But why shouldn't climate change be a political issue?

We have an awful lot of people trying to insist that climate change simply should not be a political issue. John Harris is just one of them:

In the UK, unfortunately, the past 48 hours has seen a political story whose parochialist absurdity is off the scale: Conservative voices undermining the fragile cross-party consensus on reaching net zero by 2050 and calling for many of the UK’s tilts at climate action to be either slowed or stopped. The reason? The results of three parliamentary byelections – and, in particular, the views of 13,965 Conservative voters in the outer London suburbs.

But climate change is the very essence of a political issue, something that has to be decided by politics.

No, leave aside the question of whether it is happening, even that of whether anything should be done about it. Stick with just the one point - if we’re to do something what is it that we should do?

Net Zero? A carbon tax at the social cost of carbon? As it happens the science prefers the second rather than the first there. So no one can use “but the science” to decide on the first.

But very much more importantly there’s a big political question here. Britons are being told to carry the cost of lower emissions so that others may gain the benefits of lower emissions. This is something that can only be done with the acquiescence of Britons. Elections are how we decide those things. What we do about climate change is the very essence of what a political issue is. Therefore rather than no politics about climate change we must have lots and lots more.

This is before a rather more sarcastic observation we’d like to make. The same people - largely that is - who argue against this democracy about climate change are those who shout for a “more democratic economy”. Surely that couldn’t be because they think the demos would vote for their economic policies but against their climate ones now, could it?