What this general election result taught me about how not to fight the climate crisis

Boris Johnson declared that it was the “Get Brexit Done” election, and he united the Brexit vote by ruthlessly forcing Nigel Farage to join him (or at least get out of his way). But the other side, broadly defined, failed to pull together.

While the Lib Dem-Green-Plaid Cymru “Remain Alliance” managed to organise tactical withdrawals from a good few constituencies, they still fought each other in many others. Meanwhile, the SNP and the Labour Party, both of whom backed a second referendum, fought their corners alone.

The upshot was that while the Remain parties won the popular vote by nearly six percentage points – 52.9 per cent to 47.1 per cent – the Brexit-backing Tories still netted a massive parliamentary majority, as the split between the Remain-oriented parties allowed the Tories to win in many constituencies where they might otherwise have struggled.

There’s a lesson here for all mass political movements: united campaigns win, and divided ones fail. And nobody should heed that lesson more than the climate movement.

However fast the anti-climate change movement is growing, it remains deeply fractured, and some of its most stark divisions are between differing political ideologies.

The movement includes everyone from anarchists and libertarians to free-market fundamentalists and social and liberal democrats. At one end of the green spectrum are people like US vice-president Al Gore, who pushed for market-based carbon taxes to be the basis of the Kyoto climate treaty. But carbon taxes have been difficult to deploy, with opponents rightly saying they can disproportionately penalise the poor.

Then you have people like Naomi Klein, Owen Jones and George Monbiot arguing that the problem is the viciousness of neoliberalism (which I prefer to call vulture capitalism), or indeed just capitalism itself. Tackle capitalism, they say, and the climate crisis will be solved. Owen Jones even claims that nationalising the oil corporations is vital to tackling the climate crisis.

The problem with these differing sides is that few seem inclined to learn anything from the others, or to subject their own deeply held views to critical examination.

While many on the left are right that vulture capitalism has been disastrous for working people across the globe, they aren’t right about it being the core problem with the oil corporations. Examine the list of the 25 largest oil corporations and you’ll see that only seven are majority shareholder-owned. The other 18 are already nationalised.

These include eight owned by democratic states, four owned by absolute monarchies, 3 by dictatorships, two by communist governments and one by an Islamic theocracy. The fact that they are nationalised has not meant they emit even one ton less of carbon dioxide.

The problem with oil corporations isn’t who owns them; it’s that their product is destroying our climate. The Norwegian state ownership of Statoil means that its profits are invested in a sovereign wealth fund to benefit all Norwegians, including future generations – but its carbon emissions are exactly the same as if it were owned by vulture capitalists.

So the vital question is not how to destroy neoliberalism (however much that might benefit society generally) but how to unite across the political spectrum to tackle the world’s fossil fuel and consumption empires immediately.

The Danish Oil & Natural Gas (DONG Energy) is an example of a company that successfully combines the best of left and right. It is 50.01% state owned, but the rest of it is owned by pension funds, private equity firms and shareholders.

DONG transformed from a fossil fuel corporation developing Denmark’s fossil fuel reserves to a 100% renewable electricity firm concentrating on offshore wind energy. This transformation meant it had to change its name from DONG to Ørsted. It now has assets worth £16 billion and is growing exponentially.

What was key here was not who owned the company, but the fact that changes in market regulations allowed it to make the corporate decision to move into the new renewable energy sector early. It now holds a 16 per cent global share of the offshore wind energy market.

If the UK political parties opposed to the Tory Brexit deal had agreed a full-blown alliance on what united them (a commitment to a People’s Vote) then they would have won. The same applies to the climate movement. All our political ideologies can either help build success or can damage it.

All the tendencies in the climate movement have something to offer. The left brings a passion and commitment to fairness, the right a passion for efficiency and effectiveness, the liberals a willingness to look and see what works best for a particular situation, and the Greens a laser focus on the existential importance of the climate and ecological emergencies.

But likewise, we can let our contradictions get the better of us. The left can become fixated on a destructive hatred for those on the right. The right can be dismissive of impacts on the poor, while the centre sometimes prefer sitting on the fence to upsetting the left or right by saying what really needs to be done.

But the fact is that we don’t have time to waste on this. A recent report from the Potsdam Institute terrifyingly stated that “The evidence from tipping points alone suggests that we are in a state of planetary emergency: both the risk and urgency of the situation are acute.”

This critical emergency dwarfs all of the world wars and recessions put together. As in the Second World War, we now need a national climate emergency unity government.

Its cabinet would include representatives from all the political parties. It would draw up and agree a plan to reorganise the economy to get us to zero-carbon by 2025, just as the unity government redirected 50 per cent of GDP into the war effort to save Britain and Europe from fascism. (As it stands, we are currently only spending a miniscule 1 per cent of GDP on tackling this existential emergency.)

If the new prime minister admires Churchill’s wartime leadership so much, he must understand that the nation and the world face a peril far greater even than Churchill faced in Hitler. Our task in the climate movement is to focus on what unites us and demand that all of society, governments, businesses, media and civil society must now focus all efforts on putting out the blaze.

Let the results of the general election teach us this crucial lesson: divided, we lose. United, we can and must win. Getting this wrong would mean potential extinction for humanity and the elimination of much of what is left of the natural world.

Donnachadh McCarthy is an environmental campaigner, writer and eco-auditor. He is the author of ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy has been bought’