What makes climate a populist issue? Jonathan White

As in some sense the very opposite of a populist issue, it presents a perfect target for those wanting to assert the importance of commonsense, the welfare of a bounded people, and traditionalist outlooks 1 over the unconventional lifestyles of an elite. [...] The sceptical case against climate- change action is developed by populist actors as a critique of the disavowal of agency – of the 2 willingness of mainstream political actors to embrace discourses of functional necessity, the absence of political choice, and what to sceptics appears as a form of ‘alarmism’. [...] It is a repudiation not so much of the climate emergency itself as of the response to it.10 One of the advantages of this line of critique is that it need not set the speaker directly against a scientific consensus, indeed need not require great engagement with that consensus and the specialist knowledge associated with it. [...] As with the populisms of the 2010s, what one sees is not just the condemnation of detached and corrupt elites, but a critique of the genuflection of authorities before external demands – a critique of political acquiescence. [...] Endnotes 1 The author acknowledges support in publishing this paper from the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment and the Economic and Social Research Council through the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy, as well as the editorial assistance of Gregor Singer and Georgina Kyriacou, and the support of a Leverhulme fellowship in facilitating the research.