As the COP 28 climate summit entered its final negotiations, Graham Stuart, the U.K.’s minister of state for energy security and net zero, flew the 3,400 miles back to London from Dubai for a critical vote in parliament on immigration. Then, he turned around and flew back to the United Arab Emirates.
Stuart’s absurd round trip is an almost too perfect encapsulation of the U.K. government’s attitude toward the climate crisis. Once seen as a global leader on climate, the U.K. has lurched rightwards under its Conservative government, which has watered down climate targets, launched a “pro-motorist” campaign against cyclists, and passed draconian laws limiting the right to protest in response to direct action from climate activists.
What’s now known as climate populism is on the rise across Western democracies. In the Netherlands, far-right leader Geert Wilders, whose PVV party won the largest share of the vote in elections in November, made hostility to carbon emission targets a significant part of his platform. Populist parties in the Nordic countries have flirted with climate denialism. In the U.S., Republicans are lining up to attack President Joe Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, an enormous package of green stimuli that GOP presidential primary candidate Nikki Haley has called “a communist manifesto filled with tax hikes and green subsidies that benefit China and make America more dependent on Beijing.” On the more lunatic fringes, conspiracy theorists have tied climate measures to the racist “Great Replacement” theory.
These populists are exploiting real tensions within the green transition away from fossil fuels. The shift to new models of production and consumption is reopening old conflicts around land, culture, identity and colonialism. Over the past year, Coda Story has worked to understand the compromises and complexities of addressing climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental health, looking at how power, wealth and geopolitics are restructuring the global economy and changing our daily reality on the ground, worldwide.
