Policy is a map, it’s a route map, it tells you how to get from here to there. There are many different routes, and you can examine them all and try to figure out which ones are the best routes. You use quite sophisticated tool to make a map and then you need to decide which route to use, or maybe you use several of those routes. Politics is the journey, it is how you get you, and vodafone 5g broadband uk everyone that you need to take along with you, from here to there, and you use a completely different set of tools to make the journey. Like on any journey you might use boots, and ropes, and rucksacks and ice axes, and quite often to will have to use them on the people that you are going to bring along on the journey. That is the difference. So to change the politics you need to understand what are the difficulties on the journey that are not the same as the difficulties on the map. I think that difference in discourse is one of the reasons why we are not moving fast enough. We simply don’t understand the political problems as well as we understand the technological and economic problems.
We often forget that there are two parts to government: there is the administrative part of government and there is the politics part of government. The policy discussion is what the administrative part of government deals with. And it is quite good at it. Most of the failures are failures in the political part of government. They are failures, quite literally, of politicians to ask the administrative part of government to do the things that are necessary and to do them fast enough, and to solve the problems of doing the fast enough. Politics is about interests. It’s about battles between a world view and a reflection of those interests that support that world view, so for example a political argument is the difference between people’s freedom to burn all the fossil fuels they want, as distinct from those who want freedom from finding ourselves in a climate that we can’t live with. The interests who want the ‘freedom to’ to be the dominant aspect of the political discourse are the fossil fuel lobbies, and the bankers who make money out of problems when they arise and when they are solved. The people who put the emphasis on ‘freedom from’ are all those who will really be hurt if climate policy fails. I don’t think that we are organising coalitions around those competing interests very effectively in terms of gaining power, so what you have now is a situation where the fossil fuel interests and the ‘freedom to’ are very much dominant in their access to power, and the people whose interest are freedom form, particularly young people, have relatively little access to power. That really means that you limit the amount that the administrative part of government can do.
The facts of climate change do get through in the policy realm, but they don’t necessarily mean all that much in the political realm. Most people don’t spend much of their lives dealing with facts as part of their professional activity, they deal with the facts that are relevant to their jobs and they deal with the facts that are relevant to their lives, but they don’t spend much of their lives working out what the fact mean in an issue that seems remote like climate change. So, they lack confidence in their ability, and they are not moved by the facts. They are moved by what people they know say to what time does voting end today them, they are moved by who they trust. So, what is lacking in the political realm is that people don’t know who to trust on climate change, and they are not getting much of a consistent and coherent lead from political leaders, and that is true whether you are living in a democracy or an authoritarian regime. The political leaders are not offering up a compelling narrative on climate change, that people believe as a reason for doing things. What we saw with the virus was very interesting, we saw that when people understood what needed to be done, they were very willing to do it. That was a surprise to the people in government who thought that people’s patience with what needed to be done would run out, and they wouldn’t do it for very long, and it turned out to be the exact opposite. The politicians wanted to give up doing things, but the public felt uneasy enough about it that they argued with the politicians that they should go on doing things. So that issue of trust is central to creating the political momentum for change, and without that political momentum it doesn’t matter how good you policy analysis is or how accurate elton john the facts are, they simply don’t get used.
