Doug Sheridan counsels
“The Economist writes, a movement is gathering pace around the world—a backlash against pro-climate policies.”
The Economist writes, a movement is gathering pace around the world—a backlash against pro-climate policies. The trend can be seen across Europe. In America, climate change has become a culture-war battleground.
The political undercurrents aren't reassuring. Voters are realising that remaking the entire global economy will be disruptive. And it's not clear they are willing to pay more taxes to help prevent climate change. In a survey of 29 countries by Ipsos, only 30% of respondents said they would be willing to do so.
James Patterson of Utrecht University in the Netherlands argues that anti-green backlashes sometimes occur when environmentalists overreach. For example, by enacting policies so coercive that many people deem them illegitimate.
For the most part in developing countries, climate change is a less prominent topic in domestic politics than it is in rich ones. The elite discuss it—governments want to be compensated for the industrialised world’s past emissions and to attract investment for the energy transition. But during elections in India or Africa the topic is barely mentioned.
However, voters in developing countries are even more sensitive to rises in the cost of living than those in rich countries. So they often resist policies that they think will batter their budgets. Hence the difficulty of cutting fossil-fuel subsidies. Such handouts are so popular that the harm they may do to the environment is seldom motive enough for gov'ts to get rid of them.
Several middle-income countries, such as Indonesia and India, are burning more fossil fuels even as they try to reinvent themselves as green powers. India’s government plans to triple renewable-electricity-generation capacity by the end of the decade. It has also declared a moratorium on new coal plants and aims to become a big producer of green hydrogen.
But this pursuit of green energy seems to be driven at least as much by worries about energy security as climate change—last year’s green-hydrogen strategy mentions a plan to be “energy independent” by 2047 before the target to achieve “net zero” by 2070. And despite the moratorium on new coal plants, Indian coal production grew by 14.8% last year.
Our Take: The Economist just can't bring itself to state the obvious—that the charge to reduce global carbon emissions has a math problem. You see, with only a little over a billion people in the developed world, there's neither the opportunity or the will to cut carbon emissions in these economies enough to offset the inevitable increases the remaining seven billion persons in developing countries view as central to their ability to close the wealth gap.
🌎 ♻️ 👀