Beyond Net Zero: Towards a Climate Politics that Can Defeat the Far Right
by Christopher Shaw
26.03.2026
Christopher Shaw holds Research Associate roles at both the University of Sussex’s School of Global Studies and the Working Class Climate Alliance, and is a leading voice in climate communications in the UK. Below, he argues that the UK’s liberal, technocratic net zero climate politics has reached its limits. By ignoring both the political roots of the climate crisis, and the voices of the working class, net zero has allowed itself to be instrumentalized by the far-right. Drawing on recent political developments, Shaw outlines what a climate politics, rooted in social justice and grassroots democracy, could look like, in the fight not just for heat pumps or electric cars—but a world that feels like home.
The UK’s net zero policy: preserving liberalism versus preserving life
As the centrist waters recede back down the beach of history, climate policies are left stranded and exposed on the shore, flapping about like so many dying fish. Who will fight for net zero now? Not the European Union it seems, which is busy shredding many of its flagship climate policies, whilst the long standing net zero consensus in the UK is now coming apart. Even climate researchers supportive of net zero remain divided over the ability of net zero to deliver emission cuts quickly and fairly. To cap it all, campaigners have seen twenty years of efforts to get people to adopt the low carbon behaviours needed to deliver net zero come to naught. The rapid and ongoing collapse of the net zero policy architecture leaves climate campaigners with two choices. The first is to double down on net zero, turning increasingly to geo-engineering and technological innovation as the primary tools used to fix the climate. This limits the need to involve people or politics. The only choice the public needs to make is whether to install an air source or ground source heat pump. The second option is to recognise that the climate fight is, and always has been, political. Campaigners are choosing the first option, a strategy destined to fail further and faster than ever before. Rather than trying to lift climate policy out of the democratic sphere, we need narratives that present climate change as a product of the same politics that have delivered austerity, inequality and war. Fixing climate change means fixing the political conditions that are generating these crises. If this is not a fight the existing liberal climate movement wants to take on, we will need a new climate movement, one that does not prioritise the preservation of liberalism over the preservation of life.
The myth of the good liberal citizen
There is more anger, resentment and fear abroad today than liberal politics can assimilate – liberal politics and the current public mood are as oil and water. Liberal climate policy remains wedded to the hope that the evidence-based application of intellect and reason will dissipate both greenhouse gases and public anger. Through calculation and rational deliberation we can fashion a painless technocratic and reformist path to the net zero land beyond history. Liberals look to an eternal tomorrow of ‘self-regulating citizens conducting resource-efficient and sustainable lives’, enjoying outdoor yoga, cycling to the repair cafe. The mainstream climate movement is blind to the true function of net zero; it is an idea created by the allies of capital as an instrument of control, handed over to the middle class liberal climate movement to then sell to the working class as their only hope of a decent life. Support for net zero has also come to stand as a marker of whether or not you are a good liberal citizen. It doesn’t matter if you enabled the bombing of 2 million Gazans or got rich from an exploitative finance system. If you are on board with net zero then you are part of the liberal climate family. As a consequence, your voice is more deserving of attention and obedience than a poor person of poor means who is critical of net zero. If you want to identify as a progressive then you have to support net zero. If you don’t support net zero you are a fascist.
Towards a climate politics that can defeat the far right
There is much excellent theoretical and practical work to draw on when thinking about what sort of climate politics can defeat the far right. Efforts to articulate and promote a Green New Deal offer vital insights for how to combine climate policy with an anti-austerity, anti-imperialist agenda. Community engagement projects across Europe have identified important knowledge about barriers and opportunities for combining climate action with social justice campaigns. These ideas will remain on the margins all the while climate organizations continue drawing from the same privileged strata of society, or insist any subaltern actors must adopt middle class values and norms before being allowed into the circle. The political shift we are seeing as parties of the left and far right gain momentum is an opportunity for the climate movement to jump to the left and engage in the battle for humanity’s future.
The UK Green Party recently overturned a huge Labour majority without once mentioning climate change in their leaflets, focusing instead on poverty and the destruction of public services. This reflects a deep public rift with the liberal climate agenda. It points toward the path we need to take — further and faster, in the opposite direction to that mapped out by net zero narratives: away from global and towards the local, away from work and towards play, prioritise the human over the machine, democracy over technocracy, the substantive over the abstract, equality over difference, the social over the individual. It is only from these foundations that we can undermine the allure of far-right politics, whilst building a climate strategy from the bottom up.
For a world that feels like home
The failure of the liberal climate movement is in part a failure to understand human nature. Liberalism, and the climate policies it has birthed, wrongly assume there is a space above and beyond the human heart. We cannot escape our own subjectivity. Right-wing politicians would rather see the world destroyed than compromise their political beliefs. This is also true for liberalism. This is also true for climate campaigners. This is also true for you and me. I joined the climate fight because it seemed to me the best reason for the ecosocialist future I already wanted. I am not going to fight for a decarbonised capitalist future of ground source heat pumps, a modernised electricity grid, or more EV charging points, even if I thought such things would preserve a liveable future for my children. Such technologies may be a part of living in a carbon-constrained world, but the first task is to recreate the social world, to make a world people feel at home in, feel rooted in, have control over. There seems nothing so thrilling as this prospect. Whilst liberalism makes a fetish of free will and individual autonomy, the vast majority can see that the decisions about our future have already been made for us by experts and leaders. Net zero promised to let the targets be humanity’s guide and leave the politics behind. But actually what we need is maximum politics in climate policy, a genuine grassroots democracy, a mechanism for embracing and channeling public anger towards a world that feels like home, not an innovation hub.
Christopher Shaw holds Research Associate roles at both the University of Sussex's School of Global Studies and the Working Class Climate Alliance, and is a leading voice in climate communications in the UK.
Further Readings
- Bernstein, Steven. F. (2001). The compromise of liberal environmentalism. Columbia University Press.
- Crary, Jonathan. (2022). Scorched earth: Beyond the digital age to a post-capitalist world. Verso books.
- Moyn, Samuel. (2023). Liberalism against itself: Cold War intellectuals and the making of our times. Yale University Press.
- Rose, Matthew. (2021). A world after liberalism: Philosophers of the radical right. Yale University Press.
- Shaw, Christopher. (2023). Liberalism and the challenge of climate change. Routledge.