{"id":1354,"date":"2019-11-29T11:16:23","date_gmt":"2019-11-29T11:16:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/?p=1354"},"modified":"2019-11-29T11:16:23","modified_gmt":"2019-11-29T11:16:23","slug":"climate-policies-in-party-manifestos-green-washing-or-eye-opening","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/2019\/11\/29\/climate-policies-in-party-manifestos-green-washing-or-eye-opening\/","title":{"rendered":"Climate policies in party manifestos: Green-washing or eye-opening?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Dr Aurelie Charlies<\/a> is a Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

\u201cClimate Emergency\u201d is the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year 2019, \u201cClimate Strike\u201d is the Collins Dictionary Word of the Year, and with a 266% rise<\/a> in the use of the term \u201cClimate Action\u201d over the past year, Climate Action seems to be the number one priority in people\u2019s mind.<\/p>\n

Channel 4 got this right when organising the Climate Debate between the main political leaders. So, how does climate action reflect in their manifestos? Are the policies proposed in line with the scale of action required to stay alive as a species? Or is it business-as-usual? And is it realistic and financially sound? Bearing in mind the 8 to 10 years of carbon budget<\/a>\u00a0Nature is giving us to stay below a 1.5 rise in global temperature, let\u2019s have a look at the extent to which the main parties are connected to the reality of the climate emergency.<\/p>\n

For the Conservatives, the pledge is to place the environment as a number one priority in the first budget; to reach net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, and to create a new \u00a3640 million Nature for Climate Fund, and a \u00a3500 million Blue Planet Fund for our oceans. Riding the wave of Sir Attenborough\u2019s programme is interesting, but to have a real impact - and not be accused of green washing - should we count in million of billion? With climate action as the first priority, the propositions of the Conservatives - starting on page 43 of 66 in their manifesto<\/a> - will melt in the face of the challenge. It's a quick fix to a problem that requires much deeper and dramatic change at the economic, social and individual levels.<\/p>\n

For Labour, the Green Industrial Revolution is on its way to achieve a low carbon economy by committing to net zero carbon emissions by 2030<\/a>. Propositions in terms of \u201crepairing\u201d our impact on nature via investments in renewable energy, or job creation in the green economy, will be financed with the creation of a \u00a3400 billion National Transformation Fund and a \u00a3250 billion Green Transformation Fund. These figures show promising signs in understanding the scale of the issue and, according to the work of Mazzucato<\/a>, public finance for long-term investments makes economic sense for a mission of such scale. It helps monitoring large scale projects to avoid green-washing projects, promotes public-private partnership, and helps to avoid large sums of valuable finance feed speculative financial bubbles, as witnessed in 2008. The main ideological caveat however here is the word \u201cindustrial\u201d in the title, because it keeps our mindset in the manufacturing era that led us to a climate emergency in the first place, and it prevents us from evolving toward a \u201cdoing more with less\u201d type of economy.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, the Liberal Democrats got the emergency element right by proposing \u201chard-and-fast\u201d targets of planting trees, and promoting public transport and electric cars, while having 80% of UK electricity produced from renewables by 2030. These targets are not ambitious enough however for the scale of the challenge. Similarly, financing through air passenger duty demonstrates once more that we need to move beyond the mindset of \u201cinternalising the externality\u201d of Nature, as promoted by mainstream economic theory with taxes and carbon markets, to a new organic economic design in the vein of Raworth<\/a>\u2019s framework. Such organic design prevents quick fixes from falling in to the trap and momentum of speculative financial bubbles. More profoundly, it avoids alienating people taken as consumers from their ecological self.<\/p>\n

Placing Nature at the heart of its manifesto is precisely the proposition, and yes expertise, of the Green Party. Here the Green New Deal proposed for energy, incomes, housing, transport, industry, forestry and farming reflects the party\u2019s ethos, which means that propositions are more likely to become reality. It is also eye-opening compared with others in understanding the scale of the challenge ahead, with a realistic (Nature-wise) target of 2030 for net zero emissions. Such a challenge is financed through public borrowing for long-term investments of a total of \u00a3100 billion a year over the next decade, and borrowing makes sense in an era of negative interest rates. Frequent flyers levy or carbon tax are also useful economic nudges to trigger behavioural changes as it taps into people\u2019s cognitive biases<\/a> or brain errors. However, nudging people to act differently for transportation or consumption doesn\u2019t mean that \u201cgreen\u201d behaviour will consistently be applied in all of our daily individual choices.<\/p>\n

Convincing the converted around climate change is easy, but to elect and convince the deniers is a problem of individual responsibility. It has to be personal. We have to face our emotions<\/a>, positive and negative, around past experiences of Nature and Nurture in order to be able to rewire our brain towards an ecological mind - a human mind able to heal, and act upon our relationship with Nature.<\/p>\n

This blog is part of the IPR 'General Election 2019' blog series.\u00a0Visit the IPR blog<\/a>\u00a0to read more.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Dr Aurelie Charlies is a Lecturer in the Department of Social and Policy Sciences at the University of Bath.\u00a0 \u201cClimate Emergency\u201d is the Oxford Dictionary Word of the Year 2019, \u201cClimate Strike\u201d is the Collins Dictionary Word of the Year,...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1186,"featured_media":1355,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[112,114,117,123,129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-economics","category-energy-and-environmental-policy","category-food-and-agriculture","category-political-ideologies","category-uk-politics"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/115\/2019\/11\/Climate-Action.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1186"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1354\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1355"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}