How Green polices have been dragged into the culture wars

Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer hung the loss on mayor Sadiq Khan’s plan to expand the ULEZ (Ultra Low Emission Zone) in London. The proposed expansion from Khan would require owners of higher emission vehicles to pay a monthly fee of nearly £13. The climate crisis, cost of living crisis and a political crisis, all in one.

What’s strange about this outcome isn’t just policy. It reveals a great interconnected “political ecosystem”. One where Uxbridge voters express passive angst with green policies from their mayor by sending a Tory to Westminster. It goes on. For Khan was preceded in his role as London’s mayor by Boris Johnson, who vacated of the very Uxbridge seat as MP this year. A bit Shakespearean, no?

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Of course, this is politics. Not in the idealist sense. Not the Churchill of 1940, thundering on blood and sweat. More the Churchill of the 30s, desperate to stay relevant in Westminster and out of bankruptcy. Before there was political glory, there was political grit.

And political grit turns idealists into survivalists. Experienced Tories and Labour alike know a failure to keep up with the political winds might be devastating. Partisans learn to keep political time. It grows into an instinct, where one knows which policies will be sure to catch those precious winds and keep the party away from the doldrums of obscurity and futility.

Present green policy is proving a liability on the political seas. The law of political expediency – just as exacting as maritime law and lore – demands action, a change of course. But all the while, the climate crisis goes on. The blazing sun is indifferent to the laws of politics. The seas rise without a thought to the cost of living.

The natural world might be indifferent to our political world, but it is never disconnected from it. Pollution from ancient Roman industry still lines Scottish peat bogs. Smoke from Roman smelting can be traced in Iceland glaciers.

We now live in what geologists call the Anthropocene. A new geological epoch. It means, for the first time in history, humanity is the dominant geological and ecological force on the planet. For example, we collectively displace more rock and soil annually than all natural processes combined.

People protest against ultra low emission zone plans (Image: PA)

It’s not unnamed chaos that causes our sun to blaze and seas to rise, it’s the rising smoke of industry and luxury with fires of hubris and greed stoked in the furnaces of human hearts. The seas rise at our beck and call, because of paths we’ve chosen, collective human decisions made across hundreds of years. This recognition is half the battle. It is not just what we’ve done but who we are.

The climate crisis reveals a deeper crisis. It’s just impossible to understand the true nature of the climate crisis apart from confronting some of the most persistent inequalities and injustices that have characterised not just human civilisation, but human nature.

Though solutions to climate change may emphasise longstanding economic inequality, political misrepresentation, or discriminatory application of risk in our social systems, these crises are not unrelated to (or unaffected by) the proclivities of the human spirit which contributed to the problem in the first place.

Of course, this all can be quite combustible. Why? We don’t know how to narrate the depths of our own culpability. Some do. Conrad saw this in Heart Of Darkness. One scene from his early 20th-century novel recounts a conversation of sailors idling on the Thames.

They lazily follow an often-trodden racist line of thought: true “evil” was found far away, in the depths of the African continent. But Conrad’s Marlow turned to London itself and observed, “this too is one of the world’s dark places”. In the climate crisis that implicates our political systems and solutions, the human spirit – that which speaks of our most inner essence – is laid bare by and implicated in a seemingly infinite complex and interconnected crisis.

Systems of economic inequality and political misrepresentation tend to be described most commonly by conspiracy theories which trade on and traffic in our worst fears and reactionary impulses. Take, for example, the 15-minute city concept. It’s an urban design strategy attuned to address and alleviate the interconnected reality of climate crisis and poverty, particularly “food deserts” and access to human services.

Recently, City of Edinburgh Council has expressed an interest in the concept. One study even found that Edinburgh basically exists as a 20-minute city anyway, with most residents living just 20 minutes away from the key services emphasised by the concept. The surge of interest in 15-minute cities has also seen a rise in conspiracy theories. Many claim the design is part of a plot among global elites at the World Economic Forum to surveil populations. They claim these cities are pursuing these concepts in order to enact climate “lockdowns”.

Conspiracy theories tend to weaken democratic practice, ironically the very thing which buffers the rise of authoritarianism. At a social level, conspiracy theories short-circuit our capacity to develop the moral clarity necessary to imagine and direct shared sacrifice as well as pursue social consensus in good faith.

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Conspiracy theories can be risky in projecting suspicion and confusing it with fact. At a deeper level, they attempt to name and negotiate crisis. They fail not just because they make moral decisions based on suspect, unprovable claims.

They fail because they opt for simplistic caricatures of our most complex problems. They fail because they catastrophise solutions, and end up denying the problem itself. But this denial of one problem just manufactures another that aligns with ideological commitments or psychological needs. This denial is potent, but it is not total.

Resisting Green solutions doesn’t necessarily signal a conspiratorial denial of the climate crisis. Nuance is possible and necessary. This involves, among other things, a refusal to trade in political and ideological rhetoric which is quick to pathologise an abstracted mass of people as “conspiracy theorists” who may reject green policies with their votes.

There are other possibilities. Consider whether green policies may be falling flat with voters who are finding all political talk (from any party) on “moral responsibility” and “social sacrifice” to be hypocritical.

This is, after all, the legacy of a generation who endured the Blitz, and whose children endured four months of lockdown only to find their leaders were on holiday or hosting parties. The political winds are constantly changing, but cultural memory tends to be a stubborn, moral act.

Are we prepared to entertain the possibility that many common citizens are not deniers of the climate crisis, but rather resisting solutions which reflect (and protect) a parasitic patronage system laced through our political practices? The nature of this system – in spite of its political rhetoric – exposes itself through the very policies it proposes.

Green policy concentrated solely on extracting the cost of climate change from common citizens isn’t just a bad political strategy. In its own way, it’s a form of climate denialism. It obscures the reality of the climate crisis itself. But this denial is more subtle and palatable, usually couched in activist language that sacralises the Earth while continuing to benefit from its exploitation.

A 2015 Oxfam study found that the wealthiest 10% account for 50% of manmade carbon pollution. To scale that 10%, consider that in 2018, the World Bank found more than half of the global population – 4.5 billion people – live on around £8 a day. The world’s poorest will be disproportionately affected by climate change while contributing a scant fraction to it.

Green policies deny climate change whenever they ignore or obscure the nature of responsibility. Social sacrifice, moral responsibility, political solutions … these all hinge on honesty. The reason honesty falters is not just because of blunt denial in the most popular conspiracy theories about shadowy global elites. This practical denialism flourishes under a neoliberal capitalism which teaches most of us in the West to call this state of affairs “freedom”.

We should – and must – share responsibility for the climate crisis. Part of this responsibility involves a recognition that our individual material “lifestyles” aren’t just private expressions of freedom. Our individual lifestyles are exponentially compounded into a collective reality with natural force.

This reality contributes to the climate crises on a scale that challenges how we understand ourselves in the West at the most fundamental level: namely that we are individuals.

THE “I” needs to include a “We” just as the “We” ought to include an “I” . The climate crisis calls for more of the former since we tend to assume the latter. This can’t be a strictly political operation.

It won’t happen with imposed solutions or coercion from above. And while I’m not suggesting that we wait around until we feel like collectively doing something about the dangerous destruction of our ecological world … I am suggesting that we learn how to better narrate the crisis.

While the crisis demands solutions in the political, it cannot – should not – become a partisan issue. We need better narratives, better stories that confront us with not just the crisis without, but within.

Eighty-four years ago, John Steinbeck wrote a novel. The title? The Grapes Of Wrath.

Steinbeck did what any good writer does: tell the truth. The truth was a story.

One that won him a Pulitzer. The novel tells the story of just one family, the Joads. But it might as well have been the same truth for hundreds and thousands of other families in the American midwest of the 1930s. A family of generational farmers, migrating from Oklahoma, Arkansas, Kansas to California – pushed off their land, hungry and lost, but looking and longing for the promise of a fresh start that meant full stomachs.

The Grapes Of Wrath testifies that the truth needs to be told in other mediums.

The Great Depression wasn’t just the economic collapse of the stock market in 1929. It wasn’t the political crisis that the Second World War seemed to dissolve. Part of the Great Depression was an ecological disaster known as the “Dust Bowl”. It was the result of economic and political choices over decades to practice novel farming techniques which stripped the fertile soil of the American midwest.

But Steinbeck brought the human crisis to bare. The Dust Bowl precipitated a human migration which tore at the social fabric of the United States. Faced with an ecological disaster of an unprecedented scale, the need for not just policies, but stories, is greater than ever. Negotiating political winds requires learning how to narrate our own faults and failures. Honesty, then, is necessary for hope.

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My own understanding of hope is framed by the great tradition of Christianity. Tragically, Christians can respond to an ecological crisis by treating faith as a bunker, as an escape hatch version of salvation – where hope becomes less honest and more of a fantasy. It adjusts the natural world as a loss, unworthy of further attention and simply raw material for exploitation. But the great tradition, as I understand it, doesn’t pit honesty and hope as opposites.

Hope in the Anthropocene can be a greater political liability than partisan policy. Hope, real hope, involves an honesty that calls into question the grounds and assumptions of the system itself.

But it also is honest about the human spirit, awake to our own weakness, fragility and failure. This is the sort of honesty we need. Not just in the search of solutions, but also in the stories which stir in us the capacity to rise to the occasion for action.