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Dr Kristian Niemietz is Editorial Director and Head of Political Economy at the Institute of Economic Affairs.
Nobody likes a sore loser.
When you’re on the losing side, whether that’s in a sports competition or in a political election, you are socially expected to graciously accept defeat, congratulate your opponents, and blame yourself for losing. If you don’t, you’ll be considered a sore loser. And everyone hates a sore loser.
I would know, because in the battle of ideas – I am one of those sore losers. I’m on the losing side of most political arguments, and in classic sore loser fashion, I don’t blame myself for this. I blame everyone else for their failure to understand that I’m right.
The marketplace of ideas is not a meritocracy, where the best ideas win. It is mostly a status game. There are opinions that elevate your social prestige, and there are opinions that lower it. When scanning political opinions, most people do not primarily ask, ‘is this idea correct or not?’; they ask, ‘what would it say about me if I adopted this opinion? How would that make me look? What would that do to my social standing?’ This is obviously not the only factor that matters, but the marketplace of ideas is heavily rigged in favour of high-prestige opinions.
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Sore losers like me can be annoying. There is, however, a type that is even worse than us: the sore winner. I am talking about the curious phenomenon of the successful political movement which wins every major battle, but which nonetheless refuses to go away. Because its members refuse to accept their own victory. They will insist that they are still the plucky underdog bravely challenging a mighty establishment, even when they clearly have the establishment on their side.
Which brings us to Extinction Rebellion. Yes, they are back. They staged a protest on Tufton Street [ [link removed] ] last Monday, and since everyone thinks the IEA is on Tufton Street, I’m sure the protest was aimed at us as well. Oh, and their comrades from Just Stop Oil are back as well [ [link removed] ]. I bet Greta Thunberg will also be along shortly.
This new eco-militant movement – of which the above are all part – is one of the most successful political movements of our time. When Extinction Rebellion were first set up [ [link removed] ] in 2018, they had fewer than two dozen members. A few months later, they regularly mobilised thousands of people up and down the country, and by the end of the year, they had gone global [ [link removed] ].
The 2017 Conservative manifesto only said:
“Britain is […] a significant influence for good around the world. […] We are at the forefront of action against global climate change. […] We will continue to lead international action against climate change […]
[W]e will continue to take a lead in global action against climate change, as the government demonstrated by ratifying the Paris Agreement. We were the first country to introduce a Climate Change Act, which Conservatives helped to frame, and we are halfway towards meeting our 2050 goal of reducing emissions by eighty per cent from 1990 levels.”
What this shows is a party which is clearly committed to an ambitious climate policy, yes, but also a party which thinks that the country is already on the right track, and that doing more of the same is good enough. The party was definitely not suggesting that the climate policy framework which existed at the time was inadequate, and that it had to be replaced by something more far-reaching.
Even Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour manifesto did not contain anything that sounded like Net Zero. It said:
“Building a clean economy of the future is the most important thing we must do for our children, our grandchildren and future generations. Yet recent years have seen a failure to progress towards our targets. A Labour government will put us back on track to meet the targets in the Climate Change Act and the Paris Agreement.”
So, the Corbynites complained about Britain not meeting its existing emission reduction targets. (Wrongly so: Britain was meeting its targets, with a comfortable margin and ahead of schedule.) They did not say that the targets themselves were insufficient, or that a Labour government would replace them with something more stringent. They saw meeting the existing targets as good enough.
That was the climate consensus at the time. It was not a consensus of complacency. It was not a consensus of ‘climate change denial’. There was a pro-decarbonisation consensus, but crucially, the proponents of that consensus recognised that decarbonisation was already happening. It was not seen as a departure from the current trend, but as its continuation.
Correctly so. Since the Climate Change Act 2008 (and to a lesser extent, even before then), Britain’s carbon emissions have been falling rapidly. By 2018, they had already fallen by 30 per cent compared to their 2008 level. (They are now about half that level.) On its own terms, Britain’s decarbonisation agenda was working.
Then XR and Greta came along and decided that this was no longer good enough. Astonishingly, the entire political establishment caved in and went along with it: this is how Net Zero was born. When did any political movement ever achieve such an easy victory in such a short time?
Needless to say, no new information on climate change emerged in 2018 or 2019. We already knew that climate change was happening – hence the pre-Net Zero climate consensus, which had produced the Climate Change Act 2008. The only thing that changed in 2018/19 was that it suddenly became fashionable to pretend that Britain was not doing anything on climate change, and that everything had to happen this second.
I thought it was a profoundly silly idea, and that people were just doing this because Thunbergism had become the high-prestige opinion. But then – I’m a sore loser! I always say that about the fashionable opinion of the day.
In a way, XR and JSO are the ultimate sore winner movement. Net Zero remains enshrined in law, and successive British governments have done their best to destroy the North Sea oil sector, even against the current geopolitical backdrop. What are they complaining about? Go home, guys! You’ve already won!
Or have they?
Even though Net Zero was imposed on the country in a rush, a consensus around it formed immediately, and for a little over five years, Net Zero was beyond argument. That has recently begun to change. The Overton Window has shifted, and if XR and JSO blame ‘Tufton Street’ for this, they are probably right. I would like to think that our papers, such as The Cost of Net Zero [ [link removed] ] by David Turver and Can We Just Stop Oil? [ [link removed] ] by Kathryn Porter, as well as David Turver’s chapter in The Great Stagnation [ [link removed] ], had something to do with this.
Maybe the return of XR and JSO is a response to this shift in the Overton Window: maybe they are trying to move the Overton Window back to its 2019-2025 position. They realise that their ideas are no longer as unchallengeable as they were a year ago, and they don’t like that. They are, as our friend Zack Polanski would say, ‘rattled!’
Let’s make sure they’ll stay rattled.
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