Policymakers must address the politics of climate crisis

JRF’s mission is to speed up the transition to a more equitable and just future, free from poverty, where people and planet can flourish. In keeping with that commitment, we’re placing a renewed focus on climate justice policy. Building on the foundations of many years of work on just adaptation and transition, we now have an exciting opportunity to shape policy over a crucial decade of transition. Setting up a new program of work has given us a chance to interrogate what we can add to an already busy policy ecosystem, and to question what the role of policymakers should be in addressing the climate crisis.

Can we really just ‘listen to the scientists’?

Climate activists, policy makers and politicians have all argued that we need to ‘listen to the scientists’ if we are to have a chance of addressing and preventing climate change. In the UK, this narrative burst into public consciousness in 2018, propelled by the rise of Extinction Rebellion and the school strikes for climate. Both movements focused their messaging on the gap between scientific evidence and government inaction. In doing so, they built on a long tradition of framing climate change as a scientific challenge (one defined by CO₂ and °C) that should be solved by the Government (using technical policy changes).

On their own terms, these movements were relatively successful. A new upswelling of public consciousness put pressure on the conservative Government. The Government responded by announcing a climate and ecological emergency in 2019 and introducing a legally binding target of net-zero emissions by 2050. No longer, it seemed, was climate change subject to the political obstruction of climate change deniers, instead it had risen above politics to become a scientific fact. This cross-party agreement continues to exist for much of the voting public. A pre-election poll found that 70% of people said that climate and environmental policies were important enough to influence how they voted in the election.

However, this consensus – built on a rhetorical commitment to ‘the science’ - has not delivered the results one might have hoped for. A recent court case found that ‘UK Government’s climate strategy is not fit-for-purpose and therefore breaches the UK Climate Change Act.’ So why has the climate movement, alongside countless civil servants and policymakers, failed to convert such widespread public agreement into meaningful action? There are a few answers to this question – ranging from the cost and complexity of climate change mitigation to the power of vested fossil fuel interests – but what is less widely discussed is how consensus itself has played a role in preventing real progress. 

‘Post-politicisation’ of climate change

Geographer Erik Swyngedouw’s concept of ‘post-politicisation’ can help us to make sense of this phenomenon. Post-politicization ‘rejects ideological divisions and the explicit universalization of particular political demands [and] reduces the political terrain to the sphere of consensual governing and policy-making’. With its focus on renewable energy, smart technologies and carbon capture, net-zero has provided a framework for this post-political engagement with climate change.

Swyngedouw goes on to say: ‘disagreement is allowed, but only with respect to the choice of technologies, the mix of organizational fixes, the detail of the managerial adjustments, and the urgency of their timing and implementation, not with respect to the socio-political framing of present and future natures.’ In other words, while climate change has deeply social and political origins – namely capitalism’s dual exploitation of nature and labour – and its impacts reflect structures of racism and colonialism, its mitigation is currently largely understood through policy debates on when to phase out gas boilers or how to use data to optimise our energy system.

One can see the appeal of trying to address climate change in relatively apolitical terms. While climate denialism may seem less rampant than it once was, Reform deputy leader Richard Tice’s claim that climate change is the result of ‘the power of the sun or volcanoes’ suggests that denialism is far from dead. Faced with the loud voices of those who would deny the role that fossil fuels are playing in climate change, many climate policymakers have closed ranks around an apolitical framework grounded in ‘the science’. This is particularly tempting in our current ‘anti-incumbent’ political climate when the political status quo is under threat. But climate politics means more than just a battle between ‘the science’ and climate change deniers. In fact, it is vital that we resist operating on a playing field defined by climate change sceptics or political forces that are resistant to net-zero.

The more productive site of contestation is not whether we need to take action on climate change, but what that action looks like and more specifically who is going to pay for the transition. Within the climate policy world, the consensus is that climate action should minimise sites of conflict – whether by paying off local NIMBYs or by continuing to honour existing North Sea drilling permits. But conflict is a necessary component of effective climate policy. Whether it’s to face down vested interests and climate sceptics or to demand a progressive distribution of the costs of the transition. Engaging with conflict as a key element of the transition will re-politicise climate policy and help it grapple with what is really driving climate change.

Non-reformist reforms

But what might this look like in practice? Philosopher André Gorz’s ‘non-reformist reforms’ offer one approach. Legal scholar Amna Akbar explains the concept: ‘In contrast to a reformist approach, which seeks to address social problems while leaving the prevailing governing system untouched, non-reformist reforms seek to redistribute power and reconstitute who governs and how’.

We can look to America in the 1960s and 1970s for examples of non-reformist reforms in practice when ‘lawyers worked with activists to model prefigurative and empowerment practice in welfare rights, landlord/tenant disputes, criminal defence and domestic violence’. But there are also examples closer to home – in a more ambitious form, Great British Energy (GBE) has some of the makings of a non-reformist reform. It creates an opening for a different kind of energy system – one that recognises that the market mechanisms that have driven climate change should not be relied upon to solve it. Public ownership also brings with it an opportunity to democratise decision making, so changing the way we govern our energy system.

The current scope of GBE however lacks the ambition to deliver the level of cost reduction, system coherence or democratisation needed to classify as a non-reformist reform. As a relatively small player within a private market, GBE will not have the power to bring down energy prices as needed. Instead, its proposed partnerships with private investment amount to a ‘de-risking’ approach that leaves tax payers to foot the bill if things go wrong but allows wealth to be distributed to shareholders if the investments are a success.

The limitations of GBE reveal some of the challenges and pitfalls of the non-reformist reform approach: the policies that are implemented often look very different to the policies that are proposed – particularly if they aren’t willing to take on the political fight. That’s why, as Karl Klare argues, to retain their transformative potential, non-reformist reforms must work in tandem with powerful social movements.

Shouldn’t we leave politics to the climate movement?

The climate movement – united behind a commitment to following ‘the science’ - has successfully built public consciousness around climate change. However, the movement in the UK is no longer in a position of strength. Harsh legal penalties have been placed on activists – with many facing jail time – while at the same time the Government has a climate agenda that on the surface appears ambitious. The result is a climate movement that has been ‘discombobulated’, unable to identify tactics that are still effective or politics that will galvanize a wider movement. In its current state, the climate movement is unable to do the hard work of challenging power, in other words of re-politicising climate change.

It would be naive to think that climate policymakers can drive the transformational changes we need on our own. Not least because doing so would ‘not invite a transformation of the existing socio-ecological order but [rather call] on the elites to undertake action such that nothing really has to change’. But policymakers do occupy a position of some power, and given this gap in the climate movement, it is important that we interrogate our role in shaping change. There is an urgent need for policies that both improve people’s material circumstances and decarbonise our society. In order to produce those policies, we must become comfortable with a re-politicisation of the climate debate.

A wedge into the future

At JRF, this means identifying policies that can shift the Overton window (the spectrum of ideas that a government might view as acceptable at any given time). Not in one fell swoop, but rather by identifying ‘wedge issues’ that can offer a bridge between the work of optimisation within existing systems and the work of building systems anew. In the climate context, this could mean seeking out policies that re-politicise the debate by challenging status quo assumptions, whether those are about technical policy mechanisms, systems of governance, low-carbon technology, or who pays for the transition. This is a position that grapples with the urgent needs that can be met through policymaking, while also holding a commitment to more transformational change.

We are currently testing this way of thinking through our work on energy affordability. There is widespread agreement both within government and the third sector that energy is unaffordable for low-income households. This consensus has spawned a flurry of policy activity focused on the need to establish an ‘energy social tariff’. Some of the proposals up for debate include extending the warm homes discount or introducing a discounted tariff for households below a certain income threshold. These approaches have pros and cons in terms of technical feasibility and impact on household finances, but both largely maintain the status quo in the energy system, particularly when it comes to the question of who pays.

In addition to exploring the approaches already on the table, we've been investigating a regulatory change that would introduce a two-tier price cap. The bottom tier would charge a reduced unit rate for consumption up to a certain threshold and then a higher unit rate for consumption above that threshold. Households in receipt of means-tested benefits and disability benefits would only ever pay the lower unit rate. This approach would set up a cross-subsidy between high-energy consumers and low-energy consumers, and between lower (equivalised) income households and everyone else (due to the protections). In doing so, the policy provides a progressive answer to the question of who pays, and provides a route to an energy transition grounded more in energy efficiency than energy maximization.

There are many technical questions that need to be answered by all energy affordability proposals, but this consumption-based approach has forced us to grapple much more explicitly with the political challenges of who is going to pay for the transition and what the future system should look like.

Whether this approach does indeed qualify as a ‘wedge’ issue remains up for debate. Evolving the way we think about policy – to challenge a more incrementalistic status quo – is challenging and we certainly won’t always get it right. In the spirit of this piece, however, I welcome feedback and contestation. How have you brought politics to the forefront of your policy thinking? Are you working on a piece of climate policy that might classify as a ‘non-reformist reform’? We’d love to hear from you.