How to do climate policy in the age of the green backlash

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How many people do you think would be willing to give away 1 per cent of their household income every month to fight global warming?

Here’s a clue: it’s not 20 per cent or 40 per cent of the global population. It’s 69 per cent according to a striking study by four European economists that came out last week.

I say “striking” because this analysis of 130,000 people in 125 countries also shows most have no clue the figure is as high as 69 per cent. On average, they think it’s 43 per cent. What’s more, they believe this even though 89 per cent of them wish governments would do more to tackle global warming.

In the words of study co-author Teodora Boneva: “Most of the world’s population wants to fight climate change, but that majority thinks they are the minority.”

This misperception matters. People are less likely to act for the common good if they think everyone else is free-riding. As Boneva says, “you’re going to ask why you should be the only idiot who stops flying to Mallorca”.

I realise it is a lot easier to tell a researcher you care about the climate than it is to buy an electric car. But that peer-reviewed study is still a welcome example of the knowledge needed to tackle one of today’s most vexing climate policy questions: can you cut carbon emissions if rising inequality and populism are fuelling a gathering green backlash?

The answer looks ominous at the start of a mega election year when about half the world’s adult population is due to vote. 

Ahead of EU elections due in June, voter anger has spurred leaders from Brussels to Berlin to water down measures to cut emissions from farms, home heating and more. The next US president could be Donald Trump, who has railed against “environmental lunatics”. 

UK voters face a Conservative government that has repeatedly weakened net zero targets, and a Labour opposition that last week slashed a signature £28bn green spending plan — on the same day scientists confirmed global warming had entered new territory by exceeding 1.5C over the past 12 months.

Small wonder if climate-concerned voters think they are wildly outnumbered. Yet that global research suggests otherwise. 

Britons, for instance, think they live in a country where only 37 per cent of people would give 1 per cent of their income to the climate fight, but the study indicates the real figure is 48 per cent. That perception gap is even wider in the US. You can see what it is in your own country on a website that makes the study’s findings easy to grasp.

Both the paper and the website are examples of smart ways to get a public message across at a time when far-right leaders are racing to argue climate change is an overblown concern of privileged urban elites.

The far right is not alone. Politicians may champion reliable, well-paid green jobs, but news reports in the US suggest the reality can look more like the long hours and middling pay of an Uber driver.

Those reports feature in a scathing recent book, Where Have All the Democrats Gone?, by John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, two left-leaning US political analysts.

They argue Democrats lost vital working-class support as a “shadow party” of cultural radicals pushed for extreme policies on race, immigration, gender — and climate.

Despairing of “climate radicals’ fanatical hostility to fossil fuels”, they argue for more gradual, centrist approaches to a climate problem they claim can “only be solved over decades”.

Alas, the science shows governments have dithered for too long already. That means fair, carefully designed and communicated climate measures are more critical than ever.

Happily, they are emerging. The 2022 US Inflation Reduction Act was designed to offer higher tax benefits to clean energy employers who pay a certain level of wages.

New research shows that after Spain’s government introduced a painstakingly negotiated policy to close coal mines in the country’s north, its vote rose in those areas compared with similar places.

There’s a long way to go. Too many climate activists still fret about a lack of “political will”, as if such a force could be magically bottled and summoned. The truth is, 21st-century climate politics is hard, bitterly contested and unfamiliar. We’ve never tried to decarbonise the global economy at speed before. Politicians are learning by doing. But bit by bit, it is also becoming clearer that even when climate action looks impossibly fraught, it may not be.

pilita.clark@ft.com