The changing face of climate crisis discourse in 2024

In case you hadn’t noticed, the climate crisis hasn’t gone away. In fact, global temperatures hit an all-time high in 2024, topping the next-hottest year on record (2023), while international communities have faced extreme weather events including hurricanes, floods, extreme heat and wildfires, costing thousands of lives and billions in damages. But in a crucial election year for countries across the globe – including the UK and the US – the climate conversation was conspicuously absent from many political campaigns. This is despite scientists directly warning politicians about the dangers of inaction (as in this open letter to UK parties) and widespread concern about climate change among the electorate.

Of course, climate issues haven’t been totally absent from the public consciousness in 2024. In June, Just Stop Oil sprayed Stonehenge with orange ‘paint’, followed by similar actions at Stansted and Gatwick airports. These are extreme examples, though, increasingly treated as extremist by the UK government, which jailed JSO activists Phoebe Plummer and Anna Holland this year, and issued Cressie Gethin the longest sentence for peaceful protest in the nation’s history. 

Also in June, an activist from the youth movement Green New Deal Rising disrupted the launch of Labour’s general election manifesto, calling out “the same old Tory policies” during a speech by Keir Starmer in Manchester. Later in the year (December 3), the group gathered more than 70 members at Parliament, to demand support for a Green New Deal from dozens of MPs, face-to-face. “Being better than the fossil-fuel-addicted Tories isn’t good enough,” head of campaigns Mel Kee tells Dazed of the new government. “We need action on the scale of the crisis.”

Kee is more optimistic than most about the state of climate discourse in 2024. “Our work shows us every day that there is still a huge movement of people organising across the country, against oilfields like Rosebank, for community-owned energy, for warm homes, clean public transport, and a just transition for oil and gas workers,” she says. “It isn’t always what the news cycle is focused on, but this work continues year in, year out.” 

It’s not only the headlines that come in cycles, though; many other causes have been competing for campaigners’ time and energy this year, and drawing the public’s attention away from the kind of transformative climate policies included in a Green New Deal – especially at the polls. “Many people have just been trying to survive in the midst of the cost of living crisis. And those with time for campaigning have often focused on opposing the unfolding genocide in Gaza,” Kee points out, clarifying: “We stand in full solidarity with the Palestinian movement.” 

In fact, the struggle for Palestinian freedom “is inseparable from the struggle for climate justice,” Kee says. And so is the cost of living crisis, which did dominate the conversation during the 2024 UK general election (and rightly so). “Not only does polling consistently tell us that climate change is a top concern for people, but we can see it on our doorsteps,” she explains. “We see it when storms ravage our communities and when supermarket prices skyrocket. The issue is that there is a pervasive narrative that climate action means more costs for regular people. Understandably, people don’t feel like they can afford that right now. The thing is, this just isn’t true.”

As spelt out by Green New Deal Rising, among other climate organisations like Extinction Rebellion, meaningful action to address the climate crisis requires a significant redistribution of wealth. Money needs to shift away from corporations, billionaires and oil tycoons, into the hands of the communities with an interest in bold, decisive action. This means tackling the companies whose profits continue to rise as our food, water and energy prices spiral out of hand. It means investing in homes to make them more efficient and help drive down energy bills. And it means investing in green infrastructure, reducing our reliance on fossil fuels and protecting communities against the material and economic impact of climate disasters.

“The people invested in burning up our planet are the same people who are raking it in whilst our rent, bills and food prices spiral out of control,” says Kee. “And they’re the ones pretending climate action will hurt ordinary people’s pockets.” Worryingly, this story is allowed to flourish, while calls for climate action are increasingly silenced. A recent report led by the University of Bristol, published in December, tracks the criminalisation and repression of climate and environmental protests across the world. This includes rising violence against activists, from police brutality, to the murder and disappearance of some 2,000 people in countries including Brazil, the Philippines and India across the last decade. It also includes the “undemocratic” anti-protest legislation introduced in the UK by the Tories, which Labour seems unlikely to repeal any time soon, making us a world leader in cracking down on activism.

The people invested in burning up our planet are the same people who are raking it in whilst our rent, bills and food prices spiral out of control – Mel Kee

In other words, if climate discourse is less visible than before, it isn’t by mistake. “Our evidence clearly shows a global crackdown in liberal democracies as well as autocracies,” says Dr Oscar Berglund, the lead author of the University of Bristol report. “This is worrying because it focuses state policy on punishing dissent against inaction on climate and environmental change, instead of taking adequate action on these issues. It also represents authoritarian moves that are inconsistent with the ideals of vibrant civil societies in liberal democracies.”

There’s a third dimension to the climate discourse, too. Empowered by the “free speech” policies (read: waves of political bias and misinformation) on platforms like Elon Musk’s X, a whole economy has emerged around climate change scepticism and environmental conspiracy theories. Whenever an extreme weather event occurs across the globe – like April’s wild storm in Dubai, which saw a year’s worth of rainfall in a single day – accusations are levelled at scientists about secret government programmes and vast schemes to change the weather. Cloudy skies over England and rain on election day (previously unheard of!) are blamed on a cabal of elites who want to block out the sun. X users with names like Concerned Citizen and Red Pill USA point to nefarious “climate engineering” schemes to explain unprecedented crises like Hurricane Beryl. 

Ironically, these theories are used to downplay the proven causes of deadly weather, like rising ocean temperatures, and to discredit conversations about new technologies that could mitigate its effects. In 2024, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) published a major report on this new, emotion-led brand of climate denial, following up with an open letter to Google – owner of YouTube, where denial has been allowed to flourish – on Earth Day in April.

“New, cynical climate denial narratives that cast shade on solutions, climate science and scientists, pose an evolving threat to action on climate change,” wrote Imran Ahmed, CEO and founder of the CCDH, in the letter. “Most cynical and telling of all is the way opponents to action on climate change have pivoted from claiming climate change isn’t real to claiming climate change is real, but that we have no hope of averting it.”

For politicians and companies whose incentives lie in business- and politics-as-usual, this sense of hopelessness is a powerful tool. That’s why organisations like New Green Deal Rising are so important: to provide a vision of an optimistic, and realistic, alternative. “Where I find endless hope is the fact that there are so many more of us – the public, demanding common-sense action on the scale of the crises we face – than there are of them, the politicians and ultra-wealthy who defend our broken economic status quo,” says Kee. “Our generation is proudly pro-climate, pro-Palestine, pro-worker, and we have massive power to shift our politics over time, if we stay organised. Ultimately, politicians work for us. If enough of us get activated, we can force them to deliver the solutions we need.”

Already, change is happening (if not at the scale and speed required to outpace crucial climate tipping points). While the election of Donald Trump in the US is broadly seen as a blow for climate action, the UK general election saw 12 “Green New Deal champions” gain seats, including Jeremy Corbyn, Zarah Sultana, and Nadia Whittome. In October 2024, a letter organised by Green New Deal Rising, urging chancellor Rachel Reeves to impose a 2 per cent tax on wealth above £10 million, also gained the support of 30 cross-party MPs. But Kee makes clear that the campaign isn’t just about playing by Westminster’s rules.

“Politics-as-usual isn’t working,” she says. “It needs to be disrupted if it’s going to get serious about fixing the crises we face. Just like so many movements throughout history, who forced governments to concede to their demands when it felt impossible, we can beat the odds and get our government to deliver a Green New Deal and the future we deserve.”