'I don't want to be seen as a zealot': what MPs really think about the climate crisis
One day in the summer of 2017, I was sitting at a cafe table in the atrium of Portcullis House, across the road from the Palace of Westminster. With indoor trees and a good coffee bar, it’s a pleasant place for politicians and their staff to meet, outside their cramped offices. I was there to interview an MP for a research project, hoping to learn more about how MPs understood climate change, and how that shaped their work in parliament.
The MP arrived. She was young and, at least on the surface, full of confidence. I explained that my interviews would be anonymised, so that she and others could talk freely about how they came to their public positions on climate. She told me she regularly speaks for her party on climate change, telling people about the need for action to tackle emissions. And yet, she said, there was a catch: lots of people in the constituency she represents have jobs in an industry responsible for huge amounts of carbon pollution.
She had two, conflicting, demands: she wanted urgent action on climate; and she also wanted government support to allow her local industry to continue polluting. She was simultaneously backing and opposing climate action. She was worried that someone – maybe a constituent or the local paper – would point out this glaring contradiction. But so far, no one had. “I thought I might get a bit of pushback,” she told me. “I’ve had absolutely zero.”
This contradiction sums up the state of climate politics in the UK today. There is strong cross-party support for far-reaching carbon targets. In June last year, the government passed a law to strengthen these targets, committing the UK to end virtually all emissions of carbon and other greenhouse gases within the next 30 years. There was next to no opposition – in fact, Labour and the Liberal Democrats argued for an earlier phase-out date. And yet politicians are oddly reluctant to talk about how we might actually meet these targets. There is very little honest debate about the major changes to our economy and society that will be needed if we are to meet this challenge. Like my interviewee, we’re all in favour of climate action, but we haven’t yet had an honest conversation about the power and the vested interests involved, or the choices that will have to be made if we are to achieve significant reductions in emissions.
I have come to think of this as the dual reality of climate politics. We know that things need to change, and yet we’re embedded in our current lives and our current politics. We exist in both realities at once. Politicians make grand statements about the threat of climate change, then flip straight back into politics-as-usual. They find it hard to imagine, and to get others to imagine, how we might talk about and bring into being a politics with climate at its heart. It’s easier to look away.
In recent months, though, politics has changed almost beyond recognition. The coronavirus pandemic is a global crisis that alters fundamentally the way we see risks, politics, and the relationship between people and society. Like everyone else, I am not sure what the world will look like on the other side. The only certainty is that everything will be different. If, as I’ve described, politicians have until now been finding it hard to contemplate radical changes to the status quo, has this barrier now fallen away?
Covid-19 is, understandably, taking up all the political and media attention there is, for now. But the need for fast, radical carbon cuts – and a political strategy that will allow this to happen – has not gone away. Will green investment be prioritised in the economic stimulus packages that are undoubtedly needed? Will people think differently about travel or food security? Will we emerge with a politics that focuses more on a collective approach to global challenges such as climate? Or will we fall back into desperate attempts to rekindle the old economy and the old ways? For now, there are only questions. But my research offers some clues about how the recovery could be climate-proofed.
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I’ve worked with politicians for many years. In the early days of Tony Blair’s administration, I got a job with the thinktank Green Alliance. I started to look into the backgrounds of new Labour MPs, trying to find ways of connecting with them on environmental issues. We worked with the Conservatives in opposition, too, so that they could hold the government to account. Gradually, climate issues grabbed a political foothold. In 2006, the Tories went into a local election campaign with the slogan “vote blue, go green”, and the parties began to compete for environmentally minded voters. Then in 2009, came the Climate Change Act, a comprehensive piece of legislation setting legally binding carbon targets into UK law.
Even then, the dual reality was evident. Despite the obvious implications for economy and society, there was precious little media coverage or political debate about these new laws. I asked a senior Labour figure what discussions there had been about the act as it went through parliament. “I don’t remember it being one of the big issues,” she told me. All the talk had been of counter-terrorism and banning smoking in public places. For climate, in contrast, “I remember it going on in the background, but it wasn’t something that had high temperature”. Politicians quietly passed a radical act of parliament committing the UK to serious change – and then carried on as normal.
That same year the act was passed, I had an idea that came to dominate my working life for a decade. Frustrated by the mismatch between the scale of the climate challenge and the response from politicians, I wanted to make sure that the next generation of MPs were equipped with all the evidence and skills they needed to make informed decisions on climate. New MPs are lobbied from all sides, but they are offered very little training or support for their new and often daunting roles. Climate science, and climate policy, is complex. How could we expect them to lead us if they didn’t understand what it was all about?
With the backing of Green Alliance and some philanthropic funders, I set up a training programme. We offered parliamentary candidates and new MPs the chance to learn about the science, policy and politics of climate in a series of tailor-made workshops. We worked with small groups of around 10 politicians, all from the same party, to allow them to question and debate freely. We asked leading climate scientists to join us to answer the MPs’ questions. Businesspeople came to talk through how they were thinking about the likely impact of climate change on their companies, and climate activists explained why they campaigned on the issue. At the end of each workshop, the new MPs got together with more senior politicians – ministers or frontbenchers – to debate what climate change meant for the outlook, values and strategy of their party.
Running these workshops was a fascinating experience. In each, there was a definite point which I came to think of as a “penny-drop moment”, when the participants came to realise the significance of the climate crisis and the way it would shape our collective future. In one workshop, for example, a very eminent scientist explained to MPs how crop yields are likely to be severely affected by extreme weather, a likely scenario if global average temperatures rise by 2C or more – and that this could lead to food shortages. The response was striking. There was a silence, a collective intake of breath, a recognition of the significance of the changes that could be upon us if we don’t act.
And then, at the end of our workshop, they walked out of the door and back to their normal lives.
We kept talking to them. We organised more briefings, and we worked with them in their constituencies to bring climate issues home. In Sheffield, we talked about how communities could set up and own renewable energy projects. In Nottingham, we talked about resilience to floods. They were polite conversations, but all the time, that sense of dual reality was with me. If they understood the seriousness of climate change, I thought constantly, why aren’t they doing more?
I became a little bit obsessed with this question. I wanted to see whether they worried about climate, or whether they had somehow convinced themselves that it would all be OK. I decided I would ask them directly. And so, in 2015, with Lancaster University, I set up my research project in order to learn more about how MPs understood climate change, and its implications for political life. I chose to work with a small number of MPs – 23 in all – to get a detailed, qualitative understanding of their views. I spoke to politicians from all parties and all levels of seniority. The only group I left alone were the small, but nonetheless influential, number of known “climate sceptic” MPs, who publicly state that they do not accept the scientific consensus on climate change.
I offered my interviewees anonymity. Many displayed a disarming frankness about their professional and personal struggles, often at odds with their appearance of breezy confidence.
All the politicians I spoke to accepted the science of climate change. And yet they downplayed the consequences. They showed a reluctance to discuss how climate change would reshape human society. A newly elected MP, talking to me in the House of Commons, told me that climate “terrified” him. “Where we’re sat right now might well be underwater, right next to the Thames. I wouldn’t fancy our chances.”
I asked why, if it’s so significant, it wasn’t discussed much in parliament. But he didn’t answer. He couldn’t, or didn’t want to, linger on this point: he steered the discussion on to electoral cycles, the health service, the economy. He was back in the manageable normality he knew, rejecting the reality of a climate-changed future that had, just a few moments before, terrified him.
Over the course of the interviews, carried out between 2016 and 2018, I saw a pattern emerge. The way politicians responded to climate didn’t just depend on what they thought about the science. Instead, it became clear to me that there were two main reasons why MPs struggled with the issue: first, because it didn’t fit easily into the culture of political life and their own identity as a parliamentarian; and second, because they worried that public support for climate action was limited, and that, as representatives, they needed to be led by their electorate.
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It’s obvious that the House of Commons is an institution with a strong internal culture. Yet I was surprised by the extent to which the MPs I spoke to felt constrained by the social norms of their workplace. In one conversation, my interviewee was deliciously unguarded in her opinions of her colleagues. She said that just a few of her 600 or so fellow parliamentarians took climate seriously as an issue: “You might not get into double figures.” She told me she saw everything through a climate lens, and was, in private, very critical of measures such as tax breaks for oil and gas exploration. And yet she felt that she had to tread carefully: she has to fit in. I asked her what would happen if she tried to intervene in a budget debate, to make the case that fossil fuels should stay in the ground. She replied: “I think they’d just think you were a bit ‘niche’, is the way I’d put it – I say ‘niche’ in quotes, like a bit of a lunatic fringe.”
One former MP, who had been an
active climate campaigner in parliament, said: “I was known as being a freak.” Another told me about how he tried to avoid being seen as a “zealot”. These remarks were common in my conversations with politicians. Some said they avoided any mention of climate for fear that it would put an unhelpful label on them. One confident, outspoken MP who worked on energy policy told me that he did what he could to promote policies that would reduce carbon, but justified his proposals on other grounds, such as reducing fuel bills. “I don’t use climate change as the word because I think it’s just toxic,” he told me. “As is the way in these issues which are contentious, you won’t take people with you politically.”
This shouldn’t come as a surprise. We know the way people think and act is conditioned by their social world. This plays far more of a role in our responses to climate change than we might imagine – and politicians are no exception.
Back in 2001, the anthropologist Kari Norgaard spent a year living in a rural Norwegian village. That winter, the weather was unusually warm. The lake didn’t freeze over, and the local ski resort had not received any snow by mid-December, having to resort to artificial snow – something that had not happened before. Income from the ski industry was reduced, and the tradition of ice fishing was interrupted. When talking about this and other weather patterns, villagers mentioned climate change, and seemed to have a good level of understanding. And yet climate was not something that people factored into their daily lives.
Norgaard uncovered a paradox: people were aware of, and concerned by, climate change, but chose to ignore it. It was an unspoken collective turning away. She asked: “How could the possibility of climate change be deeply disturbing and almost completely invisible – simultaneously unimaginable and common knowledge?” She labelled this phenomenon “socially organised denial”. Norgaard pointed to a range of strategies people used that allowed them to continue as if climate change wasn’t happening. Some said that Norway was a relatively small country, with insignificant emissions compared to the US. There was also a widespread sense that, as a rural community, they lived simply and “with nature”. By telling each other these and other stories, they created the fiction that all could continue unchanged.
Socially organised denial is alive and well in the Commons. It is exacerbated by very deliberate strategies from those who have a stake in high-carbon activities: countries, and companies, that depend on fossil fuels.
As a result, it is surprisingly difficult for politicians to talk openly about the need to transition away from fossil fuels. Witness Nicola Sturgeon, leader of a progressive Scottish government that champions strong climate commitments, while also supporting continued oil and gas extraction in the North Sea. When challenged, her reply is always the same: the industry “cannot be shut down overnight”. She’s right. But her dismissive response shies away from the science, which tells us very clearly that fossil fuels need to stay in the ground, and that we need a plan to move away from them, and create opportunities and jobs elsewhere – not overnight, but urgently.
The toxic combination of socially organised denial and deliberate lobbying has created a problem that I’ve come to think of as the “feelgood fallacy”. So far, climate action has focused overwhelmingly on low-carbon solutions such as developing renewable energy or offering grants for electric vehicles. These are very valuable schemes, but all this positive activity masks a deeper problem. Little has been done to curb carbon-intensive activity. New coal mines are opened and new airports built with little discussion of climate impacts. If we are constantly finding new ways to dig up and burn carbon, it won’t be enough just to ramp up renewable energy. Study after study shows that meeting climate goals means phasing out the extraction and use of oil, coal and gas – yet no mainstream political party has a coherent plan to do this.
If pressed, politicians like Sturgeon could hide behind a quirk in the rules of carbon accounting. According to conventions set by the United Nations, we count the carbon where it’s burned, not where it’s taken out of the ground. This creates a strange incentive to dig more up, ship it out and let other countries take the hit on their carbon target. But what might make accounting sense for one country works directly against the global goal of reducing emissions.
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Politicians, then, are constrained by the culture of political life. They also feel constrained by the electorate. There was a striking consistency in my interviews: no MP felt that their voters were putting them under particular pressure to act. As one said to me, “I’ve knocked hundreds, literally thousands of doors, and had tens of thousands of conversations with voters … and I just don’t have conversations about climate change.”
Many of these conversations took place before the school climate strikes and Extinction Rebellion protests began in 2018 – these were remarkable events, after which the polls showed heightened levels of concern. Yet speaking to politicians during and after the 2019 election, I heard a lot of uncertainty about how this generalised concern might translate into support for particular climate strategies. And this matters, particularly in the UK’s constituency-based system, where MPs feel a particularly strong attachment to the local patch, described by one as “almost like being a parent. It’s got the sort of joys and terror associated with that type of emotional connection.”
Exactly how a politician “represents” the people is not at all straightforward. When an MP campaigns against a hospital closure, they are, in effect, saying”: “I am campaigning for local health services and this makes me a worthy representative of this area.” This is a relatively straightforward claim. With climate – a complex, global issue with no clear beginning or end – it’s more complicated. Politicians have to work quite hard to make a claim for why acting on climate is in the best interests of their electorate.
They might do this through pointing out that a global problem such as climate change requires everyone to do their bit. But this claim is often ignored, because people are understandably caught up with their daily lives and struggles, or feel powerless, cynical or overwhelmed by the scale of the challenge. Some politicians point out the economic or social benefits of climate action, such as jobs in renewable energy. As one told me: “I’m happy to use an economic argument if that means more people will come on side.” Another told me about proposals for a new road in his constituency, which he opposed. If he had used a climate argument, he said, “there would have been a rolling of eyes and saying: ‘Oh, here he goes again.’” Instead, he made the case on economic grounds, saying that investment in public transport was a better option.
There’s a danger in dampening down the message in this way. If politicians don’t speak out, people don’t feel a sense of urgency. They are less likely to support climate action if they don’t see their politicians leading the way, or offering up a strategy that is as serious as the problem it is designed to address. Climate politics becomes a silent standoff, with neither citizens nor representatives willing to make the first move.
But this standoff contains the seeds of a solution. If politicians have the confidence to lead, to see climate action as a social contract between citizens and politicians, this is likely to lead to greater support. What could a confident climate politics look like?
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In this new world of the coronavirus pandemic, this question is all the more urgent. Some have cheered the unintentional environmental benefits of lockdown. It’s certainly true that the air is cleaner, the streets quieter.
We can hear the birdsong. Carbon emissions have taken a dive, too. But this is in no way a model for climate strategy. Experience from China has shown that emissions bounce back pretty quickly once lockdown restrictions are eased. But most importantly, lockdown has imposed untold misery and sacrifice. This is emphatically not what is needed for climate action. Instead, politicians need to talk about a purposeful transition: not the juddering halt of lockdown, but the managed transformation of our economy, so wellbeing increases as carbon falls.
What the pandemic does provide, though, is the possibility of change. The government has done things in the last few weeks that no one thought possible: paying the wages of millions of private-sector workers; shoring up company finances; involving itself in the lives of individuals in ways that would previously have caused the hackles of even the most radical of politicians to rise. Fundamentally, we are rethinking the relationship between state and citizen. As citizens, we have realised that we need the state to keep us safe from crises, be they immediate, like Covid-19, or longer term, like climate change. Politicians, for their part, have realised that people can rise to the challenge, if they understand what they need to do and why.
Once the trauma of lockdown eases, the rebuilding begins. This is perhaps the point at which the risks and opportunities for climate are at their most stark. The government could choose to align its recovery strategy with its climate strategy, or, in the rush to prop up an ailing economy, it could do the opposite – handing money out in such a way as to safeguard the high-carbon economy.
If we are to make the right choice here, as a society, the essential first step is a simple one: speaking out. Politicians, and others, need to speak openly and with unflinching honesty about the significance of climate change. As my conversations with MPs have shown, this is a surprisingly difficult thing to do. The left has made a start, with its idea of a Green New Deal. In the US, politicians led by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ed Markey put forward a plan aiming for net-zero emissions and 100% renewable energy, including job creation in manufacturing, economic justice and even universal healthcare.
Following Covid-19, what the Green New Deal now offers is, essentially, a green route to recovery. The plan has many critics, but compared to the lowkey approach favoured by UK politicians, it has the advantage of being idealistic, bold and honest. It tells a story about climate action that aims to connect with voters. Elements of this approach could be seen in Labour’s 2019 election offer. On the political right, though, despite support for ambitious targets, there is a distinct lack of a clear story on climate.
A second step is to open up a more meaningful dialogue between citizens and politicians. One practical way is through processes like citizens’ assemblies. Early this year, Climate Assembly UK got underway. This gathering of 110 representative UK citizens, commissioned by six select committees, has heard evidence from experts on climate science and responses, has discussed and deliberated on possible solutions, and will shortly report its findings back to parliament.
Third, improving conversations on climate change almost certainly requires more of an appeal to the heart as well as the head. The language of costbenefit analysis and gross domestic product has its uses, but its appeal is limited, and it accentuates the divide between experts and public, rather than breaking it down. Yet this is the language that politicians have used until now. There are parallels here with the Brexit debate. Remain politicians thought they could win by putting forward a clear-headed case for economic stability, but they left the emotion out of it. In truth, we need both. People care about family, fairness and decency, and an enabling state, looking out for the interests of its citizens. This is exactly how climate action could be framed. Following the coronavirus shutdown, there’s an opportunity to involve people in shaping the way we rebuild our societies and economies, to increase resilience against future threats – not least, those arising from climate change.
Every politician is reassured if they know there is support for their proposals. They can’t govern in a vacuum. We can’t afford to be silent now, when politicians are debating our future. Street protests are out of the question at the moment, but there are many ways to make your voice heard. Talk to MPs and local councillors about your views on climate. Get in touch by phone or email. Ask them what they think; make it a dialogue. From a politician’s point of view, showing your strength of feeling as a citizen, as someone who doesn’t normally kick up a fuss, is immensely powerful.
Given a meaningful opportunity to have their say, most people would support action in the face of the climate breakdown that is unfolding in front of us. But our democracies, in their current form, are just not offering people that choice. Politicians and citizens, if they take each other seriously, can turn this around. • Follow the Long Read on Twitter at @gdnlongread, and sign up to the long read weekly email here.