The Terrifying Climate Chasm at the Heart of British Politics

The Terrifying Climate Chasm at the Heart of British Politics
by Ian Sinclair
Morning Star
14 May 2024

While there are significant gaps between reality and the policies of the UK governing elite on many issues, arguably none is wider and more terrifying than the ongoing climate chasm.

The frightening reality of the worsening climate crisis should be clear to anyone paying attention. So while the Guardian recently published the headline Deal To Keep 1.5C Hopes Alive Is Within Reach, Says CoP28 President, in 2021 the top climate scientist Dr James Hansen had already noted “There is now no chance whatever of keeping global warming below 1.5°C.” As he argued earlier this year: “We are not moving into a 1.5°C world, we are briefly passing through it in 2024. We will pass through the 2°C world in the 2030s unless we take purposeful actions to affect the planet’s energy balance.”

The results of a new survey of 380 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) climate scientists conducted by the Guardian is similarly disturbing: 80 per cent of respondents said they expected the world to warm by at least 2.5°C by 2100, with almost half anticipating an increase of 3°C.

“If you go past 2°C, then we will enter completely unknown terrain,” Professor Johan Rockström, Director of the Potsdam Institute for climate Impact Research, said in 2022. “A planet that is not even resembling our own planet. A place we haven’t been in for the past three million years. So we can today say scientifically, without any hesitation, that anything beyond 2°C of global warming is nothing but catastrophic.”

Speaking in 2022, United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres fleshed out what this would mean: “We are on a fast track to climate disaster. Major cities under water. Unprecedented heatwaves. Terrifying storms. Widespread water shortages. The extinction of a million species of plants and animals. This is not fiction or exaggeration. It is what science tells us will result from our current energy policies… the results will be catastrophic.” Noting there was great uncertainty about the figures, in 2014 the International Organization for Migration forecast the number of climate and environmental migrants by 2050 would be between 25 million and 1 billion.

In 2020 over 250 scientists and scholars from around the world called on policymakers “to engage with the risk of disruption and even collapse of societies”, noting “researchers in many areas consider societal collapse a credible scenario this century.” Similarly, in 2017 Sir David King, former Chief Scientific Adviser to the UK Government, referred to human-caused climate change as “an existential threat to our civilisation in the longer term.”

What is to be done? According to the authors of the 2022 IPCC report on impacts, adaptation and vulnerability “Targeting a climate resilient, sustainable world involves fundamental changes to how society functions, including changes to underlying values, world-views, ideologies, social structures, political and economic systems, and power relationships.” King himself advocates “a philosophical and cultural transition towards an ecological civilisation”.

More specifically, Professor Jim Skea, Chair of the IPCC, says averting climate catastrophe requires “immediate and deep emissions reductions across all sectors” (when Skea says “immediate” it’s worth noting he made this statement over two years ago).

How big do the cuts need to be? In 2013 climate scientist Professor Kevin Anderson calculated that if wealthy nations were to remain within their fair contribution to a carbon budget that keeps the global temperature rise to under 2°C they needed to make immediate emissions cuts of between 8 and 10 per cent per annum. For comparison, global emissions fell by 5.4 per cent when the pandemic brought the world to a halt in 2020.

Researchers have given an insight into the radical action required in particular sectors of the economy.

Using London as a case study, in 2023 four UK-based academics published an article in the peer-reviewed Nature Communications journal recommending “a rapid and large-scale reduction in car use is necessary to… meet stringent carbon budgets that limit temperature rise to 2°C at most”. One such stringent carbon budget requires a 72 per cent reduction in car travel activity by 2025, along with other measures such as retrofitting fossil fuel cars.

Similar fundamental change is required in the agricultural and food industries. In 2018 a University of Oxford-led study published in Nature journal found that to avoid dangerous levels of climate change beef and pork consumption needs to fall by approximately 90 per cent in Western countries (while increasing beans and pulses between four and six times), and milk consumption reduced by 60 per cent. Likewise, a Harvard Law School report published in March surveyed over 200 climate scientists and sustainable food/agriculture experts based in 48 countries, finding 78 per cent of respondents considered it important that absolute livestock numbers peak globally by 2025. 89 per cent of respondents agreed livestock emissions should then fall rapidly in high income countries.

Trying to join all the dots together, author Naomi Klein and other experts and observers have long argued the climate crisis requires the wholesale transformation of society on the scale of the national mobilisations during World War Two or the Marshall Plan. However, when I interviewed Anderson for the Morning Star in 2016, he noted “Even the World War Two Marshall Plan is not as significant as what we would need now. We have to transition every part of our infrastructure to address climate change”.

Rather, Anderson and his colleague Alice Bows-Larkin were arguing in 2013 that “wealthier nations need, temporarily, to adopt a de-growth strategy.”

It seems they were ahead of the curve. “Advancing to a post-growth economy is not only to survive, but also to thrive,” over 400 experts and civil society groups across Europe wrote in an open letter last year. “This calls for a democratically planned and equitable downscaling of production and consumption, sometimes referred to as ‘degrowth’… in a post-growth economy, the current focus on quantitative growth would be replaced by the aim of thriving in a regenerative and distributive economy.”

Compare all of this expert testimony and academic research to the criminal (in)action of the UK governing elite.

In 2022 the UK Climate Change Committee (CCC) noted “major policy failures” and “scant evidence of delivery” for the UK government hitting its Net Zero 2050 target. Shockingly, earlier this month the government announced fossil fuel companies will be allowed to explore for oil and gas under off-shore wind sites for the first time.

Moreover, in March the CCC noted that the government’s plans to adapt to the changing climate “fall far short” of what is required.

A Labour government might be better than the Tories, though there is no indication they are seriously engaging with the evidence and experts on the climate crisis. For example, in March Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves pledged Labour’s policy would end up “hardwiring economic growth into budget and spending review processes, with a reformed and strengthened enterprise and growth unit”. How this single-minded pursuit of economic growth fits with our rapidly deteriorating climate wasn’t explained.

There are even some climate experts who seem to be misleading the public about the level of change the climate crisis necessitates. For example, last month the Guardian interviewed Chris Stark, the outgoing Chief Executive of the CCC, with the newspaper noting “Tackling the climate crisis has been presented as a massive change, but Stark was at pains to point out that it would not be.” According to Stark: “The world that we’ll have in 2050 is extremely similar to the one we have now. We will still be flying, we’ll still be eating meat, we will still be warming our homes, just heating them differently. The lifestyle change that goes with this is not enormous at all.”

Put simply, no political party, no mainstream media outlet, no trade union, and very few experts, are being honest with the British public about the civilization-threatening future the planet currently faces, or the immediate, radical action required in the UK, and beyond, if we are to create a liveable world for young people today and future generations.

With the relative size of this yawning climate chasm likely to determine the fate of untold numbers of lives in the UK and beyond, activists, social movements and concerned citizens have their work cut out.

Follow Ian on X @IanJSinclair.