The greenlash is built on lazy thinking, writes a climate activist
Luisa Neubauer argues that rolling back climate policies is economic suicide masquerading as pragmatism
ACROSS THE West, governments’ climate agendas are being quietly pushed to one side. As a young climate organiser who has spent seven years pushing for action, I’m not surprised by the current lack of momentum, from politicians and civil society alike—momentum comes and goes. What does surprise me is the intellectual laziness with which the ebb of political effort is being explained away.
Just a few years ago political ambition on climate was everywhere, and so were the people: on one sunny Friday in September 2019, in car-and-schnitzel-loving Germany, 1.4m people flooded the streets. The Merkel government responded by passing the country’s first-ever climate law, which imposed a national carbon tax and set binding emissions caps for each sector of the economy.
Today the marches are smaller and, more importantly, climate policies are being rolled back. The Economist recently called this reversal a “greenlash", noting that fossil-fuel-driven business-as-usual is making a noisy return.
When searching for explanations for the paradoxical decrease in governments’ efforts at a time when climate threats are dramatically increasing, many land on three forces: public fatigue, financial constraints and geopolitical instability. All three are real. But good reasons for a greenlash they are not.
Start with public opinion. In several major elections in 2024, climate was overshadowed by concerns over the high cost of living, security and migration. A seemingly logical consequence, then, is that governments devote less attention to climate protection. Yet what we are seeing is much worse than simple inaction.
A report by a group of research and academic institutions shows that several big economies have in fact increased their fossil-fuel production capacity since 2023, pushing the 1.5°C climate targets out of reach. Indeed, CO₂ emissions reached yet another record high in 2024. Most countries, including in the EU, are leaving it unhelpfully late to provide renewed national climate targets ahead of the COP30 talks next month. Worse, the EU is watering down its “Green Deal" regulations.
But just because other crises are competing for attention, it does not follow that voters want climate targets abandoned. A survey last year found that nine-tenths of the world’s population want their national government to do more to fight global warming. Politicians should use this to rally support for ambitious emission targets. To the extent that there are “vibe shifts" against prioritising such goals, governments should push back. Politics is supposed to be about shaping public opinion, not slavishly pandering to it.
Consider the economy next. When the European Green Deal was first introduced, lawmakers assumed a soaring green industry would drive the transition. Now, many economies are stagnating and military spending is eating up public budgets. But curiously, as spending debates rage, few mention the huge and increasingly concrete costs of an overheating planet. One study puts the global costs of extreme weather attributable to climate change at $143bn a year. Though the global south is generally hit harder, Europe is the continent heating the fastest, and it shows: extreme weather events this year alone have cost the EU €43bn ($50bn). It will get worse: a working paper published by America’s National Bureau of Economic Research finds that 1°C of warming reduces global GDP by 20% in the long run.
And yet renewable-energy subsidies are scrutinised as fiscal luxuries. Germany and France, for instance, have reduced solar-rooftop subsidies. In contrast, fossil-fuel subsidies—an eye-watering $7trn a year globally at the last count, including implicit subsidies like the failure to price in the costs of pollution—are treated as rational and indispensable. Developing countries are the biggest subsidisers, but they have plenty of company: Britain, another erstwhile climate champion, spent £80bn on subsidising fossil fuels in 2023, a third more than it spent subsidising renewables. The numbers don’t lie, but apparently they don’t always matter.
And then there’s climate geopolitics. The once useful rise of China’s green-tech industry is increasingly seen as a strategic liability in America and Europe: cheap solar panels come at the cost of a dangerous dependency on Xi Jinping. It is tricky to recalibrate entire economies around decarbonisation while trade disputes, wars and authoritarianism are on the rise. Yet complexity and competition are reasons to act faster, not slower. That this isn’t happening rests on the premise that climate action is a “bonus"—something best left to easier times—rather than an imperative.
Whether driven by ideology, inertia or profit, an alarming number of politicians and business leaders are prepared to risk global stability for a few more years of fossil-fuel dominance. They can only maintain this stance if they are able to convince enough people that irrational moves towards more climate chaos are in fact pragmatic, and that climate campaigners’ demands are unrealistic.
Whether the greenlash continues, or gives way to new momentum for climate action, will be determined not only by elections, economic developments or Donald Trump’s latest views. It will also depend on the tone and clarity of public discourse, and on the stories we tell ourselves.
Decarbonising economies that have throughout their existence depended on fossil fuels is complicated, and will only become more so. But there is no more important task for governments than finding ways through these challenges and forging alliances of the willing to protect life. If common politics doesn’t grow a spine, then public commentators must—for the sake of, well, everything.
Luisa Neubauer is a German climate activist. She was a co-organiser of the School Strike for Climate.
topics
