According to the UN, the People Have Spoken and They Want Governments to do Even More About Climate Change. Never Heard of the People’s Climate Vote? Hard Cheese

How did you vote in the 2024 global People’s Climate Vote?

The People’s Climate Vote…

You’ve never heard of it?

Well, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), the people have spoken. Between September last year and May of this, thousands of people all over the world were selected by dialling mobile phone numbers at random. Those who didn’t hang up were asked a series of questions about their climate views. According to the results, 80% of the global population believe their country should strengthen its commitments to addressing climate change. Seventy-eight per cent of the world believes their countries should provide more protection from extreme weather events. And only 17% believe their countries are addressing climate change “very well”.

One has to admire the UN’s chutzpah in calling a somewhat lame opinion poll not just a “vote” but a “people’s vote”. And it reflects the green blob’s growing desperation to connect the global climate agenda with the world’s eight billion people – a connection which is lacking in nearly every country that has put climate change agreements before its population’s interests. The problem of the democratic deficit has long beset the green blob. The UN and its agencies, national governments, global NGOs, national civil society organisations, news media organisations and academics have all decided that society and the global economy must be radically transformed. But this transformation has rarely been put to the test – the ballot box – to gauge the public’s appetite for either the transformation itself, or for the principles underpinning it.

Various attempts to overcome this problem have been tried. In Britain, the green blob – as represented by Westminster lobbying outfit, The Green Alliance – was fully aware of scant public demand for its policies. The Alliance’s 2018 report ‘Building the political mandate for climate action’ revealed that MPs’ “feel under very little pressure on climate change”, and “voters are not asking their representatives to act”. How then, to secure democratic legitimacy, or, at the least, avoid the appearance of bypassing democracy? The bright idea developed by the Green Alliance and others was the U.K. Climate Assembly, convened by Parliament the following year, and overseen by green blob organisations, such as the Alliance itself.

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