Last week, a senior member of Parliament for the UK’s Labour Party went on television demanding the UK – maybe even the entire world – be on a “war-like footing” to combat climate change.
Speaking on the BBC’s flagship political magazine Newsnight, Barry Gardiner MP argued for unity of purpose against climate change’s “existential threat”:
“…if this were a war we wouldn’t be arguing about whether the Labour strategy or the Tory strategy were better, we would be working together to try and win […] Well, it is a war. It is a war for survival and climate change threatens everything […] So actually instead of playing party political games about who is up, who is down, what we need to be doing is saying let’s get together, let’s mobilise on a war footing and that is what is needed…”
Two days later, the exact same thoughts were expressed in a Financial Times column by Camilla Cavendish, former head of David Cameron’s Downing Street policy unit and Kennedy School of Government alumnus:
The answer is surely to invoke a wartime spirit, and make the fight against climate change a joint endeavour against a common enemy. If the public and political will is there, human ingenuity can prevail, with remarkable speed. In the second world war, America transformed its manufacturing base to produce tanks and ammunition. The Covid pandemic resulted in the discovery and development of vaccines at scale, saving millions of lives.
It’s interesting to note the comparison to Covid, but we’ll come back that.