What we talk about when we don't talk about climate

A guest post by Richard Bates

I’d like to write about climate change and green politics more often but it’s complex and I prefer elegant whingeing. So I enlisted my old friend

Richard Bates

, a perspicacious historian and environmentalist, to offer an analysis of how climate is distorting our politics in all kinds of peculiar ways.

Soly Moses, ‘Dramatic Night View of Californian Wildfires’, free to use

How much does the climate crisis shape our politics? On the surface, not much. Rare are the elections in which it becomes a leading issue. All the evidence suggests that – even as the window of opportunity for keeping the crisis manageable closes, setting us on a probably irreversible path to extreme societal stress, or even civilisational collapse – we'd just rather talk about other things.

After 28(!) increasingly grotesque international climate conferences, and despite all the progress on renewable energy technology, global emissions continue their remorseless rise. Still, to judge from events across the West in 2024, these things just don't seem to be that important to western electorates.

As a historian, I can't help but wonder what my future co-disciplinarians will make of this. Assuming our civilisation survives enough to maintain a healthy higher education system – and it already isn't doing great on that front, if we're honest – then an essay question of the future will surely be: Why?

What the fuck, exactly, humans of 1990-2030, did you think you were playing at? Your chance to stop the earth becoming largely uninhabitable is slipping away from you, and you’re arguing about – what? Trade tariffs? Inheritance tax? The social media ecosystem? How could you be distracted by such trivialities? How could you be so asleep at the wheel?

Yet let's assume that our hypothetical future academia also has room for the odd revisionist cultural historian. How might they contest the thesis that early twenty-first century westerners lived in astonishing, apparently deliberately-cultivated ignorance of this epic crisis? In other words, is there a sense in which the climate issue is everywhere beneath the surface, even if it seemingly remains marginal at the top line?

Surely there is. It’s there in Gen Z’s epidemic of anxiety, in Millennials’ dark humour that their plan for their pension is ‘to die in the climate wars’. It’s there in the declining birth rates across the developed world, as some young people agonise over the ethics of adding to the number of the most destructive objects on the planet (namely: western consumers)¹. Most obviously, perhaps, it’s there in the denialism that suffuses most right-wing media spaces, which has both become a core part of the modern populist right playbook, and contributed to its recent ascendancy.

In this regard, Professor Tim Bale’s research into the views and demographics of Reform UK party members is nicely illustrative. Yes, as expected, Reform members are old, Thatcherite, and hostile to immigration. But so are their Conservative equivalents. Two key differences mark out the Reform-ites. First, they are climate crisis deniers (sure, ‘net zero sceptics’, whatever) in a way that most Tories are not. Second, they are heavily online. These two things are of course related.

One of the key political trends of the last twenty years is the far right supplanting the centre right. This has pretty comprehensively happened in the USA, Hungary, France, Italy, Austria, and to varying degrees elsewhere. As Sam Freedman observes, the dynamics of First Past the Post may slow or defeat this process in the UK. But if we accept that a) there is at least a clear broad trend in this direction across the West in the last two decades, and b) a key dividing line between centre- and far right is the latter’s unwillingness to accept reality on the climate – then suddenly the climate issue looks more central to our politics again.

Trump’s victory is a disaster for innumerable reasons, but not least because it feels like a fairly definitive declaration by the public of the leading western nation that it either doesn’t care about the climate, or just fundamentally doesn’t believe the crisis can be solved. No previous President has been especially serious about tackling it, but Trump is what happens when you stop even pretending to care about the climate. Might there be even some refreshing honesty in that? If so, only of the blackest kind.

Stick Rich a coffee if you enjoyed his guest post today

I wonder if my future historian colleagues may come to see Trump as the first post-climate crisis politician, in the sense of being the first leader of a core western nation to abandon even the façade of mitigation, and instead seek only to profit from the inevitable fallout – by, for example, closing the border to climate refugees and annexing the resources opened up by melting ice in Greenland and Canada.

Yet that may be granting too much credit both to Trump and his voters. Another explanation is that a good chunk of the western public is simply too tempted by the psychological appeal of climate denial. A central plank of Trump’s success is his shitposting comic persona, which gives his followers permission to take nothing seriously.

And the thing about climate change is that if you take it seriously it’s fucking terrifying. Trump saying it’s a hoax, that wind farms cause cancer, is understood by his supporters to mean: you do not have to care about this. Indeed, to do so is woke and effeminate. That’s incredibly psychologically freeing – removing not just the terror at the implications but also the nagging sense that you should be doing your part by changing your behaviour.

This is where the issue can be a conduit into the wider far-right ecosystem. Denying the climate situation is powerfully appealing, because the reality is so frightening, our efforts to tackle it so inadequate, the behavioural changes it requires so inconvenient. The price of that denial, though, is to believe that our entire scientific edifice, the best mechanism ever designed for establishing empirical truth, is somehow either cosmically mistaken, or corruptly misleading, a vast conspiracy – even as an ever-growing list of immense, unignorable extreme weather catastrophes matches the scientists’ predictions exactly.

Once you’re prepared to deny science and reality in this way, you will do it in others. You will oppose vaccines. You will trustingly follow the algorithms as they deliver you content about chemtrails and the Deep State. You’ll come to think old Vladdy Putin is a nice chap. You’ll prefer, in short, to live in a fantasy world constructed by those who either share in these delusions or profit from them. (Remember how Reform UK members are all hyper-online?) The reason that Don’t Look Up (2021) is the best film yet made about the crisis is that it understood this dynamic – as well as, on current evidence, offering exactly the right amount of hope² that a culture overtaken by this thinking will get its act together in time.

At a minimum, with Trump already halting the funding for green energy projects under Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act – note that even major green legislation was framed in terms of reducing the price of eggs – we can see pretty clearly that the USA and the wider West will not lead the global energy transition. That role will now be left to the Chinese Communist Party, which will, shall we say, have its own agenda. Meanwhile, those who can see what’s coming have to find ways to find hope – for ourselves and our children, but also for our fellow citizens, before more of them tumble into this psychological wormhole³.

You want a resolution for what remains of 2025? Find a way to face up to the climate issue without either getting depressed or giving up and turning your brain into a comforting online mush. I’m afraid this may be harder than it sounds.

Richard Bates is a historian at the University of Nottingham.

https://www.nottingham.ac.uk/humanities/departments/history/people/richard.bates1

1. You might think this is all about housing costs, childcare and the hollowing out of middle-class professions. And obviously these things matter. However, with my historian’s hat on I can’t help but observe that the prospects for Gen Z on all those fronts are much better than for almost all previous generations, who nevertheless managed to reproduce at or above replacement level. Shifts in women’s roles and life expectations are another part of the explanation, but so too, and perhaps more crucially, is a reduction in hope for the future. Auden was wrong; millions can no more live without love than without water.

2. Spoiler alert: none whatsoever.

3. The centre-right, shrinking though it may be, is vital here. Climate activism cannot work if it is the preserve of the left, and defeating fossil-fuel-fascism will require a broad democratic front (what the French would call a front républicain) – just as it did in the 1930s/40s. Treat anyone who accepts reality as an ally.