Anything that might look like an obstacle to growth – such as nature – must publicly be sacrificed. Ironically nature teaches that growth is good only up to maturity, after which it becomes a problem. Imagine a child that never, ever stopped growing.
When rolling out a growth oriented change to planning rules that would allow more house building on Britain’s green belt land, Labour spun that bricks would take priority over nature.
But such political semaphore distracts from Labour’s reluctance to take other, potentially far more effective, steps to increase affordable housing supply.
Alternatives
Policies proven and common in other countries are eschewed, such as rent controls and market measures to prevent speculation on house prices. These don’t meet the optics test for ‘pro-growth’ policy.
The same reasons almost certainly explain the new enthusiasm to expand polluting airports and Reeves choosing to continue the freeze on fuel duty, a subsidy for pollution, in place since 2011.
Yet, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, by the end of the 2025 financial year the freeze will have landed the Treasury a massive £100 billion cumulative bill in lost public income, which has the effect of further tightening Labour’s self-imposed restrictions on spending.
In other words it’s a policy both economically and environmentally self-defeating, from a government that has cornered itself with messaging.
Meanwhile, the costs of cleaner alternatives, like public transport, are allowed to rise. Regulated rail fares which the government controls rose by 4.6 per cent this year and look set to rise by an even higher amount in 2026.
Acidification
It’s a counter-productive, political choice that pushes people toward more polluting, less healthy transport choices – bad for human health, and more work for the NHS, bad for efficient infrastructure and bad for the climate.
Labour’s actions clearly accord with a story it has told itself about how to get and hold power. Haunted by ghosts of the right-wing press depicting the party as anti-business, it’s easy to see why Labour is doing this.
Although given the party’s large majority in government, perhaps less easy to see why they are so fervent in their signalling. But it is also not difficult to see why this is self-defeating and much more widely destructive.
In 2024 six of the biosphere’s nine systems and processes that underpin life on Earth – the so-called ‘planetary boundaries’ – had been transgressed, the result of human activity.
A seventh – the acidification of oceans – was approaching a critical threshold. The decade 2015-2024 was the hottest on record, and globally in 2024 emissions of carbon dioxide, the main gas responsible continued to rise.
Intervention
A vast review of scientific literature on the subject of collapse by academic Danilo Brozović in 2023, surveying 361 studies and 73 books, came to much the same conclusion as the 2018 special report on 1.5 degree global heating by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Namely, the need for rapid, radical transformation of society and the economy to fit the ecological shoe size of the planet.
Brozović’s study found, however, that one of the major obstacles to taking action commensurate with the scale of the problem is “convincing people of the necessity of such measures.” It’s a point at which a lack of political leadership guarantees catastrophic failure.
When making his first major intervention as prime minister on the impending environmental catastrophe, at COP29, the international climate conference, Starmer made a calculated choice.
While defending the UK’s emissions reduction target, he added pointedly with regard to changing consumption patterns, “What we are not going to do is start telling people how to live their lives… We are not going to start dictating to people what they do.”
Habitable
Compare that to a less well-known line from Bobby Kennedy’ speech on growth. Kennedy spoke of the “great task of leadership.” He argued: “Too much and for too long, we seemed to have surrendered personal excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things”.
Starmer’s comment was odd for two big reasons.
Firstly, a basic duty of government is to provide advice on harmful substances and damaging behaviour. That could include anything from drunk driving, to smoking, infection control or not walking on live railway lines.
Regulating dangerous products and abusive behaviour, and providing positive advice and guidelines for, say healthy eating, being active, and saving energy, is the very stuff of government.
So why not do it when it comes to the biggest collective threat yet, the loss of a habitable climate?
Prohibited
Secondly, while rejecting a more active role for government and not ‘telling people what to do’ – the government appears quite happy that a vastly larger, private information machine called advertising, is effectively doing just that, telling people to pollute like there’s no tomorrow, and to enjoy high waste, high carbon lifestyles.
Whether online, on billboards or on TV, almost everywhere people are assailed with adverts promoting polluting flights, giant SUVs, greenwash propaganda from fossil fuel companies, and other heavily polluting products and services.
If the government won’t let itself encourage people to do the right thing, why are heavily polluting industries allowed to encourage people to do the wrong thing?
This question motivates the ‘Badvertising’ campaign for a tobacco-style ban on adverts that fuel the climate crisis.
It’s also the reason why increasingly at town and city level, from Gothenburg in Sweden, to Sheffield and Edinburgh, adverts for heavily climate-polluting products are being added to the list of things for which advertising is prohibited, in order to reinforce public health and climate goals.
Convivial
In fact, everyone from the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to the Britain’s official, advisory Climate Change Committee, and the economically conservative International Energy Agency point out the need for behaviour change and demand reduction to preserve a habitable climate.
Government doesn’t have to micro-manage, just shift the parameters between which we choose different products, services and lifestyles, the so-called ‘choice architecture’.
System and behaviour change can be self-reinforcing dynamics. Make it easier to walk and cycle in a town by changing road and pavement layouts and more people will walk and cycle.
As that happens further policies for traffic reduction – less pollution, more and safer space for pedestrians and cyclists, greater use of public transport – become more politically popular.
The embedded privilege, social norm and policy bias in favour of car-based travel starts to change. Health bills and accident rates reduce, the air gets cleaner and neighbourhoods more convivial.
Abate
These issues are moving centre stage. A recent ruling of the International Court of Justice found that States were legally liable to reduce their emissions in line with the 1.5C temperature rise limit and that should they fail to act adequately, they become liable for climate damage caused to others and will have to pay compensation.
In 2024, António Guterres, the UN secretary general said: “Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health – like tobacco. Some are now doing the same with fossil fuels. I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies.”
Does that sound like a big ask? In practice it may prove as simple as making clear and implementing what is already implicit in current guidelines overseen by the Advertising Standards Authority, the UK industry-funded self-regulatory body. These state that: “Advertising must not encourage behaviour grossly prejudicial to the protection of the environment.”
The activities of fossil fuel companies, and their co-dependent industries, the hard to abate sectors like aviation, and the heavily promoted shift to driving SUVs, whose high emissions have cancelled out pollution gains made elsewhere, all seem to encourage behaviour grossly prejudicial to the environment.
The UK House of Lords Environment Committee report into behaviour change in October 2022 recommended that: “The government should introduce measures to regulate advertising of high-carbon and environmentally damaging products.”
Cost-effective
Even many of those making adverts seem to agree. In advance of the first ever UK parliamentary debate on a fossil ad ban, over 100 creative and advertising agencies with business worth over £1 billion wrote a letter calling for such ban.
But of course infrastructural change is needed too. Labour’s new, publicly owned renewable energy company, Great British Energy, has been widely welcomed.
Yet it falls far short of a sufficiently scaled, and properly funded Green New Deal, whose popularity would come through nationwide job creation, reskilling, home energy-efficiency retrofits, lower energy bills and reduced national dependence on imported gas for heating.
It’s an approach that would seem to tick all the boxes for Labour’s longed for economic revival: a clean, cost-effective economic reboot for Britain, welcomed for its multiple positive effects by business, unions, anti-poverty and environmental groups alike.
But Starmer’s Labour, like the Conservatives before them, has restricted the scope for action by self-imposed and mostly arbitrary public spending limits.
Economy
Increased public green investment of one per cent of GDP is needed to raise to £26 billion annually, to make up for lost time, and that this would crowd-in the equivalent of a further £51 billion from the private sector. Note that Labour has committed arbitrarily to spending 2.5 per cent of GDP on UK military expenditure.
Labour abandoned its initial pledge to invest £28 billion annually on green economic initiatives. So many caveats now surround its plans that it is unclear what the pledge has reduced to.
But the Green New Deal Group estimate that over £150 billion of public money per year could be found, relatively easily, to pay for the policy.
This would consist of just over £50 billion from changes to personal and corporate taxes, and closing loopholes to the oil and gas industries that work as hidden subsidies and £100 billion from placing a green investment requirement on savings vehicles like ISAs and some pension contributions that enjoy tax breaks.
Failing to invest is not just a false economy, it is set to prove very, very expensive.
Adaptation
“The macroeconomic damages from climate change are six times larger than previously thought”, according to research published in May 2024. The costs of climate damage will be six times higher than the amount needed to invest to keep global heating below the 2°C level, according to earlier research.
There is surely scope for cross parliamentary work to align public investment with practical necessity. The Liberal Democrats are stronger in parliament and positioning themselves as bolder on the environment than Labour. The Green Party is proposing a £40 billion annual public spending plan that would finance a Green New Deal programme.
The UK population is being left to sink or burn due to a lack of climate preparedness. Perhaps nowhere is the gap between necessary action and urgent reality clearer.
A record number of exceptionally huge of wildfires burned across Los Angeles in early 2025, one of the world’s richest cities. In the UK widespread flooding devastated multiple communities in the North of England and elsewhere. Global heating was leading to weather ‘whiplash’, with temperature rises driving rapid swings in extreme weather.
In 2024 the Climate Change Committee (CCC) analysed the government’s national adaptation plan. Reviewing progress to date, the CCC commented that since the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 mandating the adaptation plan “the country is still strikingly unprepared.”
Preparedness
As well as a lack of vision, the plan was failing in terms of governance, investment and monitoring, and adaptation policy, it said, needs to becomes a “fundamental aspect of policy making across all departments“.
How could things possibly be this bad, and how can communities, as nearly always the first responders in any disaster, best prepare? The answer can be found in the deep knowledge and experience of the humanitarian relief community.
It is about building resilience into infrastructure, having the network of local human relationships and assets in place before disaster strikes, and having people know and rehearse what to do.
One overriding factor can be seen in disasters ranging from the Grenfell Tower atrocity, to the pandemic and the impacts of worsening weather extremes in a warming world.
Community
There has been a failure of officially guided measures for pre-disaster preparedness, disaster response, and post disaster recovery.
It is the communities affected themselves who are typically the first responders to disaster, and the foundation for recovery. But invariably these are communities that have not been resourced, equipped or given sufficient agency and control to best perform that role.
Flawed, top-down, official ‘civil contingency’ planning could be re-engineered to create a genuinely civil society based, locally organised, and properly resourced approach to adaptation, disaster preparedness and response. Not only will this be more effective, it will save countless lives.
The current local vacuum – gathering dust with some existing bodies part of the current system not meeting for years – has led to an independent initiative to establish ‘climate emergency centres’ across the UK, using empty buildings as community hubs to build resilience to climate and social crises.
Supporting
It’s hot and getting hotter. Both in and beyond party politics there is growing support for action.
We need a culture shift around overconsumption and the behaviour of the polluter elite, and an infrastructural shift away from the fossil fuel dependent economy.
Communities need strengthening to look after themselves better when inevitable climate extremes strike.
These three elements are not intended to be a comprehensive or exclusive plan, but they are key things that need to happen to give us any chance of holding on to a climate capable of supporting society. You could call it ‘three shifts or we’re out’.
This Author
Andrew Simms is co-director of the New Weather Institute, assistant director of Scientists for Global Responsibility, co-founder of the Badvertising campaign, coordinator of the Rapid Transition Alliance, an author on new and green economics, and co-author of the original Green New Deal. Follow on Bluesky @andrewsimms.bsky.social or Mastodon: @[email protected].
This article is based on the chapter From climate emergency to national renewal by Andrew Simms published in the book The Starmer Symptom, edited by Mark Perryman and published today by Pluto Press.
