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One day during the chaotic 2022 climate COP in the Egyptian resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, I spoke to an Icelandic entrepreneur who managed to put the event’s burst sewage pipes, lack of drinking water and eye-watering food prices into perspective.
“I called it the crazy COP for the first three days,” said Halla Tómasdóttir, who was then chief executive of the B Team group of progressive business leaders. “But then I decided to rename it the adaptation COP,” she told me, explaining that the event showed how the world would have to adapt to shortages of water, food and decent infrastructure if global warming went unchecked.
I remembered Tómasdóttir on Thursday, when she was sworn in as the new president of Iceland. Her June election victory made her one of a new breed of climate-savvy politicians winning office in this mega election year, where about half the adults on the planet have the chance to vote.
From Taiwan to Mexico to the UK, voters are propelling lawmakers with a deep understanding of the climate challenge into power. It is too early to say with precision what this will mean in practice. It obviously won’t lead to an instant plunge in carbon emissions. But it does make it likely that more governments will include people who grasp the need for swift action to cut those emissions — and know how this can best be done.
I have hopes for the most powerful of the bunch so far, Mexico’s president-elect, Claudia Sheinbaum. A scientist with a PhD in energy engineering, she has studied transport and energy use in buildings and contributed to reports by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. She pledged to invest billions in clean power and has picked an energy minister who has vowed to advance the energy transition.
But I also share critics’ fear Sheinbaum will continue the legacy of her backer, outgoing president Andrés Manuel López Obrador, a fossil fuel project enthusiast in the oil-producing nation.
Even so, it is cheering to think of presidents like Sheinbaum and Iceland’s Tómasdóttir at this year’s climate COP in Azerbaijan. Both would have a head start over the many baffled leaders who arrive at these complex UN gatherings with little understanding of — or interest in — advancing global climate action.
The same goes for Taiwan’s new environment minister, Peng Chi-ming, a scientist who founded a weather risk management company and is a serial attendee of UN climate COP meetings. He says he wants to speed up Taiwan’s net zero transition and help further a climate strategy set out by President Lai Ching-te.
Lai has already moved to set up a bipartisan National Climate Change Response Committee that he will personally convene to develop national and global policies — he has called the climate problem “the largest challenge that humanity faces”.
Even if he is motivated more by a desire to strengthen ties abroad amid rising tensions with China, and placate political opponents at home after his party lost its parliamentary majority, his focus on climate is still instructive.
It reminds us that climate lawmakers cannot do much, no matter what their skills and motivation, unless their leader is on side and politically adept.
Joe Biden offers an object lesson here. The US president is not a formal climate expert, let alone a scientist. But his many decades in politics have made him a formidable legislator: he has signed into law some of the world’s most comprehensive climate measures.
The UK’s new prime minister, Sir Keir Starmer, lacks Biden’s political experience and I would not want to bet that he is well versed in the intricacies of carbon sinks. But he has made the energy transition a priority and appointed a seasoned climate politician to oversee it: Ed Miliband, the former opposition leader who is now secretary of state for energy security and net zero.
Miliband had a similar job when Labour was last in power 14 years ago. This time around, he will be in a parliament with a record four Green party members and a new batch of Labour MPs that includes climate policy advocates Katie White and Polly Billington, and Melanie Onn, a former deputy chief executive of the RenewableUK trade body.
This election year is not over and more climate politicians may emerge. These individuals won’t guarantee victory in the race to slash emissions. But they are a sign of a shift in climate politics that it is hard to imagine will ever go into reverse.
pilita.clark@ft.com
