It’s the ballot, stupid!

Politicians worldwide have to say something about climate change during their election campaigns these days. They believe it’s ballot-worthy. And that’s important

Franny Armstrong’s 2009 documentary The Age of Stupid reviewed today’s human activities amid a perceived dystopian future. The film depicts a world ravaged by catastrophic climate change in 2055, where London is flooded, Sydney is burning, Las Vegas has been swallowed up by the desert, the Amazon rainforest has turned up, snow has vanished from the Alps, and nuclear war has laid waste to India. A man living alone in a devastated world—in a largely ice-free Arctic—watches a half-century-old archival film and asks, “Why didn’t we stop climate change when we had the chance?”

A decade later, a 16-year-old wonder girl from Stockholm, Greta Thunberg, scolded the world leaders at the 2019 UN Climate Action Summit in New York for their decades of inaction on climate change: “How dare you!” The “Greta effect” rocked this planet for sure.

However, the Conference of the Parties (COP), the yearly UN Climate Change Conference, has been held since the 1995 Berlin edition. When, after a year of Covid-induced interruption, COP26 was organised in Glasgow in 2021, the world witnessed remarkable enthusiasm among the media and general public for a climate conference!

At COP27, the UN chief warned of a “breakdown in trust” between rich and poor governments if no clear agreements on key issues, including funding for loss and damage, were made. After two weeks of fraught and often bitter negotiations, a breakthrough agreement was reached when the developed countries agreed to provide finance to help rescue and rebuild vulnerable countries hit hard by climate-related disasters, known as a “loss and damage” fund.

It’s not clear, though, how much of that would materialise. In fact, lots of commitments have been made over the years, but very little has been kept so far. During Copenhagen’s COP15 in 2009, climate finance funding of $100 billion per year from developed countries to developing countries by 2020 was agreed upon. This target has been missed. Furthermore, it is now clear that limiting the global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius “remains on life support.” The climate activists, however, had reason to cheer even before the summit began. This is due to Lula da Silva’s election victory in Brazil, who oversaw a significant decrease in deforestation as president. At COP27, President-elect Lula vowed to start undoing the rampant destruction of the Amazon rainforest under his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, which had pushed the world’s largest rainforest to the brink of irreversible collapse.

Also Read | COP27: An eyewash of a resolution

Some other recent elections may have produced promise for the climate. In 2017, former Australian prime minister Scott Morrison – then the treasurer of Australia – brought a lump of coal during question time into the House of Representatives, and brandished it like a trophy! A symbol, indeed. After three years of record-breaking bushfires and floods, Australia now has a government led by Labour leader Anthony Albanese that has vowed to end decades of inaction by one of the world’s highest per capita emitters.

Historically, the climate issue has not been much of a political kingmaker, though. In the backdrop of the 2020 US presidential election, two-thirds of respondents told exit pollster Edison Research that climate change was a “serious problem,” while 29 per cent of them voted for Trump, who pulled America out of the Paris Agreement and whose position on climate issues was inconsistent. This US midterm, a $12 million ad campaign was aimed specifically at promoting Democratic candidates’ bona fides on climate change, targeting 2 million electorates who put climate change as a priority, voted for Biden in 2020, but were undecided in 2022. In a tight election like this, it was important, indeed.

This August, US President Biden signed the Inflation Reduction Act, which authorises $391 billion in spending on energy and climate change, which he hails as the “biggest step forward on climate ever.” Well, it’s difficult to say how much of this was done with the elections in mind. In a 2021 paper in the journal Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, researchers from George Mason University and Yale University perceived that global warming’s importance as a voting issue may be dynamically influenced by the state of political and social environments.

Wait. Not really, yet. For example, with far-rights in the newly elected coalition government, climate policy is in turmoil in Sweden, Greta Thunberg’s country. For the first time since 1987, Sweden has no proper Environment Ministry. Denmark’s 2019 election was mostly dubbed a “climate election,” but the just-concluded one was seen as a “crisis election.” It ought to be so, given the backdrop of a pandemic and a war in the region resulting in an energy crisis. Overall, it seems that people are now more concerned about climate change, but they don’t consider it a primary poll issue yet.

In a world where hunger and inequality are rampant, citizens’ top concerns would continue to be the economy, crime, education, and corruption. Billions are more concerned about surviving one more day, having a job, food on the table, and access to medical facilities.

Still, political leaders worldwide have to say something about climate change during their election campaigns these days. They believe it’s ballot-worthy. And that’s important. The UN Secretary-General, António Guterres, has warned that the fight for a liveable planet will be won or lost in this decade. There is little doubt that we are passing through The Age of Stupid.

(The writer is Professor of Statistics, Indian Statistical Institute, Kolkata)