On Thursday, the United Kingdom is holding an election that has major implications for many facets of governance, including energy and climate change. One of the top candidates, British Labour Party leader Ed Miliband, has been a champion of climate action since at least 2008, when he was selected the U.K.’s first Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change. A win for Labour could usher in a new era of progressive energy and environmental policies in the U.K., which for the last half decade have stalled under the leadership of the Conservative Party and Prime Minister David Cameron.
The next government is likely to maintain the U.K.’s leadership on climate.
Recent polls put Labour and Conservatives in a neck-and-neck race, with each party garnering about one-third of the vote. While the Conservative government argues that it’s been the greenest U.K. government ever, the party platform is devoid of specific climate or energy targets. Meanwhile Milibrand’s Labour party is calling for a policy to reduce carbon emissions from electricity generation to zero by 2030.
In an op-ed in the Guardian this February, Miliband wrote that tackling climate change is the “single most important thing we can do for our children and our grandchildren.”
“There is no trade-off between tackling climate change and building an economy in which working families succeed,” he wrote. “Indeed, success on one will help us achieve the other.”
Miliband cited the devastating floods Britain experienced last year as a way climate change impacts not only global security, but domestic security as well. In January of 2014, the U.K. experienced more rain than during any winter month since daily recording started in 1767. Flooding is expected to be the greatest threat of a changing climate posed to the country, according to a 2012 report published by the U.K.’s environment department.
“We must be guided by the science, which shows that emissions are higher than anticipated and some effects are coming through more quickly than foreseen,” Miliband wrote.
Joss Garman, former Greenpeace political director, told the Financial Times that Miliband was “something of a deity with environmental groups” during his time as energy and climate secretary. On top of spending much of 2009 preparing for the Copenhagen climate talks — where, as the Financial Times puts it, he salvaged “some limited success from an otherwise disastrous event” — Miliband also debated a climate skeptic and called opposition to wind farms as “socially unacceptable” as failing to wear a seatbelt.
For them to take time out from a fiery general election battle to show consensus on anything takes a lot.
However, even if Milibrand doesn’t win, climate change policies in the U.K. aren’t likely to suffer severely. In what has become one of the most contested elections in recent memory, leaders from the major parties, including Miliband and Cameron, actually came together in February to sign a joint pledge to tackle climate change. The pledge states that “climate change is one of the most serious threats facing the world today” and that it “is not just a threat to the environment, but also to our national and global security, to poverty eradication and economic prosperity.”
According to Alastair Harper, a senior policy adviser at the U.K.-based Green Alliance, agreeing to come together on this joint pledge, which includes getting a “strong deal” at the Paris climate conference later this year, is a very positive indication for the national discussion on climate change in the U.K.
“For them to take time out from a fiery general election battle to show consensus on anything takes a lot and shows how, regardless of the outcome of the election, the U.K. intends to take a leading role in getting what we need,” Harper told ThinkProgress.
Simon Retallack, director of policy and markets at the U.K.-based Carbon Trust, said there is a “quiet but consistent political consensus on the need to reduce emissions” in the U.K. as well as “broad support for the long-term benefits of green growth, clean energy, energy efficiency, and technology innovation.”
Retallack told ThinkProgress that on top of the pledge to include a legally-binding target to remove carbon from the U.K.’s electricity by 2030, the Labour Party manifesto contains “support for renewables, a big push on energy efficiency, and the creation of one million green jobs.”
Notably absent from the U.K.’s elections — aside from the relatively minor Independence Party that wants to “rejuvenate the coal industry” — is any indication that human-caused climate change is unproven or that recent climate changes are just part of the natural cycle.
Retallack said that “unless there is a last-minute surge in support for the climate-skeptic U.K. Independence Party, the next government is likely to maintain the U.K.’s leadership on climate and the country will be a strong advocate for a global deal in Paris.”
Even so, the degree of climate leadership assumed will depend heavily on the Prime Minister. Miliband’s track record as energy and climate secretary from 2008 to 2010, during which time he propelled the U.K. into becoming the first country to commit to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by law as part of the 2008 Climate Change Act, suggests he possesses the determination to advance climate goals even when they are politically unappetizing.
The Climate Act commits the U.K. to reducing emissions by at least 80 percent by 2050 from 1990 levels. The new Labour policy looks to extend this effort by calling for “a goal of net zero global emissions in the second half of this century.”
It’s less clear that Cameron would take meaningful steps to act on climate. In response to growing pressure from the Labour party and green conservatives, in 2014 Cameron said he believes “man-made climate change is one of the most serious threats” facing Britain the the world. However his interest and allegiance has remained economically determined, and the party’s current platform is almost entirely based on economic initiatives.
In an indication of how Miliband would fare as a U.S. politician, Beitbart, a U.S.-based right-wing news and opinion site, published an article in late April headlined “Ed Miliband’s Climate Change Law Will Cost Each Home £50,000 Per Year.”
The article begins with a quote from Christopher Booker, a climate denier and conspiracy theorist, saying Miliband is “easily the most dangerous man who has ever come within touching distance of becoming our Prime Minister” due to his record as Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change.
Booker lampoons Miliband for increasing the percentage cut under the Climate Act from 60 percent to 80 percent by 2050, following “pressure from green lobby groups.”
But in the U.K., where less than 10 percent of the public thinks global warming is either not happening or is entirely natural, that type of messaging from climate deniers isn’t likely to fly. While this number fluctuates depending on status of major issues — such as the cost of electricity or devastation of floods — it remains far higher than in the U.S. where the number hovers somewhere slightly above half.