Twenty years of climate policy have seen some successes, but global emissions are still rising. No country yet has a comprehensive strategy for carbon reduction that meets what the scientific community say is required. And climate impacts themselves could result in worsening conditions for democratic governments.

We saw in Chapter Five that climate strategies initiated by countries and local areas had been limited, for two reasons: first, they focused on encouraging positive action, like renewable energy, or greener products, but did not discourage highcarbon activities, like fossil fuel extraction, or car use. I called this the ‘feelgood fallacy’. There are plenty of schemes to encourage electric vehicles, and some countries charge less tax for smaller cars, but the incentives are not large. No country has yet put significant measures in place to discourage people from buying cars with large petrol or diesel engines (Wappelhorst, 2018). There are no restrictions on advertising cars, either. Similarly, while there are incentives for renewable energy in most European countries, there are still few restrictions on fossil energy. The UK has generous tax breaks for oil and gas exploration in the North Sea, and these have increased in recent years, despite the country's ambitious carbon targets.

The second difficulty is that much climate action has been carried out without the involvement or meaningful consent of people. The shift from a high-carbon society to a zerocarbon society is not just technological. It requires social and cultural change too. Yet as we saw in Chapter Six, politicians and policymakers are often tempted to adopt ‘stealth strategies’, rather than making an upfront case for change. Like the politician who argued for a local transport scheme, without mentioning carbon reduction, they feel it's best not to open debate about climate change.

Given this track record, many critics say that our politics is fundamentally broken. Spurred on by Naomi Klein's assertion that ‘this changes everything’ (Klein, 2015), many argue that nothing less than an end to capitalist economic systems will solve climate change: ‘system change not climate change’, as the protest placards put it. In a similar vein, economist Tim Jackson (2017) argues that economic growth, the goal of nearly every government, is incompatible with climate stability.