If climate policy is in any respects a culture war, the aggressors are the comfortable do-gooders, not those complaining of an assault on their living standards.
One of the advantages enjoyed by those in Europe forcing through the reckless “race” to net zero is the argument that (essentially) resistance is futile. All “respectable” parties were in favor. Polling supported it (although, tellingly, when people were asked how much they, personally, were prepared to sacrifice in the name of the climate, the answer was, well, not very much). And, oh yes, there are the young — Greta’s army.
In an article for NR’s May issue, I noted that one stumbling block might be the forthcoming EU elections:
Most mainstream European politicians have yet to voice much concern about the general direction in which net zero is taking the continent. However, that may be starting to change, a process that could well accelerate if (as is currently forecast) the populist Right makes major gains in the EU’s parliamentary elections in June. Should that occur, it may prod the center-right European People’s Party, the largest grouping in the parliament, into taking a markedly more adversarial approach to the course that climate policy-makers have been taking.
Those elections have come and gone.
In a fascinating piece (do read the whole thing) for Liberal Patriot, published yesterday, Ruy Teixeira discusses one aspect of their outcome:
The results from the recent European parliament elections were quite something. Right populists did very well indeed while the European Greens took big losses. They lost 18 of their 72 seats in the European parliament and their performance was particularly bad in the E.U.’s two largest states, Germany and France. In Germany, the core country of the European green movement, support for the Greens plunged from 20.5 percent in 2019 to 12 percent. Shockingly, among voters under 25, the German Greens actually did worse than the hard right Alternative for Germany (AfD). That contrasts with the 2019 elections, when the Greens did seven times better than the AfD among these young voters.
And in France, Green support crashed from 13.5 percent to 5.5 percent. The latter figure is barely above the required threshold for party representation in the French delegation.
As Teixeira correctly noted, climate policy was not the only reason that the populist and conservative right did well. There was the small matter of immigration, for one thing.
But would, as I had speculated in my earlier piece, the center-right European People’s Party start paying attention? Well, notes Teixeira:
Manfred Weber, the leader of [the] EPP party—still the largest grouping in the new parliament—has declared that the 2035 ban on the sale of combustion engine cars was a “mistake.” Peter Liese, lead climate policymaker of the EPP, said the election results indicated support for a less restrictive Green Deal and that, “The ban on combustion engines—that needs to go”.
An earlier draft of the center-right’s EPP election manifesto had contained wording on this, but it disappeared in the final version. The question is how far the EPP is prepared to push this issue. Weber is from Germany’s CSU, the more conservative part of Germany’s long-standing center-right partnership. Germany’s auto sector is, of course, critical for the country, and EVs represent a severe (but complicated: German business is hopelessly intertwined with China) threat to its market position. There is a limited exception allowing the sale of new internal combustion engine vehicles after 2035, but that’s only if they run on e-fuels. That’s not going to save the day.
“Undoing the car ban” (via Politico, June 10), however,
would directly contradict the EPP’s lead candidate, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who introduced the ban and backed it as she campaigned for a second five-year term as the EU’s top executive. Any move to scrap the law would also start an all-out war with left-wing parties that supported the move.
The EPP should have that fight, both on the merits and for political reasons. Merkelism severely damaged the CDU/CSU in Germany, as they clearly now realize. For the EPP to stick with zombie Merkelism in the EU parliament makes little sense.
Teixeira cites a New York Times article in which Matina Stevis-Gridneff correctly acknowledges the extent of the Greens’ rebuff but also writes this:
But over the past few years, something has clearly snapped in much of the European electorate. . . . A backlash against climate change policies as part of broader culture wars has gained momentum.
When the Left talks of “culture wars” (by the Right), that talk is not infrequently designed to trivialize them, at least intellectually. Thus the battle over ESG is often dismissed by its supporters as part of the culture wars (an argument in which, as I have noted before, ESG’s critics don’t help themselves by referring to “woke capital”), when the real issue is legal and economic — what does being a shareholder mean?
To be fair, though, Stevis-Gridneff then (sort of) undermines the notion that a part of the EU’s right was fighting a culture war over climate policy with this:
In many places, the nationalist agendas of far-right parties have been augmented by populist appeals to economically strained citizens. The right surged among voters by targeting the Greens specifically, painting them as unfit to protect poorer working people in rapidly changing societies.
For many voters, Green parties failed to show that their proposals were not just expensive, anti-growth policies that would hurt the poorest the most. And some view them as elitist urbanites who brush aside the costs of the transition to a less climate-harming way of life.
Objecting to the (pointless) hit to the economy induced by the race to net zero is hardly fighting a culture war. And it should not be forgotten that an element within the climatist coalition sees slower (or, in some cases, no) growth as a virtue.
As for objecting (reasonably) to the position taken by “elitist urbanites,” that’s a manifestation, not of “culture war,” but clashing class interests. Many such “urbanites” see climate policy as a means to achieve political and social ends that they would want whatever the climate is doing. It is also, for them, a source of jobs, and, yes, a useful form of virtue-signaling, which, importantly, they can afford. Some, of course, may be pursuing quasi-religious aims in which they genuinely believe and which psychologists or students of religious history could explain. If climate policy is, in any respects, a culture war, it is one where the aggressors are these comfortable Gutmenschen, not those complaining about the assault on their living standards and, say, a forced transition to electric vehicles.
The same is true in the U.S., where, to quote Teixeira:
Voters really do care, above all, about cheap energy prices, not the provenance of that energy. And fundamentally most voters simply do not care that much about climate change as an issue relative to other issues like the cost-of-living.
Teixeira cites polling by Impact Research for Third Way here in the U.S., which shows that “just 4 percent of voters attach enough priority to climate change issues to be described as ‘climate-first’ voters.”
Who are those voters? I’ll quote Teixeira quoting Third Way. They “tend to hold a college degree or higher. . . . They are also far more likely than Economy-First voters to be financially comfortable and to believe the economy is in good shape, by a margin of 35 and 47 points, respectively.”
And here we are.