I find it inordinately odd – and depressing – that climate change is so frequently dragged into politics and culture wars.
I have been reading a recent piece in The Guardian about solar farms. Admittedly they are not uncontentious, primarily on two grounds: firstly in their use of prime farmland, and secondarily because of aesthetic impact. Neither of these objections stands up to much scrutiny but neither are entirely without merit. The aesthetics of solar panels remains one of their biggest stumbling blocks (something our partners at the Art & Energy Collective have paid quite a bit of attention to in recent projects.)
The feature story (‘…the battle raging in the heart of the British Countryside’) focuses on rural Lincolnshire, an area of the country traditionally dominated by Conservative voters but now largely captured by the populist right in the shape of the Reform Party – the Labour Party is not the only party currently losing their core voters. A number of large-scale solar farms are proposed for Lincolnshire in part due to their proximity to the grid due to the nearby Cottam coal-fired power plant, now decommissioned. One of the defining commonalities of far right parties world-wide is their purported desire to maintain traditional economic, political and cultural models and this used as a primary argument against most forms of renewable energy. Hence the ‘raging battle’ The Guardian uses in their title.
So…we learn that Lincolnshire hates solar farms, or so their politicians tell them they must. This despite the fact that most are proposed for poor quality agricultural land and will provide power for around a hundred thousand homes across the county and the country. All the tired axioms are trotted around: “Solar farms are not proven to be of any use.”, “solar farms are destroying nature and killing much needed farmland”, “It is all down to money and greed.”, “We don’t believe there is an [climate] emergency.”, “[The IPCC reports are] 30 years old made-up stuff. That’s crazy. It’s not true.” and so on, ad nauseam.
In the rural fields of Lincolnshire, I would venture to suggest, the populist right wing pols so hungry for power manipulate crudely (cruelly?) the emotions of the rural population and their small-c conservative values. These are places redolent of a way of life that spans generations; solid, earthy, male, slow-but-sure, and this becomes the dominant trope. These are good people; although with a little digging you’ll find the loudest voices are often incomers who have moved here to escape urbanism. The cynicism of the exploitation of these populations is staggering and bald-faced. Nigel Farage (as leader of Reform) has learnt much at the coat-tails of Donald Trump and his henchmen – the playbook is unrelenting in whipping up anger and dividing communities. In truth, many farmers have gladly embraced solar farming as a far more lucrative use for their less than prime agricultural land but they are decried as traitors.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, has via his Justice Department paid $1 billion to TotalEnergies (a French oil and gas company) to ‘buy out’ (in other words, cancel) their contact to build a four gigawatt wind farm off the east coast of the USA that would provide power to approximately four million homes. He’s done this purely because of his palpable (and inexplicable) hatred for renewable energy. According to CNN the money will be used by the company to develop a new gas plant in Texas to export natural gas to Europe – hmmm I wonder if anyone has asked if they will want it?
This piece is not about merits of solar panels or renewable energy in general. If you’re reading this you probably agree that any such discussion is moot. I’m just deeply saddened that something of such vital importance to all our futures has been hijacked into nasty culture wars designed only to exploit and attain power. That many of these parties and politicians are in the pay of the extractive industries is not by-the-by, not at all. To take advantage of the small-c conservatism of a population who genuinely love the land they work or are surrounded by just feels sordid and detestable.
All war is about Othering: it is not possible to fight someone or something unless it is declared an enemy. Not without irony, the populist voice is one of outrage, calling for the protection of the status quo against those who wish to attack it. This can of course be used in many flavours: race, identity, sexuality, education, religion. So sounds the argument against Net Zero. It’s hailed as an attack on our freedoms, as an enormous waste of taxpayers’ (“your”) money. As a hoax perpetrated by the elites to steal your money, take away your jobs, and wreck the economy and our precious countryside. These tropes work and have already translated into electoral success. We can sneer at the American people for electing a man as dangerous and stupid as Donald Trump – twice – but we are not fairing much better here in the UK.
Underlying all this we should not forget that we have reached a number of tipping points and that the genie of climate change mitigation can never be forced back into its bottle. For the first time, pure electric vehicle sales outstripped ICE sales in Europe. There were days when all the power in the UK came from renewable energy. Octopus Energy became the country’s leading energy supplier with all their electricity supplied from renewables. In the US, solar, wind and geothermal energy has more then tripled in a decade (in part due to support from the Biden administration); solar increased 27% in the last year alone. Despite the best efforts of the government and the auto industry, electric vehicle sales are also up – just not as much as in most other countries. Much of this is happening in so-called ‘red’ states where land is cheap and sunshine often plentiful. Renewables have overtaken coal as the world’s biggest source of electricity (led by China). This genie is well and truly out of her bottle and she is dancing with joy and batting away her detractors.
And this, at the end of the day, is the absurdity of it all. All that outrage and noise, all the denigration of the elites, all the denial and ignorance, all the misery. In the end, there is no choice. We simply cannot go on extracting stuff from underground that harms our planet when we burn it to create energy. There simply has to be a better way – and it is already here.
Sources used in this blog
Political ideology and climate change-mitigating behaviors: Insights from fixed world beliefs
Eugene Y. Chan & Amy A. Faria. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2021.102440
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskBrits/comments/1n4r9vt/why_do_right_wing_people_not_get_worked_up_about/
https://theclimatenews.co.uk/why-are-the-far-right-climate-sceptical/
https://edition.cnn.com/2026/03/23/climate/trump-totalenergies-offshore-wind-cancellation
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/may/07/clean-energy-report-environment-trump
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cx2rz08en2po
image: Dmitry Eliuseev, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0 via Wikimedia Common