uses proportional representation vs first-past-the-post single member districts or the abomination that is the Electoral College. But the deeper point is one the literature is clear on:
The more people experience climate shocks and disruptions, the less their politics veers towards solidarity with others and collective action. Every LA fire, every Wales coal tip about to do another Aberfan, every town abandoned to the waves, perversely increases support for a politics that promises none of this is real, or if it is it’s the fault of woke/DEI/pointy-headed/lefty/tofu-eating Guardian readers who don’t appreciate the genius of “Landman”3 and want to tell you how to run your life.
So this is not a short game. It’s a long game.
Later on I’ll share my conversation with fan fave Tadzio Müller, the gay German communist to which I play the neoliberal shill in our chats. But fair to say he had a lot of POV on this issue (not just ‘who the fuck is Alice’ but the deeper underlying Verdrängung dynamic and how it plays out lots of places).
Englishmen
Before we go, here’s the inspiration for the headline, courtesy of BBC Studios:
*ok that’s a lie I just nicked it.
Seriously good news for those lads.
When not too busy “ReMigrating” people back to Syria, Turkey, et al…
About which more, anon.