By Jeremy Williams

There’s a scene in Kenneth Grahame’s classic children’s book The Wind in the Willows where the wise Mr Badger rebukes the wayward Mr Toad. Badger takes him into the smoking room for a lecture, and then brings the repentant Toad out to tell his friends that he has seen the error of his ways:

“Toad, I want you solemnly to repeat, before your friends here, what you fully admitted to me in the smoking room just now. First, you are sorry for what you’ve done, and you see the folly of it all?”

There was a long, long pause. Toad looked desperately this way and that, while the other animals waited in grave silence. At last, he spoke.

“No!” he said, a little sullenly, but stoutly; “I’m not sorry. And it wasn’t folly at all! It was simply glorious!”

“What?” cried the Badger, greatly scandalised. “You backsliding animal, didn’t you tell me just now, in there——”

“Oh, yes, yes, in there,” said Toad impatiently. “I’d have said anything in there. You’re so eloquent, dear Badger, and so moving, and so convincing, and put all your points so frightfully well—you can do what you like with me in there, and you know it. But I’ve been searching my mind since, and going over things in it, and I find that I’m not a bit sorry or repentant really, so it’s no earthly good saying I am; now, is it?”

I was reminded of this scene when I read recently that 2023 had the highest recorded number of newspaper editorials against climate action.

If you remember, in 2021 there was an unexpected wave of support for climate policy. The Sun launched its new Green Team. The Mirror turned its masthead green. So did the Express, most unexpected of all. They partnered with eco-entrepreneur Dale Vince and launched a ‘crusade’ (it’s always a crusade with the Express) to ‘go green’. It was a welcome shift, though hard to trust. “Will the newspapers stick with their new green aspirations, or revert to previous positions?” I asked at the time, and now we have an answer.

It’s been almost 18 months since The Sun’s Green Team posted an article. The Express has gone back to calling Dale Vince an ‘eco-loonie‘. Anti-green rhetoric has not just returned but risen dramatically in the last year. For the first time since 2016, right-leaning newspapers were more likely to come out against climate action than support it, according to the media analysis by Carbon Brief. What happened?

The equivalent of Toad Hall’s smoking room here is COP26. In 2021 the UK hosted the international climate talks in Glasgow. Everybody was talking about climate. Britain’s leadership on the issue visibly mattered, and there was a degree of pride in that. So in 2021 the newspapers boarded the COP26 bandwagon and waved their green flags.

In there, sure. Of course, they were green. Now that the dust has settled on COP26, the media barons have been going over those commitments, concluded that they’re not worth keeping, and have given up the pretence.

There’s more going on here too of course. Russian aggression has focused minds more on energy security. Just Stop Oil has complicated the messaging on climate. Then there are the rising energy prices. This has been the biggest difference, with the cost of net zero a recurring theme – despite the fact that well-insulated homes will save households money, and onshore wind power is the cheapest form of electricity.

At a time of incompetence and desperation in government, the influence of the newspapers looks a lot more obvious than usual. As Carbon Brief notes, opinion pieces calling for the scrapping of green policies peaked in September last year. Rishi Sunak made a speech announcing the cancellation or delay of a raft of green targets later that month, and the opinion pieces promptly ceased. Job done.

Will this change in 2024? What will it take to rebuild a sense of common purpose around the climate? It will take a change of government, and a Labour party prepared to stand up to the self-interested scepticism of the press barons. There’s not much sign of that yet, but now would be a good time to write to your Labour MPs and tell them you expect a bit of backbone on climate change.

First published in the Earthbound Report.