Raphael ThysPhoto by Paddy Kumar on Unsplash
Climate Change Is Threatening To Dethrone Politicians
But, not how you think it will.
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Published in
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6 min read
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5 days ago
Politicians are bought. That much is clear by now. It doesn’t matter how moral or just they start out; if they want to take power and create the change they envision, they have to compromise and bend in order to secure funding to campaign. Each democracy has this problem to a different extent, but they all have it. This is half the reason climate action has been so lethargic over the years, as oil billionaires are some of the world’s largest political donors, giving them massive sway over our governments. But, as climate change starts to bite, this trend is reversing, as some significant donors are threatening to pull funding over climate inaction. But is this a singular event or the first domino to fall?
This all started with British billionaire John Caudwell, who is worth $2.8 billion, according to Forbes. He is a hard-line Brexiteer, and a significant player in the vote-to-leave movement. Over the years, he has become so entangled with British politics that he was the largest donor to the Conservatives during the last 2019 general election. Yet, in a recent interview with The Sunday Times, he said, “If Rishi [the UK Prime Minister] sticks to this, would I donate to the Conservative Party? Absolutely not.” What has made him so angry that he has not only pulled funding, but wouldn’t even vote for the party he has spent a fortune to get into power?
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Well, it’s Rishi Sunak’s recent climate policy U-turns, which John Caudwell and many others see as utter “madness.”
So what has Rishi done? Well, he has delayed the ban on the sale of new petrol and diesel cars until 2035, handed out a tonne of new gas drilling licences, opened up new coal mines (the first since 2015), and diluted targets for the phasing out of gas boilers. The reasoning for all of this is that the British economy needs to grow, and these net-zero targets are costing the taxpayer money and holding this growth back. So, delaying targets and growing the UK fossil fuel sector is a way of injecting some life into the economy.
Now, we will ignore the fact that the reason the British economy is in such a…