After CAN’s Defeat: Adapting our Route to a Safer Future

Liam Kavanagh & Rupert Read

This week’s quick dismissal of the Climate and Nature (CAN) bill demonstrated that the road to sane climate policy will be incredibly hard, but deep down, environmentally concerned voters knew that, didn’t we? The question now is: with the direct route closed, what is the most pragmatic way to get where we must go? National adaptation to climate chaos and preparing our young people for the future are important actions that radically can grow citizen engagement on climate. Policies that grow support are what we need to pass something like CAN as soon as possible.

Frustrated environmentalists can find hope for making this meaningful progress in the certain knowledge that, more than anything else, the government wants to remain in power. 

Science suggests that climate chaos will continue to rise sharply in the very near future, so Labour must demonstrate to voters that its enthusiasm for managing risks extends past its own political fortunes to our nation’s future. Passing a national adaptation plan into law would do this,  offering Britons doable ways of acting for their communities’ safety now. The possibility of doing something meaningful about threats vastly increases willingness to engage with those threats, and engagement is what is needed to eventually pass something like CAN. Therefore adaptation should climb to the top of environmentalists’ priorities.

Far from killing voters’ interest in reducing carbon emissions, a national effort at adaptation would inevitably heighten awareness of the need for emissions reduction.

Adaptation planning processes will quickly reveal that there is no way to fully adapt to events like the increasingly likely breakdown in the Atlantic currents that warm Britain. We also cannot totally avoid the chaos that might be caused by the famines that scientific bodies are warning of. By embracing adaptation the UK could increase its resilience without cooperation from the rest of the world, and also increase its own willingness to lead in reducing dangerous emissions. Adaptation and emissions reductions are not competing responses to climate chaos, as has long been assumed — wrongly, and even tragically — they are complements.

Another, not unrelated front on which action can happen now is education.

At the moment it is scandalous that most UK youth will end their formal education without having a chance to learn thoroughly about their generation's greatest challenge, one which will affect their job prospects and life choices. Today students don’t learn about climate chaos with trained adult support in an intentional environment, but by reading articles on polarised social media or watching alarmist TikTok videos. This is shown by that fact that 40% of the UK’s young people feel their day-to-day functioning is affected by climate distress. Unfortunately the governments’ reaction to the emotionally challenging nature of climate knowledge is largely to leave the subject off of the curriculum.

Instead of downplaying climate facts out of the fear of causing students distress, we must offer the chance to learn about the climate crisis in a supportive emotional environment, and help students feel able to act as part of a collective response. Labour made a pre-election commitment to the youth group Teach The Future that climate education would be part of their manifesto. Backtracking on this commitment was irresponsible and self-defeating and it should be reversed. It should be strengthened by making sure that teachers have training to help with managing the emotions that are already arising for students and helping them feel part of a response. In such a school environment, education would result in motivation to act in manifold creative and determined ways. One way young people might act is by becoming grassroots supporters for future efforts to pass CAN, another is by voting for politicians who support climate action. 

Labour has obviously decided that the CAN bill was too much too soon, but as Bill McKibben has remarked, on climate winning slowly is the same as losing.

This will become obvious to many more voters within the next few years, thus climate advocates can likely convince Labour to cover its own back, now. This year, global temperature surpassed 1.5 °C — the level that science has warned us not to exceed since the Paris Agreement of 2015. Early climate tipping points are already here, or around the corner, and climate chaos will soon gain a whole new sense of lived reality. Risk-averse Insurance companies will deny more coverage, food shortages may well threaten our food-importing nation, and more. And when this happens, Labour must have a record to prove it provides “a safe pair of hands” in the next election. 

So, if Labour cannot see themselves as benefitting from bold climate adaptation and education policies, then how can they possibly feel entitled to the continued support of environmentally concerned voters?

We would be forced to desert Labour in droves and in good conscience by voting Green no matter what cost. On the other hand, by taking these steps Labour could show a way for other national governments to hasten climate mobilisation. The Climate Majority Project will be working to raise awareness of these issues this year as part of two campaigns. Strategic Adaptation for Emergency Resilience (#SAFER) and the Climate Courage campaign (CCc) will invite all climate concerned citizens to join us. Let’s demand that Labour affirm that its intention to avoid unnecessary risk extends to the nation’s safety. As last year’s terrible floods, especially Storm Eowyn show, the rising climate emergency will not let Labour rest, and neither should we.

Watch this space in coming weeks and months for a series of reports outlining these campaigns’ logic and on the ground actions!