Unravelling the covid-climate narratives

Behavioural science emerging as underhand political tool

by SHANE FUDGE

The public apathy which characterised previous attempts to persuade most of the population that there is a climate crisis has been turned on its head by the enforced behavioural change of the two lockdowns of 2020/21.

THE extraordinary range of events that have occurred across the world since 2020 seems to be unprecedented historically.

But most of these seemingly disparate events are all part of the same programme, an agenda to delete human freedoms under the guise of permanent crises.

Klaus Schwab has made the point repeatedly: the pivotal event of recent times, Covid-19, provided a ‘window of opportunity’ for a societal, economic and political transition that will supposedly save us all.

Therefore, the proposed ‘Great Reset’ is often discussed in reverential tones, implying that ‘God’s Great Plan’ is both inevitable, unchallengeable, and is being undertaken in our best interests.

With extraordinary timing, Schwab’s book detailing The Great Reset appeared in the summer of 2020, outlining the case for urgent change if we were to survive as a human species.

Embellishing the rhetoric from a long line of left-leaning politicians, academics and social commentators, the argument goes something like this: whilst globalisation itself is a good thing, the downside of more open borders, global trading arrangements, and cross-fertilisation of cultures, means that there must be much more stringent regulation, monitoring, and control.

Therefore, Covid-19 dovetailed neatly with the climate crisis, crime and terrorism, as issues which can transcend domestic policy initiatives, evade national security measures, and demand some kind of response at a supranational political level.

The acceleration of climate change as a greater political priority in the late 1990s/2000s introduced a raft of measures that were aimed specifically at changing behaviour at an individual (as opposed to institutional) level, as a way of directly engaging the public in reducing their ‘carbon footprint’.

The focal point for this was the Climate Change Act in 2008, where the then Labour Government pledged to reduce the UK’s carbon emissions by 60% (later revised to 80%,) by the year 2020.

The aftermath of what some argued was evidence that the government was beginning to take climate change seriously, witnessed the beginning of a much more direct interface between academia and policy, as government officials sought to harvest the most influential academic findings on human behaviour.

From the late 1990s, the government developed a suite of policies designed to reduce energy demand at a consumer level – primarily by changing or nudging attitudes, values, and behaviours.

Reducing or curtailing car journeys, switching to renewable fuels and sustainable ways of generating energy, turning off lights, and purchasing more energy efficient appliances have become mainstream policy objectives in the UK’s carbon governance agenda since the turn of the century.

It was the environmental debate which made changing behaviour a more central feature of government policy, although issues such as health also targeted individuals for their lifestyle choices. This emerging agenda also highlighted the closer political ties between policy and social scientific research into human behaviour.

Directly encouraging widespread behavioural shifts also signposted some challenges for policymakers when attempting to engage more directly with citizens on specific policy outcomes. Perhaps the biggest obstacle revealed itself as the latent widespread public apathy and scepticism over climate change itself.

This could be observed, for example, in the disastrous uptake of the UK green deal and other incentive-based approaches to reducing household energy use. The widespread opposition to wind farms was also indicative that many of the general public were not going to be so easily persuaded by the more visible effects of a ‘green’ transition on their immediate landscapes.

It is interesting to compare the different levels of public buy-in to the climate crisis and to the advent of Covid-19. The general levels of scepticism over the degree of threat posed by the climate crisis, for example, contrasted sharply with the perceived immediate threat of an infectious and unknown disease. The UK Government was able to leverage the perception of this threat to far greater effect than they had in delivering the climate crisis message.

The lockdown measures, keeping people in their homes, social distancing, mask wearing, and then eventually large-scale vaccination programmes, all culminated in a radical transformation in attitudes, behaviours and social norms, and an unprecedented level of change in public behaviour, wartime excepted.

Clearly, it was a more difficult undertaking to deploy the climate change message as a direct behaviour modification tool, as the concept itself is noticeably more abstract, less linear in its implications, and, for most, constitutes a non-immediate issue.

The climate crisis has now been carefully reintroduced and woven onto the back of the Covid-19 narrative, and builds on the more top-down approach to changing behaviour that was introduced by the plandemic.

For example, the International Energy Agency declared in 2021 that the lockdowns since 2020 had seen ‘an unprecedented 6% reduction in carbon emissions, as global energy demand was slashed during this period’. The media highlighted the clear blue skies resulting from ten weeks of lockdown, hinting at the implications of a society of this kind over the longer term.

A tweet released by the World Economic Forum (and then hastily withdrawn) proposing that ‘lockdowns are quietly improving cities around the world’, suggests that these may have been a testing ground for what is to come.

It is clear to most people who have been following the main narrative that the climate crisis has long served the cause of those who are part of the higher echelons of politics, business and banking, who have advocated for greater control and regulation of the Earth’s resources.

The 2011 peer reviewed Greenland ice core analysis identifies major cooling and warming periods over the last 4,000 years. The red line represents current temperature climate. Modern temperatures are clearly not “unprecedented”.