Will the 2019 election be the Brexit election that 2017 wasn’t? It’s still early in the campaign and the main debates of this election are yet to be set, but it looks likely to dominated by the various party’s stance on Brexit and how much of it there should be. 

This is a shame, as this should be the environment election. We have only 12 years to cut carbon emissions by 45% to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 degrees and most of the key decisions on that will affect whether we make this target or not will be made in 2020. This means we don’t have long to make a substantial change to our society in order to avert a climate catastrophe. We need to start the debate as to how this will be achieved as soon as possible.

Huge effects on politics

The breakdown of the natural environment will affect every other area of politics. It will have huge implications for our economy, energy production, health, transportation, immigration, defence, food production, education, science and many other areas. It will touch every aspect of our lives and have any number of as yet unforeseen effects. Destruction of the natural environment will cause more conflicts and more movement of people, which will further make politics unstable. It will be hard to achieve any other political goals whilst dealing with the fallout from a climate catastrophe. It’s important that we use this election to raise everyone’s awareness of this and to begin the discussion about what we want our politicians to do about it.

Why won’t it be a major issue?

There a few reasons why this won’t happen. Ultimately, most people don’t care enough about the environment, certainly not enough for it to change their vote when weighed against other issues. It’s becoming a more politically salient issue, especially amongst younger voters who will have to deal with more of the long-term effects of climate change. This is partly because of the hard work of people like Greta Thunberg and groups like Extinction Rebellion who are keeping the profile of this issue high, despite a lot of other political noise.

In Britain, Brexit is sucking the oxygen out of the political debate. It’s hard to get the attention of the voters and start a conversation about a different issue when Brexit is in the news so much. Brexit is the issue that is right in front of us and it’s getting more attention than climate change, which seems far off and abstract.

An election to resolve Brexit

It has been said that an election would be a way out of the quagmire that is recent British politics. Months of deadlock in parliament has paralyzed politics and made it impossible to get anything done. One way to look at this, is that the environment might be better served by using this election to resolve Brexit, one way or the other, and thus allowing the system to move again so that the climate can be the focus of politics.

I’m not convinced by this argument, as we don’t have enough time to wait until Brexit is resolved before we look at stopping a climate catastrophe. Whatever happens in this election it won’t resolve Brexit; it will run on for years and years and by then it will be too late to stop the rising global temperatures from causing massive devastation. Also, this election isn’t needed to resolve Brexit as the last parliament looked it was going pass Boris Johnson’s withdrawal deal.

A warning from Australia

The UK needs a debate on climate change. This would allow everyone to understand how serious the situation is, have all the facts and options at their disposal (or as much of this as possible during the brief time where most people focus on politics) and then we can make some kind of collective decision about what we should do, or at least indicate a vague direction.

There are risks to making this election all about the environment. For example, what happened in Australia earlier this year. With record temperatures and huge wildfires burning, the environment became a major issue in the 2019 election. The Labour Party promised to do something about it and the Liberal Party (who are, confusingly, the centre-right party in Australia) said not only that they would ignore the issue, but turned it into a battle in the never-ending culture war. Scott Morrison’s Liberal Party won, which set the cause of reducing carbon emissions and tackling rising temperatures back by years. The fact that this happened in a country already experiencing serious problems due to the climate emergency is very worrying.

Despite this warning, we should be taking the opportunity of a general election, that almost no one wanted, to focus on the most important issue affecting the country. Politicians of all parties need to acknowledge the seriousness of this issue or else it will derail their entire agenda for decades. There should be a public debate on how we can avert a climate catastrophe. This is the only way to begin to find a solution to the problem of rising global temperatures that threatens everyone.

"Extinction Rebellion-11" by juliahawkins123 is licensed under CC BY 2.0