7th February 2025
The rubble and wreckage of 12,000 structures reduced to ash; white-suited operatives picking through the possessions of the many thousands more whose lives are ruined. Recent images from California show that 2025 – following on from a yet another “hottest year on record”, and topping off a decade of unprecedented heat – will form the stage for a superlative display from a climate crisis that is already happening. This January was already the hottest on record, to the confusion and dismay of climate scientists who had expected this year to be slightly cooler.
Yet around the world, climate change action is under threat, and not just with a denier back in the White House. Nigel Farage and Liz Truss recently attended the UK launch of “Heartland” – the US climate change-denying lobby group, self-described as “the world’s most prominent think tank supporting scepticism about man-made climate change”.
Farage’s Reform UK, the most popular party in the country according to one poll this week, has done its utmost to turn the goal of “net zero” into a rhetorical obscenity, labelling it “lunacy” and “insanity”.
And Reform has mobilised a dichotomy – pitting climate concern against the standard of living – that is colonising politics on left and right.
When Rachel Reeves announced her support for a third runway at Heathrow last week, it was widely interpreted as a victory for the right, a recognition that, notwithstanding Reeves’ quixotic faith in the revolutionary potential of “green” aviation fuel, “growth” must come first, whatever the cost.
These developments come at a time when the radical flank of the British climate movement is at its lowest ebb for years. The last government’s draconian criminalisation of peaceful protest, defended by Labour, has had a chilling effect – and six years since the heyday of Extinction Rebellion and Fridays for Future, the climate movement is losing popular support.
Aside from a few bright moments (the election of Britain’s four Green MPs was a breakthrough), momentum may appear to be stalling. But something new is stirring, mostly below the radar, involving citizens more widely, and within the law.
Today’s arch climate deniers are master tacticians, and have an innate grasp of short-term popular appeal. But our problems can’t be blamed on them. A climate movement that hasn’t succeeded in making the cause of human survival genuinely popular is clearly missing something. So just how can we make climate action great again?
Our suggestion is this: start where people are. Talk to them less about an invisible gas that needs to be eliminated by some future date, and more about high energy bills caused by volatile fossil fuel prices we can’t control (compared with wind and solar energy which are now far cheaper). Talk to them about homes vulnerable to extremes of temperature (30 per cent of UK buildings, mostly rentals, have no loft insulation whatsoever), and the encroaching, destructive impact of everything from floods to fires. The global north isn’t immune to climate catastrophe; but it certainly isn’t ready.
What happens in Valencia or Los Angeles won’t stay in Valencia or Los Angeles.
Begin, in other words, not with an abstraction but with direct experience, and with quality of life. Climate action can become popular when people understand its benefits in the terms of their own communities, and their own lives.
For the climate movement, this means shifting adaptation and resilience-building from the margins to the centre of our strategic message.
This is about more local, nature-friendly food-growing that people can have a stake in: for instance, through planting fruiting tree and bush varieties that are able to cope with higher summer temperatures.
It’s about the kind of visionary community retrofit programme exemplified by Retrofit Balsall Heath in a deprived part of Birmingham, a Victorian house transformed into a zero-carbon dwelling.
And it’s about restoration of wetlands and peatlands to reduce the danger of flooding closer to source.
Tackling adaptation in such strategic and transformative ways synergises with the traditional goal of decarbonisation, rather than detracting from it. But the point is to start with the immediacy of resilience rather than with the abstraction of greenhouse gases.
And the beauty of this strategy is that a deliberate turn to protect communities could be the wake-up call we desperately need to galvanise popular support for decarbonisation. Adaptation-action can literally bring home the reality of the crisis.
Any such shift will require a step change in leadership. Successive governments’ track record on adaptation has been woeful, with the non-departmental Climate Change Committee recently concluding that action so far “falls far short” of what’s required. To win votes for policies to avert the worst impacts of catastrophic climate change, those same policies need to be of direct material benefit to those who are struggling most.
Britain must invest fully in a counterpart to the US’s Inflation Reduction Act, bringing jobs in every constituency, substantial skills and training, and well-funded apprenticeship programmes, financed by higher taxes on the super wealthy.
Britain is a place of grotesque inequalities, not just economically, but geographically and socially, with thriving cities and failing towns jostling within the same regions.
Acute insecurity compounds the economic injustice felt by many. We will never allow those who have historically been held back to face more of the same, courtesy of climate action. That means making a “just transition” a reality not a slogan – guaranteeing existing workers’ wages as they move from fossil fuels to green energy, ensuring training is free, and placing unions at the heart of the transition process.
A common-sense platform of climate populism (or “climate popularism” as we will more subtly christen it in a forthcoming report) will heal some of today’s pain while both protecting communities from extremes of climate disruption, and building resilience for the future. It is both inclusive and authentically hopeful.
Because there is no adequate way forward on climate without consensus. While today’s populists have made progress by fomenting polarisation, a successful climate popularism must behave differently. If we turn adaptation into another culture war, then we guarantee that the climate question remains insoluble.
The cooperation we require is on the scale of a wartime mobilisation, meaning active support from a majority (and at minimum the acquiescence of nearly everyone).
It’s our belief that President Trump’s decisive victory indicates a rejection of business as usual – particularly of elite, technocratic political projects – more than it indicates any hardening of polarisation. At such a moment, climate popularism could earn its name precisely by offering an alternative, a way of doing politics that shares that rejection while moving beyond culture wars.
Despite stereotypes about voters who can only be won over by a politics of fury, research shows that an “exhausted majority” is tiring of endless aggression and division. They seek something they can positively believe in, a programme that is local, collaborative and respectful.
A depolarising wave of action that mobilises communities’ instinctive protective instincts could really be… popular.
And that is climate popularism.
Caroline Lucas and Rupert Read’s full report on Climate Popularism, co-authored with Jonathon Porritt, will appear this spring.
