2024 warning: The losers of the green revolution will not go quietly

After spearheading the Green Revolution, Europe now lives in its shadow: the counterrevolution.

I spent much of the last year reporting on Northern Europe, where the transition to a clean economy is moving fastest, talking to the people who will be the losers in the efforts the world desperately needs to synchronize our economies with the environment. .

What they told me was that they would not accept their fate in silence.

I covered Dutch farmers changing national politics and Polish coal miners shaping EU climate policy. I spoke to London drivers who are concerned about the mayor’s efforts to rein in cars, and to reindeer herders whose lives could be transformed by the pursuit of metals and minerals needed for green technology. In Germany, I met far-right leaders and supporters riding a wave of anger.

For some, these burdens are trivial, but for others, they are life-changing. What all of these have in common is resentment and a strong sense that they are not being heard.

I found nothing in the report to suggest that the changes they were asked to make were unnecessary. Nitrogen pollution is suffocating the Dutch countryside, while car exhaust wreaks silent havoc on city dwellers. If we want a stable climate, we must rebuild society’s energy base.

However, it would be naive to think that the green transition will be different from other epochal transitions in history. Like every industrial revolution before it, this one created losers. No matter how many clean energy jobs will be created in the future, hundreds of thousands of jobs are being destroyed now. The freedom to drive and consume without worry is being restricted. Society is being reshaped and the pain is real. Especially those who are hardest hit.

However, there is something unique about this revolution. More than any other event before it, it was driven more by political choices than technology or capital. So, as the Luddites arrived, they inevitably came not just for the machines, but for the policymakers and politicians as well.

In short, it is increasingly clear that the success of the green revolution will depend on whether policymakers and climate activists start to consider those who will bear the greatest costs.

As climate policy shifted from position papers to laws and regulations, right-wing politicians and industry lobbyists discovered my newfound anger. In elections around the world in 2024, the right has expressed its desire to support those who may be left behind.Its most powerful message frames climate efforts as elitist instruction This is just another way to make working people pay for the excesses of the rich.

Much of far-right politics targets immigrants, but antipathy toward climate often runs in lockstep. Both questions stir the same deep-seated unease: fear of losing status in a world where national interests take second place to serving the world or globalist priorities. If immigration propels these parties to power, or even gives them greater political influence, then hostility to climate policy could rise.

Climate activists appear ill-prepared for this moment. Until recently, the green movement was unwilling or unable to address the concerns of those who felt threatened by the shift to a clean economy. Scarred by decades of a war of attrition against the fossil fuel industry, it dismisses these anxieties as fear-mongering by lobbyists or the exaggerated voices of a noisy minority.

This leaves a potentially disastrous blind spot for the movement. Activists may be right, with support for the EU’s legal target of cutting greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by 2050 consistently hovering around 90%. But when people are asked to accept personal sacrifices or behavioral changes, that support evaporates like a mirage, flickering in the distance but fading when approached.

It turns out that the myth of seamless transition persists. I was recently reminded of a morning in Marrakech in November 2016, where I heard a Sierra Club official describe an effective campaign by U.S. NGOs to shut down coal-fired power plants across the country. The good news, he said, is that more jobs will be created in clean energy industries, such as a booming industry in rooftop solar installations. But when he was asked to name a town, whether in coal-rich Appalachia or anywhere else, where fossil fuel-based jobs are predictably being replaced by clean-tech jobs, he said Not coming out.

The next day, Donald Trump was elected president.

We are learning this lesson the hard way. When Poland hosted 2018 United Nations climate talks in the heart of its coal industry, climate activists derided Warsaw’s calls for a just transition as a delaying tactic. The phrase has become a buzzword among activists as negotiations take place in Dubai this year, as they increasingly realize they need to involve workers. But there remains a gap between the reality of the climate movement and the reality of those most affected by climate policies.

If there’s one place that seems to absorb teachable moments, it’s the White House. President Biden’s Inflation Reduction Act, a green spending bill that the White House now says could end up spending $700 billion over 10 years, is clearly targeting political backlash.

Biden’s green subsidies have boosted unions, spent the most in Republican-voting states, lowered costs for consumers and boosted American-made industries so much that the law nearly derailed trade relations with the European Union. The policy appeals to the same patriotic and security-based values ​​that underpin Europe’s efforts to combat climate change. The message to voters is: Uncle Sam has your back.

It’s a big bet. Spending money could undermine the impact of the fight against climate change, but it also leaves governments vulnerable to accusations of profligacy.

But all this will soon be put to the test when 2024 is arguably the most important election year in human history, with the United States, India, Pakistan, South Africa, Taiwan, Sri Lanka, Indonesia and possibly the United Kingdom all voting. and the European Parliament elections in June.

Unless advocates of the Green Revolution can embrace and nurture the millions of people who see themselves as needing to make sacrifices, there is a real danger that these and future elections will escalate the situation to intolerable levels.