Kemi Badenoch’s speech on climate this week was not interesting of itself: she said net zero couldn’t be achieved by 2050 “without a serious drop in our living standards or by bankrupting us”. She has no expertise in climate science, no background in renewables or apparent familiarity with the advances made in their technology, no qualification in economics – just about the only bit of that sentence she knows anything about is bankrupting us.
Yet even if Badenoch can take its particulars and shove them, the fact of its existence is interesting for a number of reasons. First, this attack on net zero has been predicted, not secretly by new-Conservative fellow travellers, though conceivably them too, but by progressives – and for years. Among the first was the Cambridge academic David Runciman, who predicted a backlash against action on the climate crisis as the new galvanising issue on the radical right after it had moved on from Brexit. On his Talking Politics podcast, he was in conversation with Ed Miliband, who took that point but said he hoped Runciman was wrong. He was not wrong.
Ben Stewart, one quarter of the direct action/public art group Led By Donkeys described even more closely what the anti-green arguments would look like and the trajectory they would follow. Before Brexit, he’d been looking at who had links to the leave campaign, and cross referencing their other interests – Matt Ridley, coalmine magnate and climate crisis sceptic, Matthew Elliott, founder of the TaxPayers’ Alliance, opponent of green taxes, stalwart of Tufton Street. “Brexit was always, obviously, a plan to completely gut climate regulation,” Stewart told me last year. “First these people denied the science. Then they abandoned that trench and moved back to, ‘the science is probably real, but the impacts of climate change aren’t going to be too bad.’ Then they went to, ‘the science is real, it could be bad, but we can’t do anything about it because it’s too expensive.’”
That’s where we are now, and Badenoch’s may be the most mainstream expression of it so far. Because even while outlets such as GB News have been preaching climate impossibilism for some time, it has until now been broadly disallowable in mainstream political discourse. Politicians could undermine climate action tangentially, by fulminating about Extinction Rebellion or by sideswiping at the “green crap”, but would not, if they were ambitious, pursue a despair agenda. Not because it wouldn’t garner them attention, but because it meant resiling from scientific and international consensus.
Yet if Badenoch is the first prominent person to break the cross-party consensus on net zero, she’s not without cover. There has been a steady build of grassroots movements with specific, vehement objections to apparently pretty anodyne pro-environmental policies: ultra-low emission zones (Ulez) have attracted the ire of the outer London vandal-warriors; low-traffic neighbourhoods blew up into a culture war between neighbours; the 15-minute city attracted conspiracists with an intensity way beyond anything explicable by the idea.
All of this anti-climate activism looks, up close, like amorphous rage attached by an algorithm to an issue that could never express or contain it. Or, to put that more simply, Facebook getting peoples’s knickers in a twist. Yet when it drags on, and percolates the phone-ins, and newsreaders start giving it the merest nod, “some people, of course, are very angry about Ulez”, it takes on the heft of an imagined constituency, people who are fed up with environmentalists. Badenoch is speaking their truth. You may feel passionately that we have one precious planet and should do everything in our power to protect it, but you’re not the only one who’s allowed feelings.
And now, as progressives or environmentalists, or whatever word you want to use if you’re too polite to say “sane people”, we’re into discursive territory that’s deeply familiar, though you couldn’t call it our “happy place”. Most of us would acknowledge the increasing radicalism and stridency of the anti-environmental agenda, and we’re self-soothing with the fact that public opinion on net zero is still solidly in favour. Getting into the weeds of Badenoch’s own character, a debate is playing out that is also deeply familiar – is she saying this because she’s enchanted by dark money, or is it because she’s an “irresponsible, ignorant, reactionary fool”, as one journalist put it.
This may be a useful point at which to consider not the arguments themselves, but what happened last time: when we last saw irresponsible, ignorant, reactionary arguments, which if followed through would be greatly to the nation’s detriment, whose proponents seemed to be effortlessly attaching themselves to a simmering underlying rage that they had no real answers for, over an issue that public opinion, previously, had seemed quite sensible on. That time when it was never quite clear where the money was coming from, but you could definitely smell it somewhere – did that energy dissipate? Was good sense enough to chase the charlatans out of town? Or did they, in fact, win? I think we all remember.
Ben Stewart names not just the trench Badenoch is fighting from now, but “the next trench, the last trench: which is to say, ‘Climate change is real, it’s bad, it’s expensive, but it’s too late.’ By the time they start winning that argument, it will be too late.” We need to do better on rightwing activism this time, rather than just ignoring it and hoping it will go away.
