The United Kingdom also suffers from the polarization and political tension that plagues many other Western democracies. Until now, however, there was a bipartisan consensus around the great cause of the 21st century: the fight against climate change. Out of electoral desperation, Rishi Sunak has clung to populism and has given wings to the denialism of the extreme right with his decision to delay the objectives committed years before by the British Government to stop global warming.
“Delaying measures against climate change leads to an increase in global temperature,” warned Jim Skea, the British who chairs the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), days after the results were known. Sunak ads. The IPCC, the most prestigious institution in the analysis of the challenge of warming, makes it a rule never to comment on or criticize the individual decisions of countries. To a good understanding, however, the target of Skea’s criticism was evident: “What determines global warming is not the date chosen as the objective to achieve zero emissions, but the path designed to get there. The main factor is the accumulation over time of carbon dioxide emissions (…) The more you delay the measures, the greater this accumulation will be and the greater the danger will be. That is the global key,” summarized the professor of Sustainable Energy at the Imperial College From london.
On September 27, 1988, British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher warned a packed audience at the Royal Society, the renowned scientific institute, that the world “was creating a global warming trap that would cause climate instability.” He promised to carry out measures to stop this outcome and promote “stable prosperity.”
It is true that much of the progress in reducing emissions had to do with the almost total dismantling of the British coal industry – the result of Thatcher’s ruthless war with the unions – and a country focused on services that dispensed with the pollution of an industry that globalization had brought to other places in the world. But today the volume of gas that the United Kingdom throws into the atmosphere has been reduced by 47% compared to the levels of the 1990s; In 2008 it was the first country to impose an emissions quota (carbon budget); in 2019, the first to commit to the goal of zero emissions in 2050; Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May imposed a deadline for banning the sale of gasoline and diesel vehicles in 2040; Boris Johnson’s Government lowered that date to 2035, and later to 2030; With the COP-26 summit in Glasgow, the United Kingdom reaffirmed its leadership in the environmental cause. A common fight that united conservatives and labor.
Until Sunak’s drastic turnaround has come.
The populist discourse
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Practically 35 years after his political model and inspiration – Thatcher – set the path, Sunak has hit the brakes, irritating politicians on both sides, scientists, activists and even big industry. The prime minister announced the delay by five years, from 2030 to 2035, of the ban on the sale of new gasoline or diesel vehicles, also accompanied by the guarantee that these same vehicles could be purchased for many more years on the second-hand market. .
The British Government also extended until 2035 the obligation to replace gas heaters in homes with heat pumps. And from that date, in any case, it was committed to imposing this installation only on those homes that needed to change their heater.
To top off the speech, Sunak announced days later the renewal of annual licenses to exploit new gas and oil wells in the North Sea. The excuse: strengthening the UK’s energy security. Despite the fact that experts were quick to point out that the production of that region barely sustains the country’s needs for a few days, in addition to being a crude whose refining price is exorbitant.
The big industry attacked decisions that put its long-term projects in doubt. “Delaying the deadline for banning new petrol and diesel vehicles – a date that, until a few months ago, the Government itself defined as immovable – causes the classic political uncertainty that drives away business investment and undermines the UK’s opportunities to attract new green economy projects,” said Esin Serin, analyst and researcher at the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and Environment Studies, and the London School of Economics.
All polls suggest that the Labor Party, which they attribute an advantage of more than twenty percentage points over the Conservatives, will be the winner of the next general election, which should be held within a year at the latest. Faced with a party that is subject to continuous nerves and internal turmoil, Sunak has decided to wink at the toughest wing of the Tories.
In recent years, in response to the environmental policies of many British cities and municipalities – low emission zones, speed limits, etc. – a denialist and reactionary citizen movement has emerged that fuels conspiracy theories and street revolts. The last and most powerful of the stirs occurred in Oxford, whose city council had joined the “15-minute cities” initiative: the time required to access services and shops on foot or by bike.
“We want to make sure that all these haphazard plans that are imposed on different communities end. “It is an incessant attack on drivers, and demonstrates the ignorance of many MPs regarding the fact that the majority of the citizens of this country depend on their cars on a day-to-day basis,” Sunak recently stated. His political strategy consists of apparently taking the side of the citizen, in the face of progressive elites who have declared “war on drivers.”
Polls, such as the one recently published by the newspaper Guardian, point out that only 22% of citizens support and trust Sunak’s climate policies. Most see his recent decision as a new lurch in the Conservatives’ policies.
The king’s speech
The British, regardless of their monarchical or republican inclination, have discovered in Charles III, who has been a standard bearer of environmentalism for decades, a symbol of their world leadership in this cause. It was depressing for many of them to see how the king, bound by parliamentary tradition, solemnly announced before the UK Parliament the legislative plans for the coming year of “Her Majesty’s Government”, which included more oil wells and a slowdown in the push against climate change. He was the same person who had shone at the COP-26 in Glasgow in 2021—still then crown prince—when the message from the International Energy Agency, at the insistence of the British Government, was to warn the rest of the world that it would be impossible to stop global warming if oil exploitation increased.
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