Eight years ago, on this day, February 14 , 2015, David Cameron, Nick Clegg and Ed Miliband put aside their differences in order to focus on something they could all agree on: getting rid of unabated coal from our energy system. This level of agreement is almost unprecedented in the run-up to a general election and demonstrates the extent to which action to stop coal emissions has become a no-brainer. See more here.
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 398.2ppm. As of 2023 it is 419ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was
Cameron, Miliband, and Clegg, all for various reasons, wanted to seem to be doing something on climate and coal was now largely friendless. It was being dug up in so few places that the employment implications were not there. So it was an easy win.
What I think we can learn from this
This sort of political bipartisanship, well tri-partisanship, will only happen if there’s a lot of public pressure, or an election coming, or if the issue can be circumscribed as “something must be done”, or a technology/sector is friendless enough to be beaten up.
What happened next
Cameron won the 2015 election outright and we started to see a rolling back of the weak climate actions that the Liberal Democrats had forced the Conservatives into – not that they’d ever been that hale and hearty to begin with
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Do comment on this post.