Key governance lessons for Canada

Here’s a salutary tale from the UK illustrating how politics is the key barrier to the urgent climate action we need. Voters in the London suburb of Uxbridge this week elected an MP to replace disgraced former Conservative prime minister Boris Johnson.

The Conservative vote collapsed, plunging by half. But the voters of Uxbridge still elected a Conservative, as they always have since 1970. The candidate squeaked in by 495 votes.

But a significant part of his local campaign was against a scheme to penalise the 10% of most polluting cars with a daily fee for driving in the area. This is being implemented by the opposing Labour party’s mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, to reduce the huge health damage caused by air pollution.

Nonetheless, the conclusion drawn by current prime minister Rishi Sunak was that “green” policies were unpopular and should be downgraded or delayed. Sunak talked of being “proportionate and pragmatic”. Unfortunately, physics doesn’t care about sensible-sounding words. The screamingly obvious urgency of fighting the climate crisis means winning the race slowly just means losing.

Politics is not just hard, it’s dirty too. Grant Shapps, the UK’s minister for energy and net zero has engaged in a campaign of mudslinging since late May. He accuses Labour of being the “political wing” of direct-action campaigners Just Stop Oil, because a green entrepreneur donated some money to both. Shapps has now tweeted 33 times on this, often making misleading claims. He has tweeted precisely zero times about his day job of net zero.

Perhaps the dirtiest side of politics is the lobbying from vested interests. The fossil fuel industry has lied and lobbied for decades, crippling climate action. Petrostates like Saudi Arabia routinely block progress in international forums, such as at the G20 meeting this week. Again, the UK has an illustrative example: lobbyists for the gas boiler industry are working hard behind the scenes to delay the take-up of heat pumps.

So, how can the politics of the climate crisis be fixed?

Let’s start from the bottom up. Politicians are more often followers than leaders, so they need to be deeply convinced that the voters they court will reward them for good, green policies and punish them for the bad, brown ones.

Opinion polls routinely indicate that most people care about the climate crisis. But there is always a nagging doubt that when they enter the voting booth, short-term enticements – say, tax cuts – will grab their vote.

“I need a million people on the street,” a former cabinet minister once told me once, in order to win the green arguments at the top table in government. Today, the only path to a safe and prosperous future is the green one. But politicians will only march down it if told to do so loudly and repeatedly by their voters.

People power can tackle lobbying too, by campaigning to destroy the social licence of the vested interests so that their bad faith actions are plain to see.

Fixing the politics also needs top-down action. Politicians must ensure green policies are carefully implemented, so those on low incomes are not penalised. Failing to do so allows ideological opponents and vested interests to weaponise their policies, whether they actually care about the poor or not.

The goal must be to make doing the green thing the smart and easy thing. This will get simpler as costs continue to fall for electric cars, heat pumps and tasty alternatives to meat and dairy. In some cases, politicians don’t even have to spend taxpayers money but can just send the right signals, as research on positive tipping points shows.

Not being dumb really helps too. In 2013, prime minister David Cameron “cut the green crap”, to shave a little off energy bills. The collapse in home insulation installation that followed has cost people £2.5bn in higher energy bills.

Can we fix climate politics in time to avoid the worst impacts? One scientist I spoke to this week didn’t think so: “The political system does not have enough strength to do this. The only hope we have is the development of technology.”

I disagree. If people can face down the lobbyists and persuade politicians that their careers depend on fighting the climate crisis, I think it’s still in our hands.

Photo by Marcin Nowak on Unsplash