By Lola Heubeck
2019 was a year of climate action — at least, that’s how I remember it. Fridays for Future protests were breaking attendance records, climate change was top of the agenda at every multilateral engagement, and governments around the world were making commitments to meaningful emissions reductions — in some cases backing these up with legislation. To top it all off Greta Thunberg, the initiator of the Fridays for Future movement, was named Time Person of the Year. I was in my first year of university and remember the energy of those protests; it felt like hope. After decades of scientific warnings and painstaking international negotiations on emissions reduction targets, this was the moment the environmentalist movement managed to capture the global imagination.
Then, just as the global climate movement was truly gathering momentum, came COVID. Governments that had been pledging meaningful environmental reforms now had to redirect their attention to the immediate threat posed by a global pandemic. In the onslaught of economic, security, and social crises that followed, climate change has been increasingly pushed out of political and public consciousness. The left has forgotten the climate crisis.
Despite the waning centrality of climate change in political discourse, we have seen major pieces of climate change legislation passed since 2020. But these have all proved to be less about climate adaptation and more about reinvigorating industrial bases and reducing dependence on Chinese clean energy technology suppliers. The U.S Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), the EU Green Deal Industrial Plan, and Australia’s Future Made in Australia policy all purport to be major investments in climate change mitigation, when in fact they are designed to address current economic issues by securing future-proof, high-paying manufacturing jobs and breaking China’s stranglehold on the clean energy technology sector as geostrategic tensions heighten and trade becomes increasingly securitised.
The political rhetoric surrounding these policies — often focused on their role in enabling self-reliant transitions to green economies and energy systems — ignores the reality that, in order to achieve their commitments under the Paris Climate Agreement, these countries will have to accept some reliance on Chinese-supplied technologies. In the end, the political aims inherent in these policies may see meaningful climate adaptation sacrificed on the altar of strategic supply chain security.
Green parties have also become increasingly distracted from their core ecological ideals in the face of more ‘immediate’ crises. In Germany, the Greens’ last term in government was characterised more by their role in supporting Ukraine and pushing for reforms in Germany’s military than by any meaningful environmental reform. In New Zealand — a country often championed for its ‘clean, green’ image — the Green Party has increasingly focused on social and economic issues, as the centre-left Labour Party has failed to provide meaningful opposition to the centre-right coalition government. The upshot is that even climate action’s most ardent political advocates are too distracted to push for meaningful change.
Finally, the group of people that had been core to the climate activism of 2019 — namely educated young people and students — has redirected its attention to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Greta Thunberg, the aforementioned face of the Fridays for Future movement, is now perhaps better known for her participation in the Freedom Flotilla, an organisation attempting to break Israel’s blockade and deliver aid to Gaza. Meanwhile, university campuses are more likely to be adorned with ‘Free Palestine’ than ‘Extinction Rebellion’ posters. The civic energy needed to pressure governments to act on emissions reduction and fundamental economic and social change has been redirected.
Parallel to the fading of the climate crisis from left-wing consciousness has seen the right-wing backlash against environmental protections and the resultant environmental backsliding in many Western democracies. This has perhaps been best exemplified by the MAGA movement’s decrying of environmental protections and emissions targets as ‘woke’ policies through which governments seek to infringe on the personal freedoms of citizens. But centre-right governments — such as those in Germany and New Zealand — have also increasingly rolled back environmental protections in the name of economic gain.
In this context, the left’s abandonment of the climate issue is particular problematic for two key reasons:
Firstly, it has led to a lack of meaningful opposition to the right-wing backlash against climate policies. Rather than directly engaging with the rhetoric that paints climate policies as an infringement on personal freedoms and emphasising the urgent need to limit emissions and maintain environmental protections, the centre-left has shied away from the debate. The fear of being perceived as a ‘woke elitist’ preaching about climate change while most voters are concerned with their immediate economic circumstances is preventing meaningful political debate on the prioritisation of climate action. The centre-left is ceding this debate to the right.
Secondly, by focusing so strongly on economic, social, and security issues — at the loss of focus on environmental issues — the left is allowing the right to determine which arguments can be had in the political arena. Rather than debating which of the numerous challenges that states currently face should be prioritised, the debate is on how best to address economic and security issues, which all broadly agree are the most pressing. All this works to relegate the climate crisis to the status of a ‘future problem’ — even as the window for taking meaningful action rapidly shrinks.
Political prioritisation undoubtedly carries trade-offs, but it is possible to address climate change alongside other challenges. This is not a zero-sum game — and even if it were, the climate crisis is a challenge we can ill afford to put in the ‘do it later’ basket. The left must re-centre climate adaptation as a core policy and a political issue worthy of prioritisation.