We will not persuade. We will not explain. We will not listen. We know best and we will force you to comply. This, I’m sorry to say, is how the government’s climate policy works. Or rather, how it doesn’t. Because nothing could be better calculated to alienate the people you need to reach than climate authoritarianism.
Three astonishing things are happening simultaneously. One is the government’s utterly baffling failure to communicate with us on this existential issue. Where are the public information videos? Where are the televised emergency briefings on climate breakdown, like the emergency briefings on Covid-19?
This is the reasonable demand of the National Emergency Briefing campaign, whose film is now being shown in more than 1,000 cinemas and other venues in the UK: a remarkable achievement. Why are scientists, activists and journalists – faint voices in the storm – being left to explain this defining issue and the societal transformation we need? The great majority accept a call for action only when it comes from government. When it tells us “this is our national purpose and we want you to be part of it”, people tend to heed the call.
That is what happened when the government belatedly responded to the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. Despite the deep distrust of Boris Johnson’s administration, despite the prime minister’s own fecklessness, we came together to take responsibility (even if he didn’t). This is what happened when the government rallied the nation against the threat of Nazi invasion and bombing. Yet, faced with the current emergency, successive governments act as if no one needs to be mobilised, despite the great societal changes we need to make. They treat it as a purely technical challenge with purely technical solutions.
Now comes the second strand: coercion. Last week, the government proposed to curtail the public’s legal right to object to the new energy infrastructure it deems “critical”. If it gets its way, development consent orders (planning permission) for “critical” projects would in effect gain the status of acts of parliament. This means they could not be legally challenged by local people, except on human rights grounds – an almost impossible hurdle. This measure, landing on top of previous curtailments of the right to object, represents yet another centralisation of power. A planning system based on consent is becoming a planning system based on decree.
But surely there’s a case for stopping what Keir Starmer calls the “blockers”, the “zealots” and the “time-wasting nimbys”? His supporters point to the judicial review case that delayed approval of the massive Vanguard offshore windfarm in the North Sea. As the Centre for British Progress (yet another “thinktank” that won’t tell me precisely who funds it) states: “Permission … was challenged by a single private individual, who succeeded in delaying the project by two years.” They list it on their page discussing “frivolous cases”. But it was about as far from frivolous as you can get.
“A single private individual” might suggest the challenge was cranky and irrational. But every case needs a claimant, and this one, Raymond Pearce, had massive support from local communities in Norfolk as well as 85 parish and town councils. He is strongly in favour of wind power, but objected on the grounds that the government had not taken into account the cumulative impacts of the substations and cable corridors that the Vanguard scheme and its sister project, Boreas, would inflict on the landscape when the windfarms were connected to the grid. Objectors to such schemes have long argued that the UK should follow the lead of other North Sea nations and build its transmission hubs offshore.
Mr Justice Holgate’s judgment that the government’s decision was unlawful could not have been more straightforward. Though the project’s environmental statement identified “significant cumulative effects” on the landscape, the government failed to take them into account when making its decision. The state’s reasoning, the judge said, “even on a generous view, could only be described as cursory”. It was “perfunctory “, “flawed” and “perverse”.
If the government gets its way, there will no longer be legal correctives to such perverse and flawed decision-making. It will be able to hoodwink the public without consequence. Shoot the messenger, then ensure there are no more messengers.
As it happens, once the two windfarms received new consent, their developer, the Swedish company Vattenfall, decided to shelve the second one (the Boreas scheme) as it was too expensive. Why? Partly due to “the lack of a shared offshore ring main, which meant windfarms needed to run separate cables to onshore substations”. In other words, exactly what the objectors were calling for. Public engagement does not damage decision-making. It improves it.
The government has also been briefing against Britain’s membership of the Aarhus convention, which, as interpreted by the UK supreme court, limits the costs objectors face if they challenge decisions on environmental grounds. Otherwise, someone who seeks to protect their local landscape or wildlife habitat could lose everything they possess. Cost limitation is a fundamental aspect of access to justice.
At the same time, however – and here we come to the third element – woe betide you if you protest for the state to raise its climate ambition. A series of laws and restrictions, continued by this government, has created a new class of political prisoner: people put away for months or even years for demanding that an existential crisis is treated as such.
It’s all coercion, no persuasion. Leave it to us. We know what’s good for you. We don’t need your help. Don’t try to challenge us, in either direction.
Just as we need broad public consent for the green transition, Starmer’s team treats it as a holy war against the landscape-loving infidel. Far from accelerating climate action, it generates anger, resistance and resentment, a gift to the fossil fuel industry. Just as Reform UK and the Tories seem to act in the interests of fossil fuel companies, Labour seems to act in the interests of green infrastructure developers, letting them ride roughshod over people’s legitimate concerns.
We are being bludgeoned into accepting a deeply flawed climate strategy that is neither fast enough nor fair enough. The vast response that climate breakdown necessitates must, like a war effort or a pandemic effort, be a joint endeavour, that happens with us, not to us. But “with us” is not a concept this government seems to understand.