Premium
Climate Change and UK Politics: From Brynle Williams to Sir Nicholas Stern
Author(s) -
McLEAN IAIN
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
the political quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.373
H-Index - 37
eISSN - 1467-923X
pISSN - 0032-3179
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-923x.2008.00916.x
Subject(s) - stern , opposition (politics) , duty , dilemma , politics , political economy , political science , global warming , face (sociological concept) , climate change , law , economics , sociology , history , social science , ecology , ancient history , philosophy , epistemology , biology
In 2000 the UK Labour government abandoned annual real fuel duty increases ‐ a policy it had inherited from the preceding Conservative administration ‐ in the face of direct action by farmers and hauliers. A short‐term Conservative lead in the polls opened up. In 2006, the same Chancellor, Gordon Brown, announced an increase in air passenger duty from February 2007 in the light of the newly published Stern Review. The opposition parties denounced this as too feeble. As Stern points out, all citizens in the world are in a global N‐person prisoners' dilemma. Everybody knows that a world without global warming is better than a world with it; but each actor is unconditionally better off from continuing to pollute than from restraining her polluting. Everybody expects somebody else to drive less. Now, however, all parties have committed themselves to tax and/or emission trading policies to mitigate global warming. The paper examines this transition.