What is living and what is dead in Europe’s climate consensus?
Talk of 'greenlash' is mostly exaggerated, but risks lie ahead
In a strange way, in democratic politics issues have brands. Each is used by politicians to signal a particular set of values to certain parts of an electorate. On an issue’s way up the agenda, everyone wants to be seen about town with it.
This is roughly where climate was around 2019, at least across northern European countries.
Fast forward to 2024, with NYC Climate Week in full swing, the mood is a bit more sour. The media is invested in this idea of backlash. Those not overburdened with humility in UK politics have gone cold on the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) because it didn’t single handedly rescue the Biden Presidency. The last few years have registered episodes of greenlash in London, Germany, the Netherlands.
All of which is enough to make some politicians stand-offish.
Some of this is blatantly absurd. Joe Biden is 81. America is a deeply polarised country (the fact IRA is not especially divisive is itself an achievement). In the UK election, the Tories and SNP ran against Labour’s climate commitments and got marmalised, as predicted. The country now has the most pro-climate government in its history.
But still, is all the angst truly pure fiction? What does the evidence says about public attitudes in the last few years?
‘Ah yes, the two genders’ (of public opinion)
There are two basic axis of voter attitudes we can assess this on: sympathy and salience. Sympathy is whatever opinion you have when you happen to be randomly asked on the matter. Salience is how much you care about that opinion; how it competes with other views you might hold across subjects.
For the greenlash hypothesis to be real you’d expect to see meaningful change on these sympathy metrics:
Will climate action hurt jobs and growth?
Is government environmental policy going to make your life better, worse or make no difference?
Is the government doing too much on the subject of climate change?
Would you oppose a new onshore wind farm in your area?
(UK only data) Can we really afford to take action on climate right now?
We can also assess attitudes to different policies. The measure of salience we’ll use is people’s top issues.
There is no obvious sign of a generalised backlash to climate action in Europe – sympathy remains high
In short, not a huge amount has moved on sympathy. Basics first: as you see below, the number of outright climate denialists is what it was, despite a tiny momentary bump in Germany and France. You’re still considered a ‘weird’ by ordinary voters if you challenge the basic science of climate change.
Fine. What about other metrics? Likewise, really, not a huge amount has shifted.
You do see a meaningful spike in backlash in Germany during the heat pump farrago there last year, suggesting there was a bleed through to the wider green agenda. But it then settles down a bit this year. Most other country changes to the anti are well within margin of error.
Beyond the aggregates, as we see below, there is a little more polarisation - that is, differences on left/right lines - in Spain, although this is as much about left voters becoming more pro as Vox voters becoming anti.
In Poland, we see the question get tangled up in the partisan loyalties of the election last October (with centre-right voters using the question to express dissatisfaction with the then government), but things look more normal this year - though strength of feeling on the far-right there has increased.
In Germany, there was a brief rise in polarisation last year, then it fell. In France, not much has happened at all.
Importantly, in the 3 countries we have robust data, centre-right voters have barely moved.
This isn’t much to write home about, in my view. With the momentary exception of Germany, anti Net Zero sentiment mostly engages those it always did - voters of right-populist parties.
Those parties may be rising or not, but to the extent climate is relevant to that (which usually it isn’t), they are almost certainly just attracting the votes of those who already held anti-climate opinions – as happened in the UK with Reform. The actual quantum of those holding strongly anti climate opinions is not massively increasing. That quantum continues to be over-amplified in media and social media spaces.
Support for Net Zero policy is strong, but delicate on EVs and heat pumps
I have less international trend data on policy, but we can see where opinion sits right now in Europe and over time in the UK. The position is largely comfortable across a typical set of Net Zero policies. In the UK, we can see things haven’t moved much at all.
The important exception concerns cars – the forced phase out of petrol/diesel cars and uptake of EVs – and home heating (phasing out gas boilers for heat pumps). On both of these, opinion is divided. It always was, but it has become more negative in the UK – and in Europe too.
Net support for European Green Deal policies in 5 EU countries (July 2024)
Given the importance of these two policies to the transition, you might argue it discredits my former point about backlash being exaggerated – a little ‘apart from that Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?’.
But I don’t think so.
What is driving those sentiments, which I don’t think themselves are even held very firmly, is not a generalised resistance to Net Zero but a cross-issue increase in sensitivity to cost and inconvenience, brought on by inflation and cost of living pressures. Anything that sounds a bit of a faff will run into trouble.
This is a change in operating conditions for policymakers, but it’s not an insurmountable one – even if it does present dilemmas, as I’ll come on to later. It certainly doesn’t amount to full-blown ‘culture war’, but something more practical and anodyne.
That said, it is made harder by what has happened to issue prioritisation.
Climate salience has significantly declined
I am something of a fundamentalist about issue salience. In my view it matters because it’s the key to understanding the few actually meaningful interactions between public opinion and politics/policymaking.
People have opinions on lots of things; they care about far fewer. It’s what they prioritise that shapes what they punish and reward politicians for; what they give time or money to, and so on. People who place an issue in their top 3 issues are also disproportionately more likely to put up with inconvenience or cost to address it.
In turn, salience influences party competition and politicians’ sense of permission structure.*
Looking across the continent, this the only truly meaningful change in public attitudes in Europe in recent times. People are not significantly more anti climate or Net Zero than they were 3 years ago. They just care about their views a lot less.
Something happened culturally around 2019 – likely a combination of the direct action protests (XR, FFF et al) and climate impacts becoming manifest – which saw climate surge up voter’s priority list across northern Europe especially.
In the last year or so, however, that’s fallen back – even if it’s still higher than in the early 2010s. In the UK, the environment is at the lowest place with YouGov since 2019. In Eurobarometer, it’s also declined.
Again, I strongly think this is not about climate itself – but how much other stuff is going on. Inflation, immigration, Ukraine, the housing crisis. It has squeezed the environment out of the news and other information spaces, and it’s these spaces which tend to set voter agendas.
But it’s still bad, above all because it risks politicians and party strategists feeling less sense of reward for action or risk to inaction.
So what? Getting policy and communications right
The obvious risk is the above conditions create the following dynamic:
Mainstream European parties – especially on the centre-left - do not wish to row back on Net Zero targets because, aside from being terrible for the planet, they fear the harmful signal it sends to the public at large who are still sympathetic, and the parts of the electorate for whom it remains important. Not to mention the diplomatic fallout.
However, with lower issue salience, it becomes harder for advocates to win arguments for spending limited financial and political capital on the transition, because the short-term political ‘bang for the buck’ is perceived to be lower.
The path of least resistance we thus drift towards is not government’s first preference, but their revealed one: doing the transition to things like EVs, electric stoves and heat pumps on the cheap, placing large amounts of cost or friction onto the consumer.
This dynamic is more or less what happened in Germany, as far as I can see, and it remains the single biggest risk of real – rather than invented – greenlash. It should be occupying more rental space in the mind of green campaigners than whatever crap Andrew Tate is saying.
For instance, you can even see the outlines of it in the UK: climate is a top 3 issue for many parts of Labour’s coalition (Lib Dem switchers for instance), but less so for others (Con to Lab switchers). Labour have ambitious targets but scaled down its proposed funding for them in February under attack from the right.
All of which hints at an inescapable trilemma. You can have two of tight fiscal policy/fiscal rules, Net Zero and avoiding costs to consumers – but you can’t have all three.
The big spending Inflation Reduction Act – all carrots no stick – was one answer. Elsewhere, people like Adam Tooze argue quite rationally for a far more efficient solution: more direct carbon taxation. Any political adviser will flinch at that, but that just takes us back to the trilemma.
It should be said there is some wiggle room to strike a balance. Voters don’t tend to notice indirect costs or those wrapped up into a wider price tag (hence the UK right couldn’t get traction on opposition to green levies despite relentless trying). But there isn’t much.
Any pro-climate government is going to have to put its hand in its pocket to avoid backlash - and at the very least see it as a downpayment on votes not lost.
Finally, what can campaigners do in this environment? Help government navigate these dilemmas, yes, but those with the ability to influence publics should not forget about conveying to them ‘the big why’ - why are we doing all this stuff to begin with? Not least to try and boost the salience of climate back up.
It’s rational for short-term, or elite facing, advocates to adopt ‘co-benefit’ narratives on jobs or bills. But the downside is these reduce the number of people putting ‘climate for climate’s sake’ into voters’ media diets. The evidence is fairly clear that it’s this – especially news stories - which drives voter issue salience.
Round Our Way and Potential Energy, for instance, take this insight and do fantastic work targeting swing voters directly with earned and paid media carrying accessible stories about climate and the threat to future generations. But a fraction of overall funding goes to this stuff in reality - and the headwinds are huge.
The Net Zero movement has come an unthinkably long way in the last decade, all of which is down to a heroic amount of hard work and smarts. But it’s these challenges alone, I think, which will determine the politics of climate in the next decade - and in doing so the world we might leave behind.
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* This ‘salience theory of progress’ is contestable. A more insider technocratic view goes: if you care about an issue, you don’t want it to be on the top of the agenda – because that just makes it a target for opposition. You want to work behind the scenes with experts, away from the gaze of media or bad faith operators. There is a certain logic to this. The renewable energy revolution in the UK was done quietly, for instance. In reality, many policy changes can be won in such a way. But I don’t see how it can apply across the board to an issue like Net Zero, which in the end – given it’s challenge to vested interests and demands on finite resources - requires large amounts of political capital to happen.