Boris Johnson's Gum-Flapping On Climate Still Same Old Greenwashing - But With Etonian Overtones
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Johnson is a man who questioned human-caused climate change as recently as 2015. We have to ask: has he truly seen the light? And has the Conservative party – long a bastion of organised climate denial – come along with him? At a glance, the Tories’ new record – or at least rhetoric – looks good. Johnson continues to make strong, sober statements ahead of November’s Cop26 conference, and the party has nicked Labour’s “green industrial revolution” framing in its ambitions for “building back better” after the pandemic. It might seem that this Conservative party is a new beast: bring on all the “green crap” David Cameron once dismissed.
But critically, the Tories aren’t the only formerly denier-friendly party suddenly ready to discuss the C word, and anoint themselves heroic climate leaders. Public opinion on climate has changed rapidly, and now to appear credible, parties across the political spectrum must have a stance on the central crisis facing humanity.
Free-market stalwarts in the Republican party increasingly clamber over each other to prove their climate credentials. The fossil fuel majors and chemical giants are spending millions to rebrand as leaders in “clean energy” and “nature-based solutions”. Even Charles Koch – scion of disinformation campaigns and the fossil fuel lobby, and the gravedigger for countless climate regulations and actions – now seeks absolution for his role in obstructing climate action and fomenting political division. Nigel Farage, the golden boy of reactionary politics, now sits on the advisory board of a carbon-offsetting firm. Contrast this with the political landscape of only a few years ago, and it certainly looks like times have changed. Outright denial of the climate crisis still exists, but thanks to decades of advocacy it has been pushed definitively to the fringes. To remain mainstream, politicians must at least speak to the reality of climate change.
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The politics of delay are those of acknowledging the reality of climate change, while ridiculing ambitious climate policy as a “green dream, or whatever”, or of weak incentives and nonbinding, intangible targets with no plans for meeting them. Delayism builds a broad church, welcoming both those politicians who genuinely resist vital action on the climate crisis – pushing it far into the future – and those who are committed to half-hearted, inadequate or regressive solutions in the present. Worryingly, this might be delayism’s most troubling form: the proliferation of false solutions that – in the same vein as greenwashing – contribute very little to curb emissions, while creating a false sense of progress that undermines the effective action we need. And they often lock in the injustices and inequalities that underlie the climate crisis in the first place.
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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/sep/21/johnson-climate-denial-delay
