{"id":2767,"date":"2025-09-10T14:25:22","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T13:25:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/?p=2767"},"modified":"2025-09-10T14:25:22","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T13:25:22","slug":"politicians-now-talk-of-climate-pragmatism-to-delay-action-new-study","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/2025\/09\/10\/politicians-now-talk-of-climate-pragmatism-to-delay-action-new-study\/","title":{"rendered":"Politicians now talk of climate \u2018pragmatism\u2019 to delay action \u2013 new study"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

UK politicians increasingly frame slow climate action as \u201cpragmatic\u201d or \u201ccommon sense,\u201d portraying ambitious targets as extreme. This language allows leaders to appear reasonable while delaying transformative policies, protecting fossil-fuel interests. The real danger is underestimating public appetite for bold climate leadership, risking the UK\u2019s net zero commitments at a critical moment.<\/em><\/p>\n

Steve Westlake<\/a> is a Lecturer in Environmental Psychology at the University of Bath.This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has described her plan to \u201cmaximise extraction\u201d of the UK\u2019s oil and gas from the North Sea as a \u201ccommon sense\u201d<\/a> energy policy.<\/p>\n

Politicians are using language like this increasingly often \u2013 calling themselves \u201cpragmatic\u201d on climate change and invoking \u201ccommon sense\u201d. It sounds reasonable, reassuring, and grownup \u2013 the opposite of \u201chysterical\u201d campaigners or \u201cunrealistic\u201d targets.<\/p>\n

But new research<\/a> my colleagues and I conducted, calling on a decade of interviews with UK MPs, shows that political \u201cpragmatism\u201d is fast becoming a dangerous form of climate delay. By framing urgent action as \u201cextreme\u201d and steady-as-she-goes policies as \u201cpragmatic\u201d, leaders across the political spectrum are protecting the fossil-fuel status quo at the very moment scientists warn we need rapid, transformative change.<\/p>\n

Badenoch\u2019s latest intervention is a perfect example. She said \u201ccommon sense\u201d dictates that every drop of oil must be extracted from the North Sea, and that net zero by 2050 was a policy pushed by \u201cbullies\u201d. This came just a day after the UK Met Office declared summer 2025 as the hottest on record<\/a>.<\/p>\n

We found that members of parliament deploy the same language of pragmatism to defend fossil fuel companies and to insist to their constituents that nothing needs to change too fast. The paradox, of course, is that more urgent social and economic change is precisely what the world\u2019s climate scientists say is necessary<\/a> to avert climate breakdown.<\/p>\n

In our recent interviews with politicians, MPs from across the political spectrum tended towards gradual change in order to maintain political and public support. One said:<\/p>\n

First and foremost be pragmatic. Accept incremental change, because incremental change often accelerates, but you take people with you. If you didn\u2019t take people with you, you\u2019ll start getting resistance.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Another MP contrasted a pragmatic approach with the calls from some campaign groups for more rapid action:<\/p>\n

There are campaigns that say we\u2019ve got to be net zero by 2025, or 2030. [laughing incredulously] \u2026 do you realise what the consequences of that will be \u2026 you\u2019d have a revolution in Britain if you tried to do that, in terms of destroying people\u2019s quality of life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Interestingly, despite rejecting more ambitious targets, later in the interview the same MP acknowledged that faster change was needed:<\/p>\n

We need to do more, we could do more, we are, you know, I\u2019m sure the government will do more. I\u2019m certainly pushing it to do more. But fundamentally we\u2019ve halved our emissions since 1990.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here we see the nuance, and the danger, of the language of pragmatism. It allows politicians to hold two positions at once. They can acknowledge the need for rapid change, while promoting a \u201cpragmatic\u201d position against it.<\/p>\n

The calls for pragmatism appeared to stem from MPs\u2019 desire to present a reasoned and rational case for climate action that does not impinge on constituents\u2019 lives. They also used pragmatism to distance themselves from arguments they portrayed as \u201cextreme\u201d or \u201cshrill\u201d.<\/p>\n

The flawed assumption<\/a> underlying these calls to pragmatism is that the public will not support ambitious, transformative climate policies. We concluded that whereas a few years ago MPs promoted climate policies \u201cby stealth\u201d, meaning they did it on the quiet, now they turn to ideas of pragmatism in an attempt to maintain a fragile political consensus in favour of net zero \u2013 a consensus that is already fracturing<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Top-down pragmatism<\/h2>\n

This turn to pragmatism can now be seen at the very top of British politics, threatening the UK\u2019s steady ratcheting up of climate ambition<\/a> to date.<\/p>\n

Former Labour prime minister Tony Blair recently wrote in the Blair Institute\u2019s report on climate change<\/a>: \u201cPeople know that the current state of debate over climate change is riven with irrationality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Blair then asserted: \u201cAny strategy based on either \u2018phasing out\u2019 fossil fuels in the short term or limiting consumption is a strategy doomed to fail.\u201d This is despite the widespread consensus among scientists that both phasing out fossil fuels and reducing consumption of at least some products are essential.<\/p>\n

The report goes on to say: \u201cA realistic voice in the climate debate is required, neither ideological nor alarmist but pragmatic.\u201d This language is intended to sound rational, reasonable and even scientific. The problem is that it can be used to justify actions that appear to ignore what the science is telling us.<\/p>\n

Former Conservative prime minister Rishi Sunak warned against treating climate change as an \u201cideology\u201d <\/a>. Notably, Sunak referred to \u201cpragmatic, proportionate, and realistic\u201d climate action shortly after his government announced hundreds of new licences for oil and gas fields in the North Sea.<\/p>\n

His message coincided with ongoing road-building programmes, plans for airport expansion, and insufficient action to insulate the UK\u2019s housing stock, all of which could jeopardise the UK\u2019s climate targets<\/a>. Again we see the language of pragmatism working against the rapid societal changes that are necessary.<\/p>\n

The pragmatic road ahead<\/h2>\n

In general, the MPs we spoke to were not using pragmatism in bad faith. Rather it was a way of navigating the complexities of climate politics where the huge changes demanded by climate mitigation are deemed too challenging to sell to constituents. But this political strategy is a very risky one and underestimates the public\u2019s appetite for \u201cstrong and clear\u201d climate leadership<\/a> from government.<\/p>\n

The current government is already struggling to reconcile net zero commitments with its economic growth agenda, which includes a new runway at Heathrow airport. Not only is prime minister Keir Starmer facing divisions within the ruling Labour party<\/a> over net zero ambitions, he is also dealing with increasingly prominent net zero scepticism from the leaders of the Conservative and Reform<\/a> parties.<\/p>\n

The political language of \u201cpragmatism\u201d therefore risks spreading from Badenoch to Starmer, becoming a discourse of delay<\/a> that promotes non-transformative solutions.<\/p>\n

All articles posted on this blog give the views of the author(s), and not the position of the IPR, nor of the University of Bath.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

UK politicians increasingly frame slow climate action as \u201cpragmatic\u201d or \u201ccommon sense,\u201d portraying ambitious targets as extreme. This language allows leaders to appear reasonable while delaying transformative policies, protecting fossil-fuel interests. The real danger is underestimating public appetite for bold...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1742,"featured_media":2769,"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":[128,112,143,114,116,126,145],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2767","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-the-labour-market","category-economics","category-emerging-technologies","category-energy-and-environmental-policy","category-evidence-and-policymaking","category-science-and-research-policy","category-sustainability"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/115\/2025\/09\/Blog-Images-193.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767","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\/1742"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2767"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2767\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2769"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2767"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2767"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.bath.ac.uk\/iprblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2767"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}