Europe: doomed but really rather important
The petri dish of climate action, plus a little bit of Italian city states
Europe is doomed. We’re just through yet another summer when the air turned to VapoRub, entire populations switched en masse into holiday mode and news reports were clogged up with wildfires, flash floods and beach culture. The Europe model has its benefits – a sense of priorities when trading off between work and play – but it’s anchored in the post War boom decades, a Ponzi scheme for a generation of insiders. Doomed, I tell you.
But for the purposes of this blog Europe is perhaps the part of the world that matters the most. It is climate action’s petri dish. This matters greatly for journalists and for climate communicators.
The world is facing an epochal shift towards a low carbon economy, while also switching on the seatbelt sign for severe climate change turbulence ahead. The biggest challenges are in working out how on earth modern post-industrial societies manage that shift, and in coping with the turbulence: more VapoRub summers in temperate climates, while chunks of the tropical world see agricultural systems collapse, leading to spikes in migration. This is a simplification, but frames how different regions face the climate challenge (warning: more massive simplifications ahead).
Everybody is important. Low-lying islands and the Sahel are ground zero. Watch Florida and Bangladesh for storm surges. Watch the dynamism of the US in finding technological solutions at scale. Watch China for industrial solutions. Watch entire agricultural industries for how they adapt to dryness, to floods, to changes in groundwater.
But watch Europe for its politics.
First a step back. I’ve argued before that we are now in the stage of working out how to shift entire economies to low carbon. The case has been made – and accepted – that something is wrong and something needs to be done about it. What’s left is human ingenuity and politics.
It’s a well-rehearsed argument that one of Europe’s developmental advantages has been that it’s in effect a smallish, irregular-shaped protrusion at the end of the Eurasian landmass. It has rivers and mountains and plains and different ecosystems. It’s perfectly built for intra-polity competition, from Florence and Genoa and Venice through to the Holy Roman Empire, unitary France and Spain, usurpers like England and Portugal and Holland, and fringe powers like the Ottoman Empire and Imperial Russia.
Something similar is happening now, as Europe contemplates its low carbon future. There is motorised Germany, nuclear France, nitrogen Netherlands, isolated Britain, booming Poland, intransigent Hungary, desiccated Spain, sclerotic Italy. I could go on (including with the massive simplifications), but the point is that Europe represents a giant arm wrestle between different political systems with different priorities (and opportunities) in the face of the low carbon transition.
This is also a giant arm wrestle because it’s fiercely contested at inter-state level and within countries. The main issue in the relatively recent elections in Germany and Norway was the transition (Germany because of its gas-dependent manufacturing sector and car industry; Norway because it has cash and a desire to wean itself off the golden teat of oil and gas). Germany is now trying to understand life with a grown-up Green party making difficult decisions from inside government (where shouting and grandstanding are less important). The Netherlands is currently roiled by arguments over nitrogen in farming, and Britain’s brimming plate of pressing issues includes everything from low emission zones to future sources of low-carbon growth.
And then there is the Ukraine War.
And these are all political issues, in that they are contested and argued over. This is not the US, where polarisation, culture wars and mood affiliation does more to shape the policy debate than a good public arm-wrestle over issues. It’s not China, where the wisdom of the CCP is trusted to find the right path. It’s not Australia or Brazil, where the debate is dominated by the economic realities of natural resources.
Across Europe voters (and consumers) are literally making informed choices about their governance based on the low carbon transition. And this is a petri dish for that tricky question of how we go about the low carbon transition, balancing issues, finding compromises, making choices, framing losses and opportunities.
In terms of climate communications and journalism this matters. It matters because in Europe the audience is the European people, as well as all the decision makers, the lever pullers and the corner office dwellers. In the past, when the environmental debate focused on why we should care about climate or what could be done about it all, it was good to shout, to get people to take notice, or to look at the international conferences where these things were discussed by people in suits.
Not now, not in Europe. The people matter, and the people are the audience.
I’m a journalist, author and think-tank-comms worker. I’ve lived and worked all over the world, and I’m currently in Italy. My free substack is aimed at unpicking a few thoughts about the world of environmental actions/communications/journalism, but I’ll branch out more broadly - probably looking at how to understand countries and places by getting out and walking around them. Get in touch at nicholaswalton99-at-gmail.com, or on Twitter @npw99.