It's not going to be a climate election

The next UK General Election has been called and the country will go to the polls in six weeks. The history of the Conservative's climate policymaking shows that nothing is going to change.

In something of a ridiculous spectacle on Wednesday last week, UK PM Rishi Sunak stood in the rain, looked sad, offered a pathetic preamble bullet-pointing his post-Covid successes, and announced a General Election for the 4th July. This choice of date taking many by surprise, the rumours have it that as Sunak has always threatened to call an election if members of his party were to try a leadership challenge, and so he did. Another theory holds that outsiders Reform, who were likely to bring Nigel Farage back to frontline politics, are showing well in the polls, and Sunak wanted to wrong-foot them mid-stride. Farage has recently announced that he will not be standing.

It was perhaps a fitting image to mark the final chapter of this episode of Tory government. A soggy, crisis-ridden PM, leader of a sodden, crisis-ridden party, announcing an event that will likely stir the biggest change to the party-arithmetic of the dampest Parliament in history, to the smallest possible effect outside it. The opposition Labour Party, if polls are to be believed, will benefit from the public’s utter contempt for this government, and will not just inherit its failures, but will double down on them.

I have long argued that a critical view of climate politics provides a microcosm, in which we can see a picture of our broader political situation. To what extent are we democratic? What is power, and how does it work in the 21st Century? Who wields it? What institutions are required? How do governments relate to individuals, to other governments, and to its predecessors? And so on. That, not “science” — which is entirely malleable to politics — is why I found climate change so interesting. So let’s start, not at the beginning of climate politics, but at a key point in the current government’s tragedy.