I was wrong. Over the past six months, several governments and international organisations — including the White House, the EU, the British research agency ARIA, the Climate Overshoot Commission, and various UN bodies — have produced reports that cautiously advocate the very same idea: releasing aerosols into the atmosphere in order to block sunlight from hitting Earth’s surface. The concept is known as solar engineering, or solar radiation modification (SRM), and it’s a specific type of geoengineering aimed at offsetting climate change by reflecting sunlight (“solar radiation”) back into space.

The idea of solar engineering is not new, but for a long time it was relegated to the fringes of the scientific community — and the realms of science fiction. However, as the very existence of these reports makes clear, the concept has been attracting more and more attention in recent years, largely thanks to the growing panic over climate change. And much of the interest in solar engineering stems from the fact that, unlike other climate mitigation policies, which require decades to yield any significant results, “SRM offers the possibility of cooling the planet significantly on a timescale of a few years”, as the White House report claims, even to “the preindustrial level” according to “highly idealised modeling studies”.

That report followed on from a 2021 study by the US National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM), “Reflecting Sunlight”, which suggested that “the US should cautiously pursue solar geoengineering research to better understand options for responding to climate change risks”. Mark Symes, director of the UK’s research agency ARIA, agrees: “Through carefully-considered engineering solutions it may eventually be possible to actively and responsibly control the climate and weather at regional and global scale.” Earlier this year, more than 100 scientists signed an open letter calling on governments to increase research into solar geoengineering.

Scientists point to large historical volcanic eruptions — which result in massive quantities of sulfur dioxide and dust particles being spewed into the atmosphere — as examples of the effectiveness of “stratospheric aerosol injection”. They’re not wrong: the 1815 Tambora eruption cooled the Earth by 0.7°C and led to a “year without summer”; more recently, the eruption of Mount Pinatubo, in 1991, cooled the planet by about half a degree Celsius on average for many months. So, the idea goes, by spraying a certain amount of sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere, we could replicate the effects of a major eruption and cool the Earth. Problem solved?

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Not quite. All the reports acknowledge that there are serious risks associated with solar radiation modification, which could affect human health, biodiversity and geopolitics. That’s because modifying sunlight could alter global weather patterns, disrupt food supplies and in fact lead to abrupt warming if the practice was widely deployed and then halted. But despite such caveats, the very existence of these reports represents a huge opening of the Overton window when it comes to the issue of geoengineering. Indeed: “The fact that this report even exists is probably the most consequential component”, Shuchi Talati of the Alliance for Just Deliberation on Solar Geoengineering crowed after the White House’s report.

In other words, what matters here isn’t so much the content of these reports — which rightly highlight the risks of such interventions, and the need to proceed with caution — but the mere fact that the issue is treated as a topic of legitimate debate, thus slowly getting the public accustomed to the concept. But even more worryingly, perhaps, now that the geoengineering genie is out of the bottle, can we really expect governments and institutions to keep it under control?

After all, we live in an era in which private and corporate power has largely unshackled itself from any forms of meaningful public control, when it hasn’t outright merged with the institutions of the state, subordinating the latter to its own logic. As a result, billionaires, philanthrocapitalists and investment funds arguably exercise a greater influence over society than most governments. And, of course, they love playing God — especially when it offers massive opportunities for profit. So perhaps it is no surprise that much of the pressure for solar engineering also comes from this rarefied community.

In a speech to the Munich Security Conference last year, George Soros endorsed using solar geoengineering to combat climate change. Jeff Bezos has partnered with the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the geoengineering non-profit SilverLining, closely tied to Silicon Valley venture capital, to help create models that show what would happen if we blocked out some of the sun’s rays. Facebook billionaire Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Open Philanthropy, is another major funder of SRM projects. And then there is, of course, the ever-lurking Bill Gates: in 2021, he backed a sun-dimming project by the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program called the Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), which aimed to spray calcium carbonate into the atmosphere in the skies over Sweden to test its effects on sunlight scattering.

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The project, however, was strongly criticised by environmentalists and indigenous groups, with 30 groups of indigenous peoples from around the world calling upon Harvard University to abandon the Gates-backed plans to test its solar geoengineering tech. “We do not approve legitimising development towards solar geoengineering technology, nor for it to be conducted in or above our lands, territories and skies, nor in any ecosystems anywhere,” stated a letter from the Saami Council, which represents Saami people across Scandinavia and in Russia. In the end, the test was called off. But this didn’t stop the ominously named American start-up Make Sunsets, which focuses on stratospheric aerosol injection — “Cooling the planet one reflective cloud at the time”  — from carrying out several tests in the United States.

This means that sun-dimming experiments are already being conducted by private companies, with little or no oversight or regulation. And the edging of this technology into reality is part of a more general phenomenon in climate action: the emergence of a “climate power bloc” encompassing liberal-technocratic politicians, certain climate scientists, environmental NGOs, “green” philanthropists, and Silicon Valley “climate capitalists”. At this intersection of ideology, class and economic interests, extreme and ambitious ideas such as solar engineering find fertile ground. And they are primed to grow further into the popular consciousness — which has already been conditioned to think of climate change as an apocalyptic threat, and to therefore accept “do or die” solutions.

Activists and scientists have started to push back. We’ve already seen the successful prevention of the SCoPEx test. Then, last year, more than 60 senior climate scientists and governance scholars from around the world published an open letter, since supported by more than 450 academics, calling for an “International Non-Use Agreement on Solar Geoengineering”. They emphasise the very serious risks: to human health, but also to the ecosystem itself, with precipitation patterns, vegetation and crop production all disrupted.

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The problem, as is often the case, is mission creep — the gradual broadening of the original objectives of a certain programme, often under the influence of technological path dependency. Once a technology comes into existence it tends to be used for the simple fact that it exists, especially if it has been normalised for the public. Hence the call for “research into solar engineering” is, wittingly or not, paving the ground for its future adoption. And its advocates have an existential climate discourse on their side. SRM lobbyists can always claim that the alternative is worse — if that alternative is planetary extinction. As Anote Tong, a former president of Kiribati, a low-lying Pacific island state menaced by rising sea levels, told the New Yorker last year: “It has to be either geoengineering or total destruction”.

In this sense, the debate over solar engineering is symptomatic of how we are interpreting climate change: as a utopian speculation created in response to the dystopia we increasingly see as our future. This logic is designed to spur humanity into action, to find answers to the climate crisis that avoid vicious socioeconomic costs — which is why some sceptics of radical decarbonisation are sympathetic to solar geoengineering. It’s also why climate change activists such as Greta Thunberg oppose it — because it would threaten commitments to decarbonisation. We should oppose this binary logic. We shouldn’t have to choose between radical decarbonisation and geoengineering: fuelled by an impetus towards climate doomerism, they are both dangerous in their own way.

Last month, he joined Freddie Sayers in Oakland to talk about the global war on motorists, the beauty of tinkering, and Silicon Valley’s threat to human freedom. Below is an edited transcript of their conversation.

Freddie Sayers: A few years ago, you published a book called Why We Drive — and in many ways, you were ahead of the times, because drivers all over the world are now pretty angry. In London, there appears to be a full-on “war on motorists”: with a new 20mph speed limit, and an Ultra Low Emission Zone (Ulez). This motorist fury has spread to the Netherlands, to Spain, and to the truckers in Canada. It feels like drivers are forming some sort of coalition.

Matthew Crawford: You could also mention the gilets jaunes in France. And there have been protests about the German autobahn. The Germans have a saying that translates as “free driving for free citizens”. Then you also had this big fight between the London taxi drivers and Uber. It does seem like people’s attitudes towards driving have become a bit prickly, as though the political authorities somehow lack legitimacy. A lot of populist energy has become focused on the automobile.

FS: Quite often this is framed as a class thing. Drivers are presented as people who probably have all sorts of unsavoury political views and therefore if life becomes more inconvenient for them, it’s probably a shift in the right direction. But your book goes deeper than that: you suggest that the action of driving is existentially important.

MC: I like to start with the skateboard, or the bicycle: simple implements that extend and transform our native bodily powers. A bicycle becomes almost like a prosthetic, an extension of your body, fully integrated into your bodily habitation of the world. And I think something similar could be said of cars, especially relatively primitive and lighter vehicles, where there’s a lot of feedback from the road. A kind of directness of control. That’s why a lot of people get quite attached to the experience of driving. Nietzsche said, “joy is the feeling of your power increasing”, and I think that you can understand that not as a scary doctrine about power-seeking, but just as an insight into how some technologies seem to extend us out into the world in ways that are deeply pleasurable.

FS: So we’re not talking about political power increasing? It’s more of a sense of being alive?

MC: The absence of remote control is really a key part of that. The idea of driverless cars — the sense of being passively carried around — triggers a kind of revulsion about being a passenger. There are all kinds of dystopian movies where driverless cars feature and one of my favourites is WALL-E, where you have these grotesquely fat humanoid beings being ferried around in their hovering cars, slurping from their cupholders, and watching their screens with some sort of entertainment piped in from afar — their faces beaming with a sort of opiate pleasure. They seem to be slackened and completely safe, and somehow less than human. I think that’s a heightened or exaggerated picture of what disturbs us about this.

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FS: And, dare I say it, unmanly? The passenger character staring at the screen is the opposite of a strong person using a machine.

MC: Yes, or even genderless. A sort of gender blob. I guess there is a kind of masculine ideal of self-reliance, certainly in America — and just moving about the world by the exercise of your own powers appeals to that. So even using GPS, which I admittedly use all the time, forces you to turn your brain off, and there’s a kind of passivity and dependence to that. And I think the push for driverless cars is an instance of this wider pattern. For the sake of convenience, and in the name of safety, we’re lured further into passivity and dependence.

FS: There’s a line that you write about beyond which technology stops enhancing life: instead of making you more powerful, it starts to make you more dependent. Where do you draw this line in the case of cars?

MC: I think intelligibility is a crucial thing. Can you, by inspection at least, imagine how the thing works? Does it invite your intervention? Does it invite the effort to understand it? Or is it completely opaque like the shimmering obelisk at the beginning of the film 2001 that the humanoids are all entranced by? There’s a deep intellectual pleasure in being a master of your own stuff, in taking things apart and trying to understand them. Tinkering is a kind of quasi-philosophic impulse.

The other feature that really rubs a lot of people the wrong way is this idea of remote control. It’s not so much that it’s digital. Conceivably, you could become an expert coder in the various software systems that run the car. But I think what people don’t want is a sense that they’re somehow geared into this bureaucratic machine that stands behind the technology.

FS: There’s also a practical sense that people want to have a car that works on its own, independent of any external network being operational.

MC: Right, and that cannot be disabled remotely. The trucker protests in Canada were mercilessly crushed by seizing the bank accounts of people who contributed money to the movement. Shortly after, the Canadians took steps to mandate that all trucks be remotely shut-off-able. So you can see that there’s a political taste for preventing any such occurrence again. This is one of those instances where I think a lot of Western leaders look to China enviously as a control society. And given the metastasising systems of surveillance and control in our own society, the car stands out as a last reserve of some kind of capacity to stand alone.

FS: More worryingly, electric and driverless cars can in theory be turned off or driven into each other by central command; in a wartime or crisis scenario, it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to see that this could be dangerous.

MC: At least in the US, we don’t have nearly the electrical grid that you would need to charge all these cars, according to the vision being laid forth. And of course, building that infrastructure isn’t glamorous, politically. The whole green energy mandate is this massive diversion of investment to party-aligned actors that will tend towards energy poverty, which will hurt the working and middle classes. And all this is part of a larger phenomenon of the party-state capturing transportation and energy policy.

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FS: Do you think this anxiety is particularly strong in America?

MC: Yeah, when shit gets real, you’re going to want to hit the road and get the hell out of Dodge, right?

FS: This leads us to the question of what we should do about it, given that these technologies are already everywhere. What would a practical rebellion look like? How can we resist without simply being Luddite or reactionary?

MC: The first thing to notice is the feeling of futility that people have about putting up any kind of resistance. In San Francisco, you have street guerrillas putting cones on driverless cars to paralyse them. And you have quite a few cases of driverless cars impeding emergency vehicles because they stall out and need to be rebooted. Despite this, earlier this month, the California Public Utilities Commission approved to have driverless vehicles on the streets of San Francisco in large numbers.

It turns out that one of the four City commissioners is the former general counsel for Cruise: the equivalent of General Motors for self-driving cars. Hovering in the background here is this sense of a “corporatocracy”, where the will of citizens really doesn’t come into play. And, in fact, when Pew polls people about their attitudes toward driverless cars, the majority of them are not interested. They’re suspicious of it; they’d prefer to drive themselves. So this is not in response to consumer demand: you might say it’s a kind of for-profit social engineering.

FS: Perhaps also that faith in technology is central to an elite idea of progress? If you are on the wrong side of it, you are seen as a bad person. 

MC: It’s an expensive solution to a non-problem. Humans are actually pretty good at driving. This is merely another case of a transfer of wealth: Silicon Valley trying to grab profits from Detroit; Waymo versus Ford. So, yes, there’s always a narrative of progress.

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FS: What do you say to the counter argument: that while some people might enjoy driving, many people don’t. Driverless and convenient electric cars should open up hours in which we can be more creative, fulfilled, and productive?

MC: Sure, I feel the force of those arguments. I’m sure there are occasions where I would totally want the option of a driverless car. One of the difficulties is when autonomous cars share the road with human drivers: that has turned out to be a far harder engineering challenge than was anticipated a few years ago. We’ve arrived at the point now where in San Francisco, at night, when traffic is light, they’re allowing driverless cars. But there’s still a lot of breezy talk about outlawing human drivers in order to make the road more hospitable to driverless cars.

FS: You can imagine that being a serious proposal in a small number of years.

MC: What would you have then? You’d have the infrastructure of a city made hospitable to automation, including driverless cars; you’d have an urban operating system that’s essentially designed and installed by some cartel of tech firms — and you can be pretty sure they would not be amenable to democratic processes. Nor would the code be accessible to inspection. This is all very proprietary: it has to be because that’s what makes the “smart city” the next trillion-dollar frontier.

FS: And if you are considered transgressive by that private company, you won’t be able to get around. 

MC: You can imagine terms of service that have all kinds of stipulations. And you can view this development as part of a long arc of high modernist urban planning that goes way back. Yet this aspiration to remake the city often creates model cities that nobody wants to live in because the human element is somehow squashed. The ethnographer Jane Jacobs wrote a beautiful book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, where she shows how a street works at a fine grain level as a social place. She describes how neighbourhoods get vacated by these planning schemes that are hatched from on high and render the city vacuous. I think we should revisit some of these critiques of modernist urban planning, by way of trying to get a handle on what the tech firms are up to with the smart city and driverless car.

FS: I think perhaps we accepted too readily this idea that not having to drive would be liberating. And this points to a larger question about technology: is convenience always better? If you’re liberated from the more fundamental, supposedly mundane aspects of living — feeding yourself, moving around, sorting your car out — is your life necessarily going to improve? 

MC: If you go far enough down that road, the whole world begins to look like one big assisted-living facility. There’s a psychologist named Kelly Lambert, who’s done some interesting stuff on what she calls effort-driven rewards. She works with rats, but the idea is that we’ve evolved to secure our own basic physical existence, and when you make everything effortless, people become anxious and depressed. And of course, a lot of that leisure time will be filled with entertainments that plug us into the hive mind. Americans in particular don’t really know how to do true leisure — a Sabbath, a time of repose. We tend to fill up everything.

FS: Do you advocate trying to resist the relentless technological advance by living more simply? Some people are trying to feed their spirit by “unplugging” and trying to be more connected to the earth, more connected to nature?

MC: Well, this is the perennial question, isn’t it? That sort of romantic back-to-the-land or back-to-nature revolt against not just technology but technocracy — the entwining of these systems. People do want to escape it; to re-humanise themselves. I guess for some people, it’s back to the land — land, of course, is scarce and expensive — for some people, I think it’s tinkering and trying to get a handle on their own material existence and become self-reliant in various ways. We have people homeschooling, just trying to unplug from what feels like a voracious borg that feeds on individual agency.

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FS: Is there a good version of that and a scary version, do you think? For some people it seems that their answer is to burn it all down, to destroy the “borg”, which starts to sound violent?

MC: I’m thinking of Fight Club, is that what you’re thinking of?

FS: More that if there are enough people who feel alienated by technology — and by this supposedly sophisticated way of living — they are going to come with pitchforks and try to destroy it. Do you think we should worry about that?

MC: I don’t see much prospect of the pitchforks coming out — we’re too well entertained. A whole other type of technology is going to enthral us. Through a combination of virtual reality and AI, I imagine we’ll be sucked into worlds that are not real. What I mean by that is that they are constructed worlds: constructed for profit, and engineered from afar. They will probably offer us some simulacrum of agency: I’m sure there’s a menu of different options for action within them. Maybe they respond to us; they will flatter us with a sense of mastery, perhaps. But the thing about real reality is that it surprises us. It is inexhaustibly rich; it can’t be represented to completion. It contains mystery. I say that both as a former physics guy, and as someone with intuitions that there’s a created order that has a benevolence to it, and some elements that aren’t fully graspable and masterable by us, and that I think of as a source of renewal. When you put yourself in nature or even in the built environment, the human environment, there’s always scope for serendipity and surprise, and renewing your sense of wonder in the world.

FS: How do we defend that? What are the micro rebellions that we can try to unplug? You talk about tinkering with your car. What should someone in a city do? 

MC: Every time we meet face-to-face as we’re doing right now, we’re engaged in the permanent human possibility, encountering one another in a real way. And I think that will always be available to us. We often get a little too doomerish about the borg, especially when the ordinary pleasures of existence and of sociality remain available to us. We have to throw ourselves into that with courage and hope.

FS: Maybe this is finally a political fight that’s worth engaging in. Perhaps motorists should defend their right to drive whatever cars they want — and maybe, they’ll win. 

MC: Yeah, Sign me up. We hereby inaugurate the freedom to drive movement.

Green mayors who captured a series of French cities in June — Lyon, Bordeaux, Marseille, Tours, Poitiers — have caused consternation in recent days with a series of self-righteous, or frankly priggish, announcements and decisions.

The mayor of Bordeaux, Pierre Hurmic, has cancelled the €60,000 budget for the 20-metre-high Christmas tree that usually decorates the city centre each winter. He disapproves of “dead trees”, he said. “They are not at all our concept of vegetabalisation.”

The mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet, attacked the country’s favourite sporting event, the Tour de France, as absurdly over-commercialised, grossly polluting and “macho”. The Socialist mayor of Rennes, Nathalie Appéré, bowed to her Green allies in the city council and withdrew an application to host a stage of the great bike race next year.

Meanwhile several of the Green mayors have opposed government plans for a rapid roll-out of a fifth generation, super-fast internet network in France. Eric Piolle, the second-term mayor of Grenoble — rumoured to be considering a Green run for the presidency in 2022 — described 5G in July as “useful only for watching porn movies in high definition on your mobile phone in a lift.”

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The Greens’ criticism may, or may not, be justified. The Tour de France, for instance, is indeed a carbon-generating carnival of plastic largesse with a terrible doping record; it is also a much-loved symbol of French unity and variety — an international sporting event which literally comes “down your way”. Either way, these are scarcely the kind of pressing local issues which French voters expect their mayors to address.

The gesture politics has annoyed some of their Green colleagues, including the national leader of the Europe Écologie Les Verts (EELV) party, Yannick Jadot (another 2022 presidential hopeful). He said this week that he was “tired of these insults” against the French people and the “popular” classes. “There is a kind of class contempt here which is absolutely unbearable,” he argued.

It seems that the French people agree with him. Green support in the polls has dropped rapidly, and according to an Odoxa poll, positive opinions of the EELV party have fallen by 14 points to 43%. Over 70% of French people say they disapprove of Green attacks on Christmas trees; 68% dislike Green attacks on the Tour de France.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the second round of this year’s municipal elections (delayed until June because of the pandemic) there was an eco-surge. The Greens leaped from the control of one city — Grenoble — to running nine of France’s biggest towns, either alone or in alliance with the Left. Five big cities — Marseille, Lyon, Bordeaux, Grenoble and Strasbourg — went Green, as did four large towns: Annecy, Besançon, Poitiers and Tours. The EELV party (alone or in alliance with the Left) now has 36 mayors out of 35,000; it represents 2.8% of French citizens. The Green Wave, it was suggested, could impede President Emmanuel Macron’s run for a second presidential term in 18 months’ time.

Those who have followed the twists and turns of personal and tribal hatreds within French eco-politics doubted whether the Green victories would prove recyclable in 2022 — but few imagined that Les Verts would begin to shrivel and fade so soon.

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And yet it’s worth remembering that the Green Wave was only made possible by a collapse in nationwide turn-out. The surge occurred only in big and medium towns, in economically thriving places with a large population of young, professional and educated voters. They have many local problems but they have been sheltered from the difficulties facing rural and outer suburban France, which generated the Yellow Vest movement in 2018. In these struggling areas, the Greens scarcely exist as an electoral force.

Moreover the Green surge may come more from votes against something than votes for something, and an alienation from mainstream politics. Urban support for the traditional centre-Right and centre-Left parties has collapsed  (although the centre-Right still dominates in smaller towns). While Emmanuel Macron has failed miserably to build a centrist, grass-roots political movement — a fact illustrated again this week by his La République En Marche party’s lamentable performance in six parliamentary by-elections.

Still, the Green surge — however lucky or accidental — offered the EELV party an opportunity to prove that it had matured politically. Would it be capable of balancing ecological issues and good municipal government? Could it match its commitment to the environment with pragmatism about contradictions in human nature (Let us be without sinful pollution, Oh Lord, but not yet)? The party leader Yannick Jadot promised that the new mayors would bring “an ecology targeted on solid achievements, an ecology of action.”

In some towns — such as Tours and Bordeaux — this has meant plans to drive out, or limit, private cars  on the model already adopted by the Socialist but Green-allied mayor of Paris, Anne Hidalgo. This has brought angry local opposition but also much local support.

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What has been missing so far — as Jadot admits — is any sign that the Green mayors have new answers, or any answers, to France’s urgent urban problems. What of the separation of  towns from their encircling, racially-divided housing estates? What of violence; distrust of the police; the cost of city centre housing; uneven health care provision? Jadot said this week:

“We should be finding answers to the fears of French people and their need for protection of all kinds — security, health, social as well as environmental. We need ecological policies which inspire, not those which push people away.”

Nevertheless, some French Greens and pro-Green commentators defend the mayors’ pronouncements on ideological grounds. The hour is growing late, they say. Global warming advances apace. Electric shocks to consumer culture are needed. Christmas trees (though a symbol of the renewal and permanence of life for centuries) are dispensable.

Others suggest that the Green wave of 2020 is damaging the cause by expending its political capital on unnecessary targets. They are alienating moderate voters by revealing  their ideological closeness to — and electoral dependance on — the hard Left.

Frédéric Says, a political commentator on France Culture radio, says that the newly-elected mayors are still in campaigning, not governing, mode. They had not expected to win in June. They have no proper programme for municipal government. To prove they have not been instantly corrupted by power — “that the sash of office is not a dog-chain” — they are parading provocative and divisive ideas.

An even harsher view is taken by Daniel Cohn-Bendit, the Franco-German leader of the May 1968 French student revolt, converted to green, pro-European politics and now semi-retired. He accuses the new Green mayors of not only ideological absolutism but a kind of eco-phariseeism. “Their attitude to sport symbolises their ideology,” he said. “For them, the world is in a mess. It is ruined. They are therefore terrified of joy — of taking pleasure in anything.”

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Macron smells green blood. Last week he publicly mocked France’s “Class of 2020” Green mayors. He said that they wanted to impose an “Amish” and “oil lamp” economy in the 21^st century. He said that they were “taking the French for idiots” by attacking the country’s “art de vivre (art of living).”

The President needs to be careful, all the same. He is himself walking a green tightrope. He has declared ecology to be the “fight of the century,” and demanded a much greener approach to government in the remainder of his term — including directing 30% of France’s €100bn post-Covid recovery plan to ecologically-friendly investments. To win re-election in 2022, the President has to hold onto his support in the traditional electorate of the centre-Right, which is often impatient with or dismissive of environmental arguments.  He also needs to appeal — in the second round at least — to the Greens’ mostly young, urban supporters. Some of them rather like the idea of an “Amish” economy.

In other words, the Green controversies of recent days may be ridiculous but they are also significant — and not just in France. They offer a burlesque preview of more important twenty-first century collisions to come. How to balance ecological pressures and economic imperatives? How to square western life-styles and climate change? How to replace the traditional politics of something-more with a new politics of something-less?

The French Greens were handed an accidental opportunity to prove that they are a fully-functioning, rounded, all-weather force in practical politics. They have been given a chance to adjust their sincere beliefs to the ragged edges of the real world. It is too early to judge them fully, but the first signs are not good. They have failed to make the leap from shouting to governing. They have proved just as attracted as most of the “old” politicians to the politics of the surface and the gesture.

The key figures in the history lesson are none other than David Cameron and Ed Milliband.  From here, it looks as if history will remember Cameron as the gentleman amateur who bet  — and lost — Britain’s EU membership on his own charm, and Miliband — if it remembers him at all — as the Labour leader who buried Blairism and helped keep his party out of office for a decade.

In fact, both men did things in 2013 that tell us a lot about how the politics and economics of “Net Zero” would play out. Net Zero has, with remarkably little debate, moved from a fringe demand to a mainstream and almost universal political commitment. But the story of 2013 should raise questions about how durable the new consensus will be.

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Start with Cameron and his environmental journey. Possibly the first thing Cameron did as Conservative leader in opposition was go to the Arctic and pose with sledge-dogs. The hapless huskies were part of his “vote blue, go green” schtick, using environmentalism to “decontaminate” a Conservative brand that a certain T May had described as “nasty”. But that was 2006. What about 2013?

Well, 2013 was the year that a “senior Conservative source” told a couple of newspaper reporters over a nice lunch in Westminster that Prime Minister Cameron had given a clear order to his ministers regarding energy bills: “Get rid of all that green crap.”

To be clear, I was not one of the reporters at lunch that day, so I cannot swear to the accuracy of that quote. But I don’t know if anyone has asked Sir Michael Fallon, then the energy minister, where he was at the time that nice lunch was taking place; perhaps he has an alibi. Perhaps.

Anyway, let’s assume — and this isn’t much of a stretch, trust me — that Cameron had indeed said something about “green crap” to his colleagues. That remark signals the end of Cameron’s environmental journey — which covered a lot of ground, but came to its conclusion rapidly.

Back in the happy, almost innocent days of 2006, greenery was, Cameron fairly calculated, a nice-to-have add-on to a politician’s offer. Saying you cared about huskies and icecaps was a way to say you were generous and decent. And that was about it. Greenery didn’t obviously entail any actual policies that would directly affect voters’ lives.

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Of course, even before Cameron took office in 2010, he had started to learn that it wasn’t that simple. Greenery then meant onshore wind: turbines, often in places where Conservative voters really didn’t want them to be.

Still, that didn’t bother everyone. What bothered just about everyone in the early years of the decade was the cost of living: after the financial crisis, real wages were falling and household bills were political. Bills for things such as gas and electricity.

And one reason those bills were as high as they were was the range of environmental tariffs that the Cameron coalition and its Labour predecessor had added on. The rationale here had seemed clear enough: there were many things that governments wanted to achieve and someone had to pay for them. General taxation wasn’t an attractive option — initially too visible, and then simply impossible given the state of the public finances. So consumers had to foot the bill.

Or rather, the bills: the energy company obligation, to support energy efficiency in poorer households; the warm homes discount, meant to help with the costs of fuel bills, again for poorer households; the renewable obligation, the EU’s emissions trading scheme; the carbon price floor; the feed-in tariffs; the smart meters. All told, the Cameron government reckoned, they added £114 to the typical bill.

And in 2013, with people feeling the pinch, £114 was all it took to turn David Cameron, husky-hugging vote-blue go-green David Cameron, into a potty-mouthed pocket-book politician, intent on saving voters money not saving the planet.

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So the first part of the environmental policy lesson of 2013 is that green promises sound good when they’re first made, but sticking with them when they turn into financial pain for the electorate is far from easy. Remember Cameron’s “green crap” when you hear his successors talking about when they’ll take the country to Net Zero, and ask: who’s going to pay for that, and who’s going to tell them they’re going to pay?

The Miliband of 2013 completes the lesson about energy policy, populism and policy. At the Labour conference in September of that year, he announced that if he were made PM in 2015, he would enact a legal freeze on domestic energy prices.

For all the excitement the announcement caused — more on that in a moment — the plan wasn’t really so radical or startling. The year before, that notorious radical socialist Sir John Major had called for a windfall tax on the profits of the energy industry.

The Miliband promise caused something approaching chaos inside the Conservative Party. I was the Telegraph’s political editor at the time and at the Tory conference the following week I did my rounds of breakfasts, lunches, dinners and drinks with Cabinet ministers. I found precisely no unity on how to respond to the price freeze promise. Some were outraged by the idea of the state trying to “fix” markets. Some thought the energy firms were a bad advertisement for capitalism and making profits that were not economically justified. And some just thought the Miliband policy would be popular so the Tories should match it.

In the end, Cameron came out against a price freeze — it was simply not something a Conservative could ever do, he thought. But nothing is forever in politics, and less than four years later, another Conservative leader, May, decided that Toryism was flexible enough to accommodate a price cap for energy.

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Remember, in all this, that some of the bills Miliband — and May — promised to limit were driven upwards, in some part, by the environmental policies they pursued and decided that customers should fund.

The year 2013 matters so much because it offers several connected lessons for the politicians promising to lead us on the journey to Net Zero. The first is that few political promises survive first contact with voters’ falling incomes. The second is that if you’re going to do things that cost voters money, best to get their permission first — because they’ll find out in the end, and when they do, they won’t be happy. And the third is that anyone who hopes to rely politically on “market forces” to allocate the resources needed to address big issues like climate change is taking a very big gamble indeed.

Now that he’s settled into Downing Street for five years — or, who knows, 10 — it will fall to Boris Johnson to learn these lessons; getting to Net Zero by the middle of the decade will require the 2020s to be a decade of genuine transformation. So far on the environment, Johnson has belied the charges of cheap populism levelled at him elsewhere, sticking with Net Zero as a promised goal. But right now, the politics of the environment are still relatively easy: commit to a goal still many years away and if in doubt, talk about photogenic distractions like turtles and pangolins.

But if he goes the distance and approaches a decade in office, he will either have to find a way to solve the green political riddle that defied Cameron, or admit defeat, just as his old school chum did.