Every year the warnings on climate change become more urgent.
Every year temperatures break new records.
Every year politicians promise action.
And every year, far too little changes.
Why?
In this video, I argue that the failure to tackle climate change is not because we lacked scientific evidence or practical solutions. Scientists warned us decades ago, and they were right. We also had credible alternatives. I explain why the Green New Deal, which I helped develop before the financial crisis of 2008, offered a practical programme linking climate action, investment, jobs and stronger public services, and why politics chose to ignore it.
The deeper problem, I suggest, is that modern politics has lost the ability to imagine a different future. Too much of economics assumes today's system is inevitable. Politicians defend existing institutions instead of asking whether they still work. Meanwhile, powerful vested interests continue to profit from fossil fuels and resist meaningful change.
Climate change has exposed something much bigger than an environmental crisis. It has revealed a crisis of political imagination.
If we continue trying to repair yesterday's economy instead of building tomorrow's, the consequences will become increasingly severe. We can no longer afford the inaction that is our politicians' preferred policy choice. Either they must change, or we will have to be rid of them.
This is the audio version:
The Debate Ammunition for this video is available here.
This is the transcript:
As we're recording this, we're in another heatwave in the UK. The temperatures are rising. It's hot in this studio. We won't be able to record for long, and across Europe fires are burning. We see it in the news in France, in Spain, but also in Scotland and in other places. Every year seems to bring new extremes, and none of this is unexpected.
We knew we were going to face a crisis from climate change. So, why did we fail to prepare? That's what I'm going to ask in this video.
Scientists have warned us about these changes for decades. Their predictions have proved to be remarkably accurate. We understood the risks, those of us who bothered to stand back and read the data, and we also understood many of the solutions. Knowledge wasn't lacking about the climate crisis that we are now facing, but action was, and that's not because we lacked a plan.
The Green New Deal was one practical response. It helped develop a programme that would've tackled the whole problem of climate change. I co-authored it in 2007–2008 before the crisis of that year, and it went worldwide. Barack Obama talked about it when he was running for president the first time round. It linked climate change, jobs, and investment. It would've strengthened communities and public services. It offered economic renewal, but most of all, it talked about how we could deliver sustainable outcomes for our planet. And then politics chose to ignore it.
The global crisis happened. It passed. And the politicians who said we should move on to where we'd been before won the day, and the Green New Deal and everything to do with climate change was ignored. In fact, many scorned it; they still do. We have the Tories in the UK denying that climate change is an issue. And for those on the far right, it is now a badge of honour to say that we should do nothing about climate change, even when it is quite literally burning at some people's doors.
That scorn was revealing. Climate change has revealed a much bigger problem. The reality is our political system struggles to imagine alternatives to the way things have been. It spends its time trying to repair yesterday's economy, but no one within our politics is trying to build tomorrow's economy. Our politicians, based upon our economics, which all looks into the rear-view mirror, mistake familiarity for wisdom, and that is the crisis we are facing.
There is no imagination in our politics. There is no curiosity. There is no questioning of what should we do? And that is why our politics is becoming dangerous and why it is so unable to deal with this crisis that we are all facing.
Too much of our economics in particular assumes today's systems are inevitable. Markets are treated as the answer to every problem, even though we know they are not. Growth is always the unquestioned objective, although it is glaringly obvious that the limits of growth are very real on a finite planet. And government is always told to stand back, even though we know that government must provide the answers to many of the questions that we're asking.
A small state is always demanded, and new ideas are dismissed before they're tested. Imagination and, even more vitally, curiosity have been entirely eliminated from our economics.
Politicians are following the same script. They promise stability, but in the process, they defend existing institutions when they have so clearly failed or have failed to deliver the answers we need. They fear challenging established interests. Those who sponsor them prevent this happening, and that is perhaps the biggest problem of all that we now face. And they rarely, if ever, ask bigger questions as a consequence.
They don't ask why fossil fuels are dangerous, because fossil fuels are funding them. They manage decline instead of creating change as a consequence, and our politicians have also lost their inquisitiveness, their ability to see through what is, to see what should be. The result is paralysis.
Every disaster brings more promises. Every report calls for urgent action. Every summit repeats familiar words, but fundamental change never arrives. We can see what is happening. We can see the failures. We can see the suffering, but those in charge seem quite unable to imagine acting differently. For them, this is somebody else's problem, as they think everything is in a neoliberal world where the assumption is that no politician has an answer, and the market always has, when it is the market that has created the problems that we are now facing.
So, why does this happen? Why are we living in this world where there seems no possibility of change? The answer is, there are powerful vested interests. There are fortunes built on the old economy: on the supply of oil, of gas and coal, and on the substances made from them. The things that we will have to learn to do without or to substitute if we are to survive.
There are careers built on old ideas, which people do not wish to forgo because they do not wish to learn something that is new. They're comfortable with what was.
These are the institutions based upon hierarchies of power that defend the structures themselves built upon fossil fuels that have created our climate crisis.
So, evidence is ignored because change threatens power, and the powerful don't like that. That is why we are getting no change. The explanation was in fact provided by a person called Upton Sinclair many years ago. He said, “It's difficult to get a person to understand something when their salary depends upon them not understanding it.” Too many politicians and economists face exactly that problem now.
They do not want to understand the problems that they face, because their power, their prestige, their status, and their economic well-being all depend upon them denying the truth that we are in crisis, and the crisis is human-made, and the crisis is about climate change.
The system rewards them if they defend the status quo. It does not reward them for challenging it. That is the whole problem. That is the consequence of allowing political donations in the way that we do, and the whole of the lobbying industry, which is designed to maintain the structures of power that we have, which are harming us all.
Even when the evidence makes it clear we must get change, the dollars and pounds of the wealthy deny that and say, “no”, and the evidence, evidence from people like the International Climate Change Committee, is just ignored, and that fact is the obstacle to our survival. Let's be as blunt as that. The denial of truth is what is denying us a chance.
Climate change is going to force a choice, though. We have to face up to it. It isn't going away. We can try to cling to the past, or we can imagine a different economy, a different politics, and a different society because that is what is going to be necessary.
In that case, we can protect vested interests, or we can survive. That is the choice that we face. We can be curious and build a better future, one built on care, resilience and sustainability, or we can sink, quite possibly, literally even as the world burns around us, but as the world's waters rise at the same time.
We knew that choice. When we wrote the Green New Deal, we knew it was real. We knew we needed to change. We knew we needed to look at the world in a different way. The real question now is whether we are finally ready to think differently or are we going to curl up in a corner and let the oligarchs destroy us?
That is the choice we have, but it isn't a choice in reality. There is no choice because we have to change, or the fires that are now lapping Bordeaux and Madrid will one day threaten us, and if it isn't fires that will threaten us, something else will. Temperature, the rise of the sea level, or something else is going to come to our doorstep and make our lives intolerable.
So, we do not have a choice. We must change. That is the only option available to us. But our politicians and our economists deny it. There's one answer to that. They have to go.
That's my opinion. What's yours? There is, of course, a poll down below, and there will be plenty of opportunity for you to pass comment. I like those comments. We try to read as many of them as we can. And please do share this video. Please do subscribe to the channel and ring that bell because that ensures that you get notifications from us. And if you'd like to buy Tom and me coffee, well, that helps because these videos do have a cost and we do need refreshment.
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[…] The video that this Debate Ammunition supports is available here. […]
Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute – now known as RMI pointed out that Energy Efficiency isnt a free lunch, its one we are paid to eat.
Oh, and while the weather we are having at the moment wasnt what we were expecting when I installed my solar hot water system 20 years ago, I havnt had to put the boiler on for hot water for over a month and if you exclude one day which was very overcast nearer two………..
And thats for a family of 4
Not only did we have the financial mess of 2008, but wasn’t the Copenhagen climate summit the one where there was a big campaign to discredit research on global warming, after UEA emails were hacked and discussion of one data strand was used out of context to supposedly unpick the body of research?
Yes
That sumnmit was a disaster as a result.
I see our ability to tackle climate change as the ultimate test of our ability to empathize with and care for others.
There’s no doubt that humans are capable of caring for our families and close social circles. But what about those more distant from us? Many of us seem not to care much for the plight of those dying in Gaza and Sudan, for example.
Tackling climate change requires that we care sufficiently about the livelyhood of our own descendants, in order to act now and leave them with a habitable planet.
The fact that we seem to be incapable of empathising in this way, makes me wonder if it’s a fundamental flaw in our DNA, which will ultimately be our undoing?
Thank you, both.
A few weeks ago, when fires raged in the south of France, a French woman asked online what will happen when people from continental Europe flee to Lapland and Greenland and are met with machine guns and barbed wire.
Starmer exploded, in the direction of Ted Miliband, at a shadow cabinet meeting in July 2023 that “he hated tree huggers”. As PM, he asked that national security briefings not mention the threat from climate change.
As fires rage not just in the south and west of France and Spain, but Brittany and Fontainebleau and northern Europe, too, let’s recall that firefighters in northern France and Europe aren’t or tend not be trained and equipped to fight forest fires and, when Canadair was taken over by Bombardier and production of firefighting planes ceased in favour of private jets (a big polluter), politicians and officials did not think it may be a problem.
New leadership is needed.
Yes, the climate crisis is desperate as you have pointed out. Clearly the powers that be are determined to carry on the trajectory of rising CO2 and temperature rises and biological destruction come what may. This trend to global suicide is now inevitable. Even such an austere and elite organisation as the Institute and Faculty of Actuaries in their recent report, Appendix 1 is forecasting 4 billion dead due to climate by the end of the century and 2 billion by 2050. Public awareness is there, especially after the rebellions inspired by Greta Thunberg and others. However now climate and genocide protests are now criminalised, climate has dropped down the agenda. The National Emergency Briefings are doing a noble job at reinvigorating public and international concern. Whether a global campaign can force change is doubtful after the dismal failures of the Kyoto and Paris IPCC accords. Only massive grass roots action can force the abandonment of fossil fuel dependency.
Might you provide a link to the report you are referring to?
Its it this
https://actuaries.org.uk/media/ni4erlna/planetary-solvency.pdf
Many thanks.
I worked my entire career as an engineer in the oil and gas industry. I loved it; but it wasn’t the production of oil and gas I loved, it was the engineering. Nothing was better than being part of a project team and (after several years of intense work) seeing new facilities undergo final commissioning. However, during the last ten years of my career, the obvious became painfully clear to me, climate change is real – and I worked under a growing sense of cognitive dissonance.
We all contribute to climate change simply because our lives are all utterly dependent on oil and gas. Yes the “transition” is happening but there is a huge amount of resistance due to extremely powerful vested interests (expert at lobbying).
What annoys me is that everyone talks about the “transition” but no-one ever seems to define what the transition looks like. It can’t be too difficult to forecast (with upside and downside margins of error) what the path to net zero looks like and therefore how much new oil and gas (if any) is required. There is always a fog in terms of detail – and this contributes to emotional rather than rational discourse.
I support the case for the most rapid transition possible. I completely agree with the argument that the “cost” of doing nothing (or very little) will far exceed the cost of taking action now. I fear that we have collectively done so little that we are already well past the tipping point. The stupidity of our political leadership over the past 50 years is already proving to be an enormous folly – IT IS A CLIMATE CRISIS. Even if we stop emitting carbon today, completely, things well get worse before they eventually stabilise decades in the future.
That’s my 300 words, exactly!
Thank you
Surely there is a word for what you are describing – Corruption?
I absolutely agree that vested interests are the biggest obstacle to change in many area, including climate change, however I think there is also a human psychology issue involved. While the vast majority of people accept that human action is behind some of the current climate disasters, I am not convinced that they genuinely believe in the reality of the issue or the outcome. Even on his blog people frequently talk about the future lives of their grandchildren, or what will happen in several decades’ time. The way things are going their grandchildren won’t have future lives and there will be few, if any, people around in decades’ time.
It is that, almost universal, inability to understand that the future will be very different that helps the vested interests to get away with it.
This video is not attracting traffic – nothing non climate change does,.
People are living in denial.
Two quotes. From me: Technology is easy, compared with dealing with people. From George Bernard Shaw: Many people would die sooner than think. And most of them do.
I think we must accept that those with entrenched thinking, and power, are not going to change. And at present, “we” don’t have the power to make them. So we need to go round, go under, go over or avoid their power in whatever ways can be devised. Civil disobedience? Make this way of thinking ludicrous? Too far out of date to be credible? Groups which can work together doing so — maybe a sort of secular monasticism? Small scale may not solve the entire problem in time, but it can certainly ameliorate for some if not all. I don’t have an answer, but hoping to change people’s minds with the facts has not worked. Conversions come from emotion, not rationality.
It’s no longer about the economic challenges of the transition. After all, building infrastructure fits in the fiscal rules. Renewable power can be added in a short timescale – a solar plant be built in months not years, and others are still much quicker than nuclear. Investments in grid capacity and battery storage would help lower prices.
For too long some talked about a ‘Green New Scam’, claiming it’s just more tax. Renewables have the lowest levelized cost of energy (LCOE) generally, so ultimately help bring bills down. Reducing electricity prices relative to gas is also key for further changes like switching to heat pumps.
The Government should support insulation and energy efficiency schemes, not on a green basis, but to save households money. This could include half-silvered film for windows to reduce house temperatures in a heatwave. These would reduce heat-related health issues, saving lives.
Even with the North Sea Oil, some present the drilling opportunities as key to our economic future. The fields are mature – we gave away too much to private interests and lost the opportunity for a sovereign wealth fund for the future. They may get some tax, but renewables will come online quicker, will do more for energy independence, and help with the cost of living while still creating jobs.
Domestic solar (or others like geothermal) also creates jobs spread around the country, benefitting areas with higher unemployment.
That’s the real political problem – too many people, even non-skeptics, don’t (yet) feel it hits home enough to want to pay a price. A shift to highlight where it improves quality of life (lowering the cost of living, reducing heat or cold-related health events, investment that will increase GDP) could dramatically change how people feel about these key enviromental efforts.
I see Zack Polanski is being pilloried in the media over a chance social media post at the moment. The elite will be mobilising all guns to get rid of him exactly as they did for Corbin. He needs to be very careful.
Agreed
I declined to discuss this issue on Jeremy Vine, not lesst because I am having a CT scan.
I’ve been dipping in to Vine of late and the economic nonsense I am hearing is epic!
That suits Jeremy
‘It has revealed a crisis of political imagination.’ Largely caused by the ‘We can’t afford it’ arguments. ‘Mitigation’ has given way to ‘adaption’ as lack of action compounds.
So many people have induced themselves to live in denial of the existential crises, and the declarations that we face a climate and nature emergency mean nothing without the actions needed to attempt to deal with them. The science and the physics are absolutely clear. According to Flightradar24 there were a record number of commercial flights on July 23rd , a colossal 153,359, plus x number of private flights.. And yet we still want to increase airport capacity in the name of economic growth? The cognitive dissonance is deafening.
Alan M comments: “Tackling climate change requires that we care sufficiently about the livelyhood of our own descendants, in order to act now and leave them with a habitable planet. The fact that we seem to be incapable of empathising in this way, makes me wonder if it’s a fundamental flaw in our DNA, which will ultimately be our undoing?”
Is it even a flaw? This looks scarily like evolution working perfectly. Human selfishness and inertia wiping out most of the human population will mean that most of the other species survive, and the few humans who manage to adapt can start again, and do better than we did.
Agreed with most of the sentiments here.
One of the factors of climate change has to be competition, that just disaggregates cooperation and has each interest living in its own little bubble.
‘Too reassure people, you only have to deny the facts’ – Charles – principal character from Bresson’s film ‘The Devil, Probably’ (1977).
Bresson went on to write (and he called it right):