The year the world changed

2024 is a politics superyear. More than half the people on the planet have the opportunity to vote this year, a historic global record. The world will look like a very different place in 2025.

2023 was the hottest year ever, so these elections are well timed, right? The need to tackle climate change will surely be front-of-mind at the ballot box?

The thing is, climate change isn't the only thing happening in the world right now. The Russian war in Ukraine and the Israel-Gaza conflict are devastating for the people living through them, while the potential for escalation and the ripple effects through the global economy have a lot of people around the world feeling very fearful heading into these elections. Just as it seemed we might be getting to grips with inflation and energy prices, the crisis in the Red Sea could be about to upend the economy all over again.

Rising geopolitical tensions are coinciding with the advent of generative AI. The mass production of deep fakes and fake news can now be automated at very low cost. It's hard enough governing populations with wildly different values and opinions - harder still when populations have wildly different facts and realities. Opponents of democracy have never had a better opportunity to trash it.

This political context is fertile ground for climate backlash. For example, German farmers have been blocking streets with their tractors this week to protest fuel tax increases. There is clear evidence of organised networks directly orchestrating climate backlash in many places, including Germany (check out Amy Westervelt 's excellent Drilled podcast for more on this), and suspicions of far-right extremists infiltrating and agitating these farmers' protests specifically.

But it would be misguided to dismiss climate backlash as just a confected conspiracy, because it is true that some well-meaning climate policies can, if poorly executed, make life difficult for well-meaning ordinary people. As Politico's Karl Mathiesen warned just before Christmas:

In elections around the world in 2024, the right has signaled it wants to champion those at risk of being left behind. Its most potent messaging frames climate efforts as an elite diktat — just one more way to make working people pay for the excesses of the wealthy.?

I don't know anyone working in the climate movement who wants to transfer wealth from the poor to the rich. Go back 10 years or so and environmentalists were facing the polar opposite critique: we were called watermelons - green on the outside, red in the middle - exploiting a trendy issue to justify robbing the rich to give to the poor.

So how has this 180 flip come about, and what should we do about it heading into all these elections?

How it came about is a huge question that touches on anywheres vs somewheres, university vs technical education, deindustrialistion and the rise of the office job (and then the work-from-home job), covid, culture wars, Brexit, Trump, unforeseen consequences, and a million other things besides. I'm not even going to try and answer it here (but would love to chat about it in the pub with anyone who's interested).

In terms of what to do about it, Megan Rowling has a good response to Karl's warning: put people first. The climate movement needs to make sure it offers up ideas that are enacted upon the elites for the benefit of working people, rather than enacted upon working people for the benefit of the elites.

Let's play word association. When I say "elite", what do you think of? A blacked-out limo. Champagne on ice. Caviar canapés. Rolex watches. Diamond necklaces. And of course, the private jet. The ultimate symbol of the super-rich - literally above everyone else, away from the riffraff, at colossal expense, and with nary a thought for the outrageous levels of pollution they produce.

We've had a slew of news stories lately about Taylor Swift and Rishi Sunak's private jet-setting. We're about to see perhaps the world's biggest convening of private jet users in Davos for the World Economic Forum. And billionaire bad guys in their private jets have graced our streaming screens in Murder at the End of the World and - of course - Succession. Somewhere in between fiction and reality we have the Kardashians as well.

Banning or taxing private jets is perhaps the clearest example of a policy that is against rather than for the elites. And if you're clever in spending the revenues from taxes or fines, it can also be very clearly for the benefit of working people. For example, you could use the money to make train and bus travel cheaper for working people.

It wouldn't solve aviation emissions at a stroke. Far from it. But it could move things forwards in two really important ways.

First, it would encourage private jet owners and users to get serious about green technology. Green aviation fuels and zero emission planes are 100% technically viable, but they are going to start out expensive and only get cheaper over time as we make and use more of them. It was the same with electric cars – the first Teslas were really expensive, so they were marketed at rich people. Rich people bought lots of them, which helped make the technology cheaper and better. Private jets are almost laughably under-taxed and under-regulated today, so the incentive to switch to green technology just isn't strong enough – yet.

Second, it opens a conversation about who flies. In Europe and the US, less than half the population fly even once a year. Globally 80% of flights are taken by just 20% of the population, and the richest 1% cause 50% of aviation emissions. Once we've established the principle that those with the highest climate footprint, and the most money to spare, should contribute the most to reducing emissions, we can build out from the 1% to the 20%. Then we'll start biting into the biggest chunk of aviation emissions, without making anyone's annual family holiday one penny more expensive. We could even make them cheaper.

Historians will look back on 2024 as the year the world changed. The year that democracy was tested to breaking point. Did it survive? I guess we'll know in a year...

But maybe, just maybe, it will also be remembered as the year we started to get to grips with aviation pollution, and made it clear to voters that climate action is not an elitist conceit, but a way of making the world a fairer place.