Dieter Plehwe, a political scientist at the Berlin Social Science Center and a co-author of the report, explains the parallels between climate denial and anti-science rhetoric in the U.S. and Europe in the economic context of neoliberal free market ideology.
“If you look at the European climate denial conferences organized by EIKE (a conservative think tank based in Germany), they share basically the same speakers and the same output,” he said. They promote what he described as radical libertarian economic values, including sometimes extreme austerity measures like shrinking welfare programs and dismantling and privatizing public goods and services, measures that have “always been part of the effort of the Atlas network.”
Several far-right European parties, including Austria’s Freedom Party, have links to Russia, which promotes and funds anti-science climate disinformation. And last week, European investigators started scrutinizing the staff of a Dutch member of the European Parliament as part of a broader investigation of Russian influence in the EU.
Where Would a Hard Right Turn Lead?
Horn said the conventional wisdom in political science is that “the losers of globalization start voting for populist and far-right parties.” Concerns about job security and socio-economic status make people receptive to the seemingly simple answers offered by those parties, including nationalistic anti-immigration policy proposals, she added. And “questions of identity,” as well as “who is shaping public discourse and how those are being communicated also affect voting,” she said.
Various strains of populist and far-right ideologies that gained power in individual European countries have already shifted the political window so far that some factions of centrist parties in the EU that previously supported urgent action to protect the climate are now backpedaling.
In their EU parliamentary campaigns, some German politicians in center-right parties are now openly calling for a rollback of an already approved, EU-wide 2035 target to essentially phase out internal combustion engines that they themselves previously supported.
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The attacks on the EU’s climate policies are particularly egregious in the agricultural sector, said Venetia Roxburgh, EU program leader at InfluenceMap, a nonprofit watchdog group tracing industry promotion of unscientific policies for farming and industrial food production.
A report Roxburgh authored on those efforts was released last week, and she said the most relevant finding to the EU election is that policymakers in the largest center-right grouping in the current parliament, as well as that group’s candidates, “appear to have adopted narratives used by industry to oppose policies to tackle livestock emissions.”
She said the risk is that the meat and dairy sector is able to continue to exert such influence following the election, leading to the stalling of key policies to reduce emissions and make the EU’s food system more sustainable.
“This would mean the EU would not be able to fulfill its Green Deal goals of transforming the European food system,” she said. “And any further regulation of methane emissions from the agricultural sector, which contributes significantly to the EU’s greenhouse gas emissions overall, would be more unlikely.”
The campaigns by meat and dairy producers, and their industry associations, ”use a combination of strategic narrative building and detailed policy engagement that mirrors the tactics of the fossil fuel industry to obstruct climate policy,” the report noted. “Both sectors employ similar misleading narratives through strategic public messaging to sow doubt and undermine the need to tackle GHG emissions from the meat and dairy sector.”
Who Is Buying the Lies?
It’s not a question any more of whether fossil fuel companies and adjacent industries are intentionally misleading people, but of how they are getting away with it, said Reinhard Steurer, a climate policy researcher at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences in Vienna.
The answer, he said, is uncomfortable.
“If you lie to somebody, you need people on the other side who want to believe those lies,” he said. “Currently it seems to be the majority of society looking away or closing their eyes and wanting to hear bullshit stories.”
Supporters of Italian far-right party Lega attend a political rally for the upcoming EU elections on Thursday in Rome, Italy. Credit: Antonio Masiello/Getty Images
That’s allowed previously fringe populist and far-right parties to amass voters for the upcoming EU election, he explained.
“The problem behind all this is the multiple crises we are dealing with,” he said.
A pandemic, high inflation, wars and social conflicts about immigration have made people tired and feeling like “They just want things to go back to normal,” he said. “Now we scientists say well, there is no normal anymore. Of course, a majority doesn’t want to hear that. They just want to lash back and lash back.
”I see a lot of refusal to face reality because the stories the far right tells people are the more convenient stories, and so people get addicted until these stories of course crash into reality sooner or later. It takes a while but it will happen. But for now, those stories sound good and they run for elections with that storyline.”
Steurer said he is even more worried about the upcoming U.S. election.
“The U.S. is, indeed, a democracy under threat,” he said. “If Trump wins this election, I don’t know how the democratic system will survive this. So it’s really serious. It’s quite simple, either a majority sides with the rule of law and science, or, we will see a declining civilization.”
Bob Berwyn
Reporter, Austria
Bob Berwyn an Austria-based reporter who has covered climate science and international climate policy for more than a decade. Previously, he reported on the environment, endangered species and public lands for several Colorado newspapers, and also worked as editor and assistant editor at community newspapers in the Colorado Rockies.
Source link : https://insideclimatenews.org/news/07062024/eu-parliamentary-election-global-climate-policy/
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Publish date : 2024-06-07 09:10:00
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