Can a democracy achieve Net Zero?
Is the environment too much an elite cause?
I attended a climate conference recently which resulted in a number of suggestions that would ease the path to Net Zero. They included a range of commonly encountered exhortations, such as flying less and eating less meat. These are recommendations that rely upon convincing people to undertake them. My interest was aroused by the recommendations that involve a degree of compulsion, such as legislating plastic waste reductions or requiring new houses to have heat pumps and solar panels. My attention was caught by the point at which convincing people to act in a certain way turns into compelling them to act in that way. Does it mean, if you have to compel people to work towards Net Zero, that you have lost the argument? Why are people unconvinced? Could it mean that the green transition is something that will have to be imposed upon a populace? If so, will we need to abandon our democratic institutions?
It seems that people have inconsistent preferences. When asked by then ONS, 61% of those surveyed felt that climate change was a pressing issue. This came behind the cost of living (89%), the NHS (87%), and the economy (74%). Of those surveyed, only 8% reported that they had made a lot of changed to their lifestyles to tackle climate change. Here lies the fickle nature of public opinion. The public wants climate action undertaken, only as long as it inconveniences someone other than themselves. Perhaps in this lies the key to why it is that we are behind in the schedule to reach Net Zero by 2050?
There is no doubt that opinion formers believe in the need to achieve Net Zero. Legislation has been introduced across the world, targets have been set, and mechanisms installed. And yet progress is behind schedule. There are a number of reasons why that might be, but the principal one is that the climate tends to be an elite concern, whilst the concerns of a broader population are things like the cost of living, access to healthcare, and the state of the economy. The general public are not yet fully aware of the costs that will be incurred in pursuing a policy of Net Zero, but their awareness is starting to increase.
We are coming out of the first crisis of the green transition, that has manifested itself as higher fuel bills, higher energy costs, and higher food prices. In part, this has been exacerbated by policy. The move towards a green transition has been financed by loading the bills paid by the public with the costs of the green transition. There is now a degree of push back against these policies. As we have argued previously (see here), the elitist concern with the green transition has proven to be a good issue for the populists to latch on to. This starts to explain the apparent lack of progress towards Net Zero. A more general public doesn’t see the green transition as a core concern to them and they are not willing to bear a higher cost of achieving a green transition. It doesn’t necessarily mean that the argument has been lost. It is more likely to mean that a more general public has not yet been convinced to accept the sacrifices of a green transition.
At this point, it might be worthwhile just outlining some of those sacrifices. There are three areas where the green transition will impact upon core areas of concern to the British public — motoring, foreign holidays, and heating the home. If we are to achieve Net Zero, car use in the UK will have to change radically from today. There will need to be greater use of electric vehicles (EVs) and far less use of petrol and diesel vehicles. The charging infrastructure for EVs is largely absent at the moment, and the infrastructure that is there is generally in the wrong place. Car battery performance does not match up to the performance of petrol and diesel engines, and EVs tend to be more expensive — both on a full cost basis and on a private cost basis — compared to petrol and diesel cars. The way things are shaping up, with a degree of compulsion imposed through the tax system, motoring in the future is likely to become the preserve of the rich. Those who can afford to buy an EV, who have a drive on which to charge it overnight, and who can bear the cost of charging the vehicle will make the transition. In this prospective future, there is likely to be some form of backlash against the move to EVs. That backlash is already evident with the current government’s plan to put back the date on which the sale of new petrol and diesel vehicles are banned from 2030 to 2035.
A similar story emerges over foreign holidays. In order to achieve the UK Net Zero ambitions, air travel will have to reduce by a significant amount. Just like motoring, the truth that is wrapped in this statement is that air travel will have to become, once again, the preserve of the rich. This is likely to cause a political reaction. Foreign travel is very popular in the UK. Some estimates suggest that up to two thirds of all Britons will take some form of foreign travel in 2023. It is not beyond belief that to reduce the number of flights to a level consistent with net zero ambitions, a majority of Britons will be priced out of foreign travel by green taxes of some form or another. This will be deeply unpopular.
There then arises the question of domestic heating. Most homes are heated by some form of central heating that is powered by gas boilers. Gas is relatively cheap, relatively abundant, and relatively efficient as a fuel. Unfortunately, it also dumps a lot of carbon into the atmosphere. The government has adopted a policy of encouraging the uptake of heat pumps as an alternative to gas boilers. Given the state of the UK housing stock — old, drafty, poorly insulated, poorly glazed — the uptake of heat pumps is well below expectations. If the UK is to achieve it’s Net Zero ambitions, the encouragement will have to become a lot more forceful. This is likely to generate a political backlash, especially if an ageing population is inadequately heated by heat pumps imposed upon them by the government. The issue of heat pumps is clearly one where the government has been encouraging the adoption of the technology, but has failed to convince sufficient householders to make the transition. It is now resorting to compulsion through the banning of the sale of new gas boilers. Originally this was set to be enforced from 2025 in new build homes, but has now been set back to 2035 owing to the lack of pubic enthusiasm for heat pumps.
All of this brings into question the extent to which a green transition can be achieved by persuasion, and the degree to which compulsion will become necessary if we are to achieve Net Zero by 2050. For some years, the direction of policy has been to encourage the adoption of the technologies of the green transition. In all fairness, some progress has been made. However, this represents the picking of the low hanging fruit. Those likely to benefit from the adoption of these technologies have readily adopted them. That now leaves a much larger pool of those who are unconvinced by the new technologies, who are resistant to change, and who are just outright hostile to the green agenda.
In thinking about what to do about these people, policy generally moves in two directions — financial tweaks to encourage ‘desirable behaviour’ and discourage ‘undesirable behaviour’; and the outright compulsion to behave in a certain way. The first category — little nudges here and there — are usually fiscal in nature. Subsidies are given to those technologies we want adopted, such as solar panels, and taxes are imposed on those technologies we like to discourage, such as the use of petrol and diesel. This is a long established usage, but forms part of the fiscal process, which is subject to democratic scrutiny.
The outright compulsion to behave in a certain way, such as the compulsory fitting of heat pumps, or to refrain from behaving in a certain way, such as not burning unseasoned firewood, is more of a set of technocratic imperatives. People are told to behave in a certain way because it is good for them or society. Usually, such technocratic imperatives — such a wearing crash helmets — are accepted as sensible restrictions. However, in a liberal democracy, such technocratic rules are subject to democratic scrutiny.
It is here where the problems might arise. If a government attempts to enact deeply unpopular prohibitions, or if it tries to tax too hard those behaviours it finds ‘undesirable’, then it runs the risk of losing it’s democratic legitimacy. A government that does that is unlikely to stay in power for too long. And here is where we find the dilemma between climate action and popular support. Measures to ensure the green transition are likely to be very unpopular. They create the space for populist politicians to advocate abandoning all attempts to achieve Net Zero. In this context, a democracy is unlikely to achieve Net Zero because people will vote against those measures necessary to make it happen. To put it the other way around, Net Zero is only likely to be achieved by those autocratic and technocratic entities where the will of the people can be conveniently ignored.
© Stephen Aguilar-Millan 2023
