“We must be good stewards of our planet, but that does not mean that I have to give up my gasoline car and buy an electric one with a battery made in China,” Kristina Karamo, president of the Republican Party, declared in Michigan on September 22. "Members of the Democratic Party, he warned, are trying to convince us that if we don't centralize power in the government, the planet is going to die. That has all the makings of being one of the biggest scams [since] Darwin's evolution."
It would be tempting to ignore Karamo and consider her a nutcase, but she's not. She represents the extremist wing of a movement that is gaining ground around the world: the reaction against climate change policies. One of its best-known entertainers could be the next president of the United States. On September 27, Donald Trump declared: “You can be loyal to American workers or you can be loyal to environmental lunatics, but the truth is you can't be loyal to both... Trickster Joe [Biden] is “sides with the crazy leftists who will destroy the automobile industry and destroy our country.”
On September 20, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak announced a relaxation of targets to achieve net zero emissions, including a five-year postponement of the ban on the sale of new petrol cars. Two weeks earlier, Germany had abandoned the requirement to install ecological heating in new homes within a few years. France has seen huge protests against high fuel prices, and could one day elect Marine Le Pen, who rejects wind farms and thinks the energy transition should be “much slower,” as president. In the United States, climate change has become a culture war battleground: in a recent debate between Republican presidential candidates, only one admitted that man-made climate change is real.
To what extent is all this an obstacle to curbing global carbon emissions? Michael Jacobs, of the University of Sheffield (Great Britain), sees reasons for cautious optimism. The world's largest emitter, China, is aware of the need to decarbonize and is investing massively in solar and wind energy. The second largest emitter, the United States, has taken a green turn under Biden. Brazil has expelled from the presidency a politician who allowed the felling of the rainforest; Australia has dumped a pro-carbon prime minister. Almost a quarter of emissions are now subject to carbon pricing. And the pace of innovation is impressive. Two years ago, the International Energy Agency, an autonomous global body of the OECD, estimated that almost 50% of the reduction needed to reach zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 would come from technologies that were not yet commercially available. . This September, the percentage had dropped to 35%.
Political trends are less reassuring. Voters are realizing that reshaping the entire global economy will have disruptive effects. Some (a minority) deny that climate change is man-made. Others oppose the implementation of certain policies to combat it, because they impose costs on ordinary citizens or add inconvenience to their already overwhelmed daily lives. Still others (especially older people) do not like change at all; especially when it causes problems in exchange for benefits that they may never see. Even among those who accept the need to act, opinions differ on how to share the burden. Many would prefer that it fall on others, not on them.
Awareness about the dangers of climate change appears to have increased over the past decade marked by forest fires. According to surveys by the US think tank Pew, the percentage of respondents saying that climate change was a “major threat” increased in 12 rich countries, except in South Korea, where it was already high (see chart 1). . A clear majority of respondents, except in Israel, agree with the assessment. However, that does not mean that they are willing to pay more taxes to help prevent climate change (see figure 2). According to a survey carried out in 29 countries by the research company Ipsos, only 30% of respondents said they were willing to pay more.
Perhaps most alarming is that a partisan divide has opened up even on scientific issues. In the 14 wealthy countries surveyed by Pew in 2022, people on the right of the political spectrum were less likely than people on the left to view climate change as a major threat (see chart 3). In Australia, Canada, Germany, the Netherlands and Sweden the difference was very large: between 22 and 44 percentage points. In the United States, the difference was overwhelming, 63 points. And a new YouGov poll for The Economist has revealed that while 87% of Biden voters believe climate change is caused by human activity, the claim is only supported by 21% of Biden voters. Trump.
In democracies, such divisions have consequences. (Public opinion also matters in dictatorships, but the topic is outside the scope of this article.) In wealthy democracies, especially, divisions over climate are exacerbated by populist politicians, who take on real problems (such as the cost and disruption caused) and exaggerate them, while claiming that the elite that imposes green policies don't care about ordinary motorists because they go to work by bicycle.
Populism tends to undermine the effectiveness of climate policy in several ways. First, populists are often skeptical of experts. When some say “Trust the experts,” Karamo points out, what they really mean is “You are too stupid to make decisions about your life.”
Second, populists distrust global institutions and foreigners. “Every subsidy we give to an electric vehicle manufacturer is actually a subsidy to the [Chinese Communist Party], because we depend on them, like a noose around our neck, for batteries,” says Vivek Ramaswamy, Republican candidate for The presidency. Such attitudes are detrimental to the fight against climate change, argues Dan Fiorino of American University (Washington, D.C.), because “climate policy is as much a question of foreign relations as it is of economic policy.”
Third, populists encourage the population to believe that the elite are conspiring against them, thereby adding a dose of paranoia to public life and making compromise difficult. Trump presents policies that promote the use of electric cars as a threat to the American way of life, and he does so by making his supporters angry and mocking these measures.
“They say that the happiest day when you buy an electric car are the first ten minutes you drive it; and then after that you panic because you start to worry. Where the hell am I going to find charge to keep this going? Panic,” he said to the Michigan workers. “If you want to buy an electric car, that's fine... But consumers should not be forced to buy electric cars... There is no such thing as a just transition to end your way of life.”
If Trump is re-elected in 2024, he will again abandon the Paris Agreement on climate change. He will also revoke executive orders on issues such as methane emissions. He probably won't be able to repeal Biden's big climate law (misnamed the Inflation Reduction Act), which entails granting huge subsidies that are popular with his beneficiaries in both red and blue states. blues. Although he could appoint bureaucrats capable of obstructing its application. And, at the very least, the United States will fail to provide leadership on climate change at a crucial time, says Democratic Senator Ed Markey. “You can't preach abstinence sitting at a bar counter. “You can’t tell other countries to do the right thing if you, as a country, don’t do it.”
Similar arguments against green measures have also taken root in Europe. Populist parties can influence the government even when they are not part of it. In Sweden, only 4% of the population affirm that climate change “is not a threat”; However, the center-right ruling coalition has cut taxes on fossil fuels several times in the last year. One reason is that it cannot pass a budget without the support of the populist Sweden Democrats, who have 20% of parliamentary seats. Populists want the cheapest fuel. And so do many Swedish voters.
Fuel Rebellion, a Swedish Facebook group, has 600,000 members. Peder Blohm Bokenhielm, one of the spokespersons, says that cars “have always been an important part” of his life. His father imported Mustangs and Corvettes to Sweden. As a child, the first word he spoke was car. He also has practical reasons to oppose high fuel taxes. In a small Swedish town “there are no shops, and only two buses a day,” he explains. “If you want to buy food, you need a car.” Charging points are not yet available everywhere; and the autonomy of a car is important in a country where trips are long and it is dangerous to stay stranded in the snow. And then there is the cost of heating, which it is almost better not to ask about. Politicians who keep fuel prices high, Bokenhielm argues, “make it harder for people to live where they want to live.”
In Germany, the far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) has risen in the polls this year (it has just obtained good results in the state elections on October 8) by attacking the energy policies of the ruling coalition, which includes the Green Party. He maintains that these measures will “impoverish” the country. The majority parties exclude it from their pacts, but the center-right borrows its themes. The Greens hurt their own cause with a plan to make green heating almost mandatory before there were enough qualified installers to install heat pumps. Homes had trouble hiring installers. The government backtracked in September and extended the deadline, but the political damage had already been done.
Now, in Germany, it is not only the hard right that attacks the Greens. Their rallies have seen stones, eggs and insults fly. Martin Huber of the Christian Social Union (CSU), Bavaria's main center-right party, told The Economist that all the Greens do is enact Verbotsgesetze ("prohibition laws"). At a rally in Andechs, a pretty town 40 kilometers from Munich, CSU leader Markus Söder drew laughter from an Oktoberfest-fueled crowd with a series of barbs. When the lights suddenly came on, he joked: “Well, at least they're still sending us electricity from Berlin.” An elderly supporter said: “I heat my house with firewood. How am I going to allow myself to change, and why do I have to do it at my age?
In Britain, the Conservative prime minister has embraced the main populist themes. In a speech last month, Sunak stressed that he is in favor of reducing emissions, but criticized the way Britain's climate targets have been set, "without any meaningful democratic debate about how to achieve them." (His party has been in power since 2010.) He also lamented that ecological policies have “imposed unacceptable costs.” And he mentioned some hair-raising sums. “For a family living in a terraced house in Darlington, the initial cost [of a heat pump] could be around £10,000.”
He pledged to abandon plans that have never been seriously discussed: “taxes on meat consumption...mandatory car-sharing [and] government obligation to sort garbage into seven different bins.” And he also played the nationalist card. “When our share of global emissions is less than 1%, how can it be right that British citizens... are told to sacrifice even more than others?” (British people make up less than 1% of the world's population.)
“Rishi is playing with fire,” says Michael Grubb of University College London. Companies aspire to predictable policies to be able to plan for the long term. “Making climate change part of a culture war will undermine investor confidence.”
James Patterson of Utrecht University in the Netherlands argues that anti-environmental backlash sometimes occurs when environmentalists go too far; for example, by enacting policies so coercive that many people consider them illegitimate. This is what happened in the Netherlands, where a new populist party, the BoerBurgerBeweging (Farmer-Citizen Movement), rose to prominence when the government began penalizing farms that produced too much nitrogen.
Nitrogen is not a greenhouse gas; The problem is that large Dutch intensive farms produce so much of it (from fertilizers and cow dung) that it threatens important nature reserves. The government wants to buy and close farms with the aim of reducing the number of livestock by a fifth to a half. This authoritarian measure has provoked peasant anger, with protests by tractors and farms throughout the country in which the national flag has been displayed upside down. The Farmer-Citizen Movement won 20% of the votes in the provincial elections held this spring, in a country where only 2.2% of the population is dedicated to agriculture. In the general elections on November 22, the most environmentalist parties expect to suffer a collapse.
In most developing countries, climate change is a less divisive issue in national politics than in rich countries. The elites discuss it: governments want to be compensated for the emissions made in the past by the industrialized world and attract investments for the energy transition. However, in elections in India or Africa the issue is barely mentioned.
However, in developing countries, voters are even more sensitive to the rising cost of living than in rich countries. That is why they often resist policies that they believe will affect their budgets. Hence the difficulty of cutting fossil fuel subsidies, which in 2022 amounted to a staggering $1.3 trillion (1.3% of global GDP), according to the IMF.
Such aid is so popular that the damage it causes to the environment is rarely a reason for governments to get rid of it. Nigeria's new president, Bola Tinubu, this year abolished a fuel subsidy not because it encouraged people to burn carbon, but because selling gasoline at below-market prices was bankrupting the public purse. In 2022, he cost $10 billion and left the state oil company with nothing for the federal government, of which he is usually the main financier. Removing the subsidy frees up billions for public services, with the happy side effect of reducing emissions. However, there is pressure to restore it. As oil prices rise, some fear it will be quietly reintroduced. Several middle-income countries, such as Indonesia and India, are burning more fossil fuels while trying to reinvent themselves as green powers. The Indian government plans to triple renewable electricity generation capacity by the end of the decade. It has also declared a moratorium on new coal plants and aims to become a major producer of green hydrogen. It is good news, but it seems that behind it lies both concerns about energy security and climate change: last year's green hydrogen strategy mentions a plan to be “energy independent” in 2047, long before reaching the “net zero” goal. On the other hand, despite the moratorium on new coal plants, Indian coal production grew by 14.8% last year.
National security arguments have the ability to spur green investment. The construction of wind farms can reduce dependence on energy imports, an issue that many politicians emphasize. Now, if it turns out that these arguments also encourage governments to erect barriers to foreign contributions, the energy transition will be more costly.
From an ecological perspective, the large middle-income country that has improved the most in the last year is likely to be Brazil. However, it is complicated there too. Under the presidency of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who took office in January, Amazon deforestation has been reduced in the first eight months of the year by a cumulative 48% compared to the same period in 2022, when the office was in office. occupied by his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, a great friend of the logging companies. However, Lula also supports a push for Petrobras, the state oil company, to increase production from 2.9 million to 5.2 million barrels a day in 2030. And his green plans have met with resistance. In the Brazilian Congress, 347 of the 594 legislators are linked to the agribusiness group, whose members fear the Greens will block development. Congress has reduced the powers of the Ministry of the Environment.
In most developing countries, zero-emissions goals are far in the future, and voters have not yet been asked to make major sacrifices to achieve them. For many, the damage caused by climate change is a major concern. According to a Yale University survey, 74% of Indians say they have experienced the effects of global warming, up from 50% in 2011. “We have lost crops due to extreme heat and rain, and the situation has worsened in last few years,” says Shiv Kumari, a Delhi farm worker whose fields were flooded this summer. The trauma translates into greater support for green policies: 55% of Indians say India should reduce its emissions immediately without waiting for other countries to act, up from 36% in 2011.
Globally, innovation will help mitigate the grievances that fuel much of the climate backlash. “Clean is already cheaper than dirty in many parts of the economy, and those parts will only get bigger,” says Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. However, how quickly that happens is of enormous importance. Many green technologies require heavy upfront investments, which is more difficult when interest rates are high. It is something that especially affects the poor world. “Just take a look at Africa. If you have to pay 15% interest, wind and solar are not cheaper at generating electricity than fossil fuels, which are 7% or 8% cheaper,” says Professor Stern. According to him, multilateral lenders should be strengthened to attract other sources of financing. “The least realistic and most dangerous thing of all would be to go slowly,” he says.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
