The coming months on #climate in the UK

Written at speed, apols for typos etc. Musings on what we may see and “what is to be done” (bracing for impact, mostly?)

The situation is one of clusterfuckery, escalating to collective suicide. Keir Starmer, to absolutely nobody’s surprise, is ditching the promise to spend £28bn per year on green investment. This promise, made by his Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves at the 2021 Labour Party Conference, should be seen as a bare minimum, not a ceiling for what we should be spending (the how matters too. Also degrowth. But that’s another blog).

You can read more about Starmer’s U-turn in my recent Conversation piece. As predicted there (and by everyone with two brain cells to rub together), the investors are not happy (see this tweet from James Murray of Business Green about unhappy vulture venture capitalists.). If Starmer can be spooked this easily, what does it say for his ability to hold a steady course when things really get rough?

Starmer and his gang seem to think that abjuring the £28bn number provides fewer attack lines for the Tory Party and the newspapers. His “advisers” are running the Blair playbook from the mid-1990s, where he flew out to Australia to go down on bended knee to Murdoch. They think it’s the 1990s. It’s really not.

It won’t. The Tories and the press (and the bots) will simply run “Starmer flip flops again” ad nauseam.

So, what else to say? Well, the fact that we are in this shituation is a sign of 30 years of failure of the environment social movement, made up of NGOs, think tanks and “grassroots” groups that go up like a rocket and come down like a stick. YES YES, “neoliberalism,” people not wanting to talk about limits because it reminds them of frailty, death etc. YES YES underfunded etc. But also, to quote a DM I sent a friend I’ve never met –

Social movements AWOL too. This is the fruit of 30 years of failure. Of boring meetings that exclude people, of cliquy groups. Of course, SMOs would never have kept all the ppl who came to a meeting, but if they’d kept two or three times as many as they did, then the ripple/knock-on effects, shifting the “dial” (the fucking “overton window”). But nope, too comfortable in the smugosphere, too easy to ride the emotacycle.

So, what to expect?

Well, there are two things going on here that matter (obviously there’s also Russia-Ukraine, Trump etc). One is the actual material world. That thing that exists beyond the “Westminster Bubble” and the accompanying court journalism (see also “rolodex journalism”). The warmest January will presumably be followed by the warmest February, followed by the…

This is an El Nino year, and those humpback graphs you see on Twitter, the 2024 red squiggles above all previous years… We will see corpses of sea mammals washing up on coasts. We will see all sorts of signs of the times. And the crops? Who knows what happens there. Food prices go up and up, pulse disturbances on top of press disturbances. The media ignores it – too complex, not an easy villain or emotionally-laden hook. But the real world is real. Will it properly bite rich people on the ass this year? Would you bet against it? Would you be surprised to see serious unrest in towns and cities across the “developed” world? (Maybe not the UK and Australia – the populace seems properly cowed).

And most of all, the sense of hope of a livable future will be scorched away in the heatwaves, washed away in the floods. “Everybody knows” that “it” is coming. Blah blah morbid symptoms blah blah.

Second is the election. In May? In October, since there’s more looting to be done? Who knows. But we will see the right-wing media try to amp up the culture war. They will be experimental – they will throw everything – trans, race, perceived “elites”, “eco-nutters”. They will try to hybridise. When they see something that looks like it is “working”, they will double down and go harder.

Starmer’s lot have shown themselves to be spineless. They think they are so smart, but they’re really really not. They will twist and spin. The main thing they have going for them is that they have now set expectations of them so low that nobody is going to get more disappointed (I think). In the end, they will form a government (minority? slender lead? landslide? No idea) simply because they are Not the Actual Conservative Party.

So, for individuals, what is to be done?

a) expect to Broecker’s climate beast waking up, because we have been poking it for so long. Figure out how to reduce (but never eliminate) the vulnerability to weather extremes of yourselves and loved ones.

See this brilliant guest post over on my All Our Yesterdays project.

b) expect the media and the political classes to ignore the climate crisis, or witter on about technology as if there were any silver bullets. Expect them to continue to not understand their failures, or admit them. It’s simply who these people are.

c) demand better of whatever social movement organisations you happen to be in. The Smugosphere and the Emotacycle have contributed to the killing the possibility of doing anything meaningful. But if we’re to have any chance at collective “resilience” (I hate that word), we need to act differently.

d) the Cocker Protocol, obvs.