Published on Friday, June 24, 2016 by Waging Nonviolence
posted at Common Dreams

"Britain’s vote last night to leave the European Union will be a disaster for the climate — both physical and political — on both sides of the Atlantic.

Most obvious are all of the direct impacts Britain’s departure from the European Union will have on environmental policies outright. “Leave” zealots don’t care much for the caps on carbon and free markets that Cameron’s Tories have also shunned, and UKIP party head Nigel Farage is eager to cut through the E.U. “red tape” of environmental regulations. Worse, many Brexiteers also happen to deny temperatures are rising at all, setting them apart even from Cameron and his Tory comrades. One recent study found that Brexit voters are nearly twice as likely as their “Remain” counterparts to deny the existence of man-made climate change — with two out of three thinking the media are guilty of exaggerating scientific consensus on the matter. Farage even called wind energy “the biggest collective economic insanity I’ve seen in my entire life.”

Fresh off the heels of their biggest victory to date, Brexit champions like Farage are now stronger than ever. And because deals like the Paris Agreement chafe up against the kind of isolationism the 21st century far-right loves, it’s not hard to imagine that UKIP will be as eager as Trump to “cancel” the Paris Agreement entirely, and make future collaboration on climate even more challenging. (The party’s energy spokesman, Roger Helmer, went so far as to call the agreement “institutionalized lunacy.”)

Once Brexit goes into effect, whatever formation takes hold of the government will enjoy free reign to scale back the environmental regulations they were roped into by the European Union. That’s a major reason, as Grist pointed out earlier this month, why groups like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth were pro-Remain. Farming Minister George Eustice has buzzed about that possibility of gutting regulations, as free marketers stand ready to do away with them entirely in favor of a market-friendly (and likely meaningless) carbon tax.

Since we live in an economy based on a series of bets, the financial markets this morning are buckling under their own bad one; namely, that Brexit was impossible. Talk is spreading that Britain’s vote to leave the union will bring the world economy down along with the pound. Those of us who lived through 2008 know how spending averse governments deal with bad markets. Whether Brexit spells a financial slump or not, it’s hard to imagine any pro-Leave forces that might come to power in the next several months will mark a radical break with the reigning dogma: Those already worse-off will be told to tighten their belts, while public funds flood in to prop up the economy’s worst actors. Reflecting on the vote, Paul Mason warns that “Unless Labour can win an early election it will be a fast-track process of Thatcherisation and the breakup of the United Kingdom.”

With a climate crisis that demands massive public investment — in everything from renewable energy to social services to infrastructure upgrades — that kind of austerity, in the accelerated or standard issue variety, will only kick these projects dangerously farther down the road."...
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