It’s a headline worthy of a blue-haired Guardian subeditor intern, but it was in the Times: ‘French Ulez to be scrapped in victory for hard-Right.’ Opposition to draconian ‘clean air’ policies has long been met with responses prescribed by the crass everyone-I-hate-is-literally-Hitler playbook. And that seems to be the framing of establishment stenographers, who struggle to understand why their policies alienate people and create a popular backlash. And more than merely a backlash. Like the UK’s Remain holdouts, green policy advocates are blind to the fact that their reckless ambitions have given ever more energy to increasingly well-organised opposition movements. In Britain, Starmer has faced criticism that he is seeking to put the UK back in the EU via the back door. But such a return may well spell trouble for his green agenda, as environmentalism in the EU is collapsing faster than the Union itself. Please don’t make me actually like the EU, Keir!
The Times is only able to sustain its allusion to the spectre of the “hard Right” for a few moments. “Marine Le Pen, leader of the hard-Right National Rally” was joined, according to the article, by “the radical Left France Unbowed”, who “along with conservatives” had pushed through a repeal of legislation that “barred higher polluting vehicles from city centres”.
You see the problem with commentary leading with such emotive framing as “hard Right”, I am sure. A cause that enjoys support of parties in a coalition of the popular Left and Right and “backed by 80% of the public” – such that the legislation was repealed by lawmakers voting 98 to 51 – makes the putative ‘centre’ in fact at the far extreme.
For those such as Times journalists obsessed with political geometry, the “hard Right” seems to represent scepticism of green policy agendas because their own ideological foundations give rise to that appearance. The social sciences (when they were perhaps more deserving of the name) used to understand how this ‘observer bias’ influenced analysis. But perhaps a better term for the same bias in today’s world might be the ‘Guardian effect’. Researchers and commentators afflicted by this effect believe themselves, by virtue of their status a members of the ideological elite, to have perspectives that are uncontaminated by ideology. But such types are the most vulnerable to self-deception. It is pure ideology that asserts that a population must be immobilised and face punitive prices in order to ‘save the planet’, whereas it is the objective pragmatism of ordinary people who determine that, while mountain-fresh clean air in city streets might be nice, getting to work, paying the bills and putting food on the table is of greater importance in the here-and-now.
Moreover, establishment intransigence can only be tolerated for so long before it elicits a righteous anger. As Macron himself said in response to the Gilets Jaunes protests, seemingly channelling one of the protesters demanding his resignation: “We hear the president, the government, they talk about the end of the world and we are talking about the end of the month.” The protests were sparked by increases in the cost of petrol, and would therefore seem to have represented an obstacle to the global climate policy process in the very birthplace of its most significant development: the Paris Agreement. But politicians and the media, keen to defend the historic development in climate politics both out of pride and out of political necessity, insisted that the cake could be both had and eaten. “We are going to treat both, that we must treat both,” said the President, referring to climate change and the GJ’s grievances.
Europe’s press and Green Blob limbs attempted to turn the popular uprising into a demand for equitable green policies, not opposition. ‘Yellow vests demand climate action,’ claimed DW, which found some protesters willing to give it quotes that would seem to cast Gilets Jaunes as an Extinction Rebellion splinter group. Similarly, the Guardian’s Oliver Haynes bemoaned in 2023 that “five years on, the world is failing to learn the gilets jaunes’ lesson about class and climate”. Leaning in to a palpable split between ‘establishment environmentalism’ and the broader green movement that seems to resonate with one-time radical Leftism’s shallow preoccupations with class war and ‘social justice’, Haynes argues that “Macron’s fuel tax offered an object lesson in how not to make climate policy”. Similarly, London’s Ultra Low Emissions Zone (Ulez) caused “costs for pollution [to be] falling on ordinary people during a period when the cost of living was rising”, antagonised by and fuelling “the Right-wing press”. “Pain should not disproportionately burden the working and lower-middle classes,” concluded Haynes, demanding “democratic input” or the wrath of reactionary forces.
But besides his political blackmail of establishment greens, Haynes’s invocation of a “just transition”, in which the burden of climate policies is first admitted to, and then shared across society, is deeply naïve. Environmentalism was, from the outset, and first and foremost, a basis for the suspension of economic and industrial development and a contraction of the economy in the interests of the world’s wealthiest people – the movement’s billionaire grantors, styled as ‘philanthropists’. Decades before climate change was part of the green agenda, the notion of turning the world’s economy into a zero-sum game using ‘nature’ as a pretext lit the imagination of those who would benefit in perpetuity from steady-state economics, having already secured their private share of the ‘commons’. Furthermore, though this idea has long existed in seemingly Left and Right forms, neither the technical nor political processes required for such a ‘transition’ without the use of guns and tanks has ever been proposed, much less tested. Instead the ‘just’ part has been ushered in my tidal waves of lies and false promises, such as ‘green jobs’, ‘green growth’ and ‘energy security’.
Following the protests on France’s streets, Macron established the country’s answer to the UK’s Climate Assembly, in an attempt to make climate policies acceptable to the public. As I pointed out in my analysis of the UK Assembly for Net Zero Watch in 2021, the Assembly was exactly the same kind of attempt to circumvent the problem of the climate policy agenda’s democratic deficit, which politicians and the Green Blob alike were extremely conscious of. And it was lobbied for and organised by exactly the same interests – chiefly the European Climate Foundation (ECF) – as the French version. Indeed, as well as appointing token representation from the GJs, Macron nominated ECF CEO Laurence Tubiana as co-chair of the French Citizens’ Convention for Climate’s (CCC) governance committee. The Green Blob gets what it pays for.
No matter what kind of political stunt is pulled to try and convince the public that its interests are ‘represented’ by hastily-convened soviet institutions, it is not possible for a categorically anti-human ideological movement to conceal its anti-humanism. And it is not possible for policies that restrict mobility and economic well-being to survive democracy. The Gilets Jaunes were immobilised by a pandemic, gratefully received by the crisis-ridden French government. But now, and despite the French CCC’s existence, actual opposition to green policies has begun to find an organised voice throughout the continent, not because of a hostility to superficial green precepts as such, but to the anti-human sentiment at the core. Nobody is against conservation and clean air and water; what people oppose are abstract and ideal conceptions of ‘nature’ being used to dilute democratic control of policy and as a pretext to rob people.
It is no coincidence that that Paris and London experienced the same legislation at roughly the same time. The “Zones à faibles émissions”, explains the Times, are “equivalent to Britain’s Ulez”, and “ban diesel cars built before 2006 and more modern vehicles in periods of high air pollution”. Environment Minister Agnès Pannier-Runacher reportedly responded to the vote by claiming that “air pollution causes 40,000 premature deaths a year and the low-pollution zones helped reduce these”. It all sounds very familiar because, as I pointed out in my Climate Debate UK/Together association report, it is the ECF and its grantors that drove the air pollution policy agenda throughout Europe.
They believed that they could overcome the obstacles to global and national climate policymaking by making climate change a local issue. The Paris Agreement is hailed as a landmark victory by greens, but it in fact represented a substantial loss of ambition. Whereas in the era of the Kyoto Protocol a one-size-fits-all policy agenda was sought, the development made in Paris in 2015 allowed counties to choose their own non-binding “Nationally-Determined Contribution” (NDC) to emissions reduction, which Trump famously withdrew the USA from, and then re-withdrew again, further exposing and undermining the agreement’s foundations.
In other words, air pollution is a proxy battle of the climate wars. National governments might not be able to further globalism’s desire to abolish private transport without a nationalist pushback, but local politics could reframe global warming as public health matter and make car ownership impossible for the middle and working classes, to much the same effect. And so the ECF’s grantors pumped billions of dollars into the project of capturing local politics, blackmailing the public with unscientific stories about ‘thousands of deaths’ caused each year by traffic.
Now, once again in Paris, we can see the collapse of another major project of the global and European Green Blob. It has no immediate consequences for us here in the UK, other than signalling both the absurd futility of Miliband’s idea that UK climate unilateralism is somehow “leading the world”, and the fragility of the climate agenda. But the political signals in France are unmistakable, whether or not they can be dismissed as “hard Right”. The same signals are evident in Germany, too, where the AfD’s hopes of power may have been dashed, but reckless top-heavy policy agendas, including climate and energy, have manifestly summoned up organised reaction. And this week in Poland, hopes for the green agenda to be sustained by the EU were dealt another blow by the presidential election. “Nawrocki opposes the EU’s climate proposals, such as the Green Deal, because he says limiting greenhouse gas emissions will harm small Polish farmers,” explains the BBC, amid much handwringing in the media about the ‘far Right’.
So perhaps this gives some context to stories that ‘Keir Starmer wants to rejoin the EU by the back door‘. Indeed, I think he probably does. And I think he absolutely shouldn’t. But looked at from the perspective of the most crisis-ridden Prime Minister in our history, surrounded by a party of idiots who will resist any meaningful reversal of immigration and climate policies, Europe might offer him a way out. Over the channel, national parties are increasingly building on resistance to precisely those policy agendas, and they will exert greater influence on the EU itself. The climate agenda, championed in Germany, has led to a catastrophic deindustrialisation and collapse in the establishment’s authority. And the bloc has similarly discovered it has neutered its industrial capacity, frustrating European elites’ desires to get on a ‘war footing’ against Russia. Policymakers have the ECF to thank. And as the mainstays of European policy such as the Green Deal collapse, Starmer might sense the opportunity of allowing the EU to drag Miliband down with them.
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