From Consensus to Culture War: Forty Years of UK Climate Policy

It's time to stop thinking about the climate crisis as a problem for the future. If the past week of stifling temperatures in the United Kingdom has shown us anything, it is that global warming is a visceral, present reality. Yet at this very moment, when the effects of climate change are so tangible year on year, political discussion skirts around the issue. 

Squabbles over North Sea oil have dominated the conversation recently, despite experts having made it clear that around 90% of oil and gas has already been extracted. The issue is often presented as a choice between continuing to drill the remaining reserves, or accepting higher household energy bills. But this is a false binary. The actual choice is between investing in sustainable, long-term energy infrastructure, or locking ourselves into dependence on a dwindling resource whilst further contributing to climate change.

It is more politically useful to paint the debate in different hues altogether, pitting the out-of-touch, dungaree wearing green campaigner against the ordinary voter struggling to pay their bills. But this turns an adult conversation about climate responsibility into another exhausting culture-war, and obscures the reality that a transition to cleaner energy is one of the few viable solutions to the problems we face today. Reform UK's pledge to scrap net zero targets altogether is the ugly symptom of this ignorance, as is the Conservatives' vow to repeal the Climate Change Act. Even Blair has chimed in on the madness, urging Labour to scrap its pledge to hit net zero by 2050. This spectrum of insanity reflects a growing willingness to sideline scientific evidence.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been remarkably clear about the scale of the challenge. In order to limit warming to 1.5°C, emissions would need to be reduced by 43% by 2030. As IPCC Chair Jim Skea put it: 'It's now or never, if we want to limit global warming to 1.5°C. Without immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors, it will be impossible'.

Despite these warnings, the Climate Action Tracker rates the UK’s efforts towards the 2050 net zero goal as 'Insufficient' in their current state: the UK’s climate policies and commitments need radical improvement if they are to be consistent with the Paris Agreement’s 1.5°C temperature limit. The last thing the UK's commitments need is watering down. 

Perhaps science has become harder to visualise in a post-truth world. Some even go as far as to deny global warming altogether. But according to the UN, failing to cap warming at 1.5 goal will bring heatwaves, droughts, wildfires, extreme weather: mortality rates will rise, ocean circulation systems may break down, tropical coral reefs will disintegrate. This heatwave is merely a foreshadowing of such horrors. Few situations justify the word 'apocalyptic' as readily as this one. Perhaps more depressing is our inability to build consensus, to truly drive the science home and impress the urgency of the matter on the decision makers and voters alike.

Yet this pessimism is relatively recent. Climate change was once an issue that enjoyed broad political consensus, a point Starmer alluded to recently during Prime Minister's Questions. Surprisingly, Thatcher was one of the earliest advocates for protecting the planet: drawing on her chemistry degree, she spoke sagely about the dangers of climate degradation long before the issue became mainstream. She warned the UN that 'mankind and his activities [were] changing the environment of our planet in damaging and dangerous ways'. Whether her warning was ultimately heeded is open to debate. But the more pressing question is how Britain moved from a position in which a Conservative prime minister could champion climate science, to one in which net zero targets have managed to divide politicians from all ends of the political spectrum.

During John Major's tenure as premier, scientific confidence increased alongside political consensus. The IPCC penned its first report on climate change, heavily influencing the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which Major stood firmly behind. As premier, he also ratified the pledges laid out in the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The first ever Conference of the Parties (COP), was held in Berlin in 1995. Momentum behind climate action was beginning to build, thanks to cross-party agreement on the issue. 

In 2001, the IPCC concretely declared that human activity was likely one of the biggest causes of global warming. Blair's government initially promised a 60% reduction in emissions by 2050, and then followed this up with the legally binding Climate Change act of 2008, passed during Brown's tenure. This marked an escalation of his earlier pledge, as it made the UK the first ever country to make its climate targets legally binding, inspiring imitations of such a framework internationally. This transition from fragile promises into legally binding commitments is perhaps the greatest signification of universal consensus on the issue. But the shared move forward by both Thatcher and Major's Conservatives, and Blair and Brown's Labour party, is perhaps the most remarkable thing of all. Policy was driving in the same direction across all administrations.

It is tempting to argue that the 2000s were a time in which sharing such consensus was easy. Politics certainly seems simpler then, in retrospect: Britain had not yet left the EU, or been plunged into the biggest recession since the Second World War thanks to the pandemic. However, 2008 was no easy year, and the financial crisis had an enduring legacy for Brown's predecessors. Despite the consequent austerity agenda pursued by the coalition government, Cameron attempted to position his government as the 'greenest government ever'. Environmental policy was at the forefront of his campaign, and he made his support for the 2015 Paris Agreement clear: 'what we are looking for is not difficult, it is doable and therefore we should come together and do it'. The simplicity of his remark recalls a time when the climate was not a means of political point-scoring. 

Cameron's approach to climate policy was certainly imperfect. His widely criticised u-turns on green levies and industry regulation raise questions as to how much of a priority the climate truly was to his government. But the fact that the centre-right of British politics had green policy at the forefront of its agenda, even for a moment, speaks volumes, and reminds us of just how far we have strayed. Critics have increasingly argued that post-2015 Britain became ungovernable, with the incessant turnover of prime ministers a symptom of this fact. This transition is aptly enacted in the disintegration of consensus that was to follow on climate policy. 

Theresa May's government made Britain the first major economy to legislate for net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050. But shortly after, during Johnson's tenure, a selection of Conservative MPs began to vocally criticise net zero policies, setting up the Net Zero Scrutiny Group in 2021. Opposition to climate measures was becoming organised within Johnson's party. Significantly, many of the MPs within the Scrutiny Group had close ties to the Leave campaign. Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine did not help the matter. Much like the recent turmoil with Iran, politicians began viewing domestic energy extraction as a solution to energy insecurity and rising prices. The debate increasingly grew into a choice between affordability and decarbonisation, and after a decade of austerity and an economically crippling pandemic, it is no surprise that cost of living became the political priority.

Liz Truss came to embody the scepticism of the scrutiny group. She framed climate measures as anti-growth, advocating for fracking and slashing environmental legislation, and was criticised even by former Conservative party leader William Hague. Such rhetoric seems to have held, with Trump, Badenoch and Farage all joining in on the clamour to 'drill baby drill' as a route to economic renewal. Sunak, whilst not tearing up plans for net zero altogether, significantly delayed many targets, such as the phasing out of petrol and diesel cars. He also removed the burden on homeowners and landlords to meet energy efficiency targets. The past five years has seen a depressing regression of climate action. 

There are many reasons why climate consensus has disintegrated over the past decade. Economic stagnation, the cost-of-living crisis, geopolitical instability and growing political polarisation thanks to emerging fringe parties have all played a part in distracting from long-term objectives. But climate change does not disappear when the news cycle moves on. The tragedy of the current debate is that Britain has already demonstrated that consensus on climate policy is possible. For much of the past forty years, governments of different political persuasions broadly agreed on the science and direction of travel towards preventing the climate crisis from cascading out of control. This consensus did not eliminate disagreement altogether - but it did allow successive administrations to pursue a common objective. As global warming becomes more and more immediate and tangible, the challenge is no longer merely the development of suitable policy, but the recovery of a shared sense of purpose. History proves that this agreement is achievable, and the future of the climate depends upon whether we can find it again.

Image: Flickr/Kumweni

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