In my final column of 2023, I wrote that I hoped this year would see anti-environmental policies being punished at the ballot box. In July, my wish came true, at least in the UK. I was in Mexico City when the results of the general election started to come through, and I watched with glee as 251 Conservative MPs were skittled, ending 14 years of increasingly shambolic rule.
There were many reasons for the Conservative party’s defeat, but their regressive, cynical approach to the environment was definitely one of them. And that has given me optimism that similar policies will backfire elsewhere, maybe even in the forthcoming US election.
The Conservatives came to power in 2010 (as part of a coalition) promising to be the “greenest government ever”. That didn’t last. Not long after, the then-prime minister David Cameron reportedly told his aides to “get rid of all the green crap”. From there on in it was downhill.
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By the time Rishi Sunak entered 10 Downing Street in 2022 – the fifth prime minister in six years – the government had declared open war on the environment, banning onshore wind farms, rowing back on net zero, promising to “max out” on North Sea oil and gas, jailing green protesters, giving full-throated support to motorists and allowing our rivers to fill with sewage.
This was all done with an eye on the votes of ordinary working people, emboldened by an unexpected victory in a by-election in outer London when opposition to the expansion of the city’s Ultra-Low Emission Zone (ULEZ) became an election issue. This led to a widespread belief that pro-environmental policies are a vote loser; the opposition Labour party also fell into this trap.
Two opinion polls published shortly after the election show this was probably a catastrophic miscalculation. One, carried out for the climate think tank E3G, found that the made no political gain from ditching the “green crap”. If they thought it would woo voters on their right flank tempted by the Reform party, they were wrong. If anything, it damaged them as it made it easier for environmentally conscious Conservative voters – of which there are many – to defect to parties with stronger policies.
The other poll, for Greenpeace, found that in the 251 parliamentary constituencies the Conservatives lost, almost half of voters surveyed said that the party was wrong to backtrack on the environment; less than a third said they were right. The sewage crisis turned out to be a major vote-loser for the Conservatives in their former rock-solid heartlands.
Polls, schmolls. But the scientific literature has been pointing in the same direction for some time. Voters do support green policies and are willing (in theory) to pay for them.
In February, a team led by Armin Falk at the University of Bonn in Germany published the of a representative survey of nearly 130,000 people across 125 countries that collectively account for 92 per cent of the global population. They found that 89 per cent of people say they want stronger political action on climate change, and 69 per cent say they are willing to contribute 1 per cent of their personal income to fund such action. “The vast majority of people around the world are willing to act against climate change and expect their national government to act,” the researchers conclude.
But interestingly, and pertinently to the Conservatives’ misjudgement, people also hugely underestimate their fellow citizens’ willingness to act. When respondents were asked how many other people they think are willing to contribute, they said around 43 per cent. Why this could be isn’t known. It may have something to do with the media disproportionately giving oxygen to minority anti-environmental views, suggest the researchers.
Whatever the cause, the Conservatives appear to have fallen into the trap of assuming green policies are unpopular when the opposite is true. They should have consulted the scientific literature. But that isn’t how right-wing populists operate.
I fervently hope US Republicans have made the same error. Donald Trump and his running mate J. D. Vance are, if anything, even more reckless on the environment than UK Conservatives and have they will take a wrecking ball to President Biden’s green successes. They presumably think this burnishes their popularity, but they may be in for a rude shock. Similar in the US shows that while 80 per cent of the public supports climate action, they wrongly believe that levels of public support are around half of that. Falk’s survey found that 70 per cent of Americans believe that their government should do more.
I don’t know where I’ll be when the US election results start rolling in. Hopefully not the US, because I think there could be trouble.
Graham’s week
What I’m reading
I’ve been bingeing an amazing podcast series about the fall of the Aztecs. No time to read!
What I’m watching
Ripley on Netflix.
What I’m working on
Prepping for our wonderful science of rewilding weekender in Devon (16 to 18 August). I’m hosting.
Graham Lawton is a staff writer at New Scientist and author of Mustn’t Grumble: The surprising science of everyday ailments. You can follow him @grahamlawton
