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Green backlash? U.K.’s leader fuels battle over driving — which could signal a coming climate fight
LONDON — Posing in a car once owned by conservative icon Margaret Thatcher, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak explained why he was launching a media blitz to burnish his own credentials as a champion of the average voter against what he considers state overreach in the name of the environment.
Signaling his opposition to a slate of environmentally-friendly policies, Sunak said on Twitter Sunday that he knows “how important cars are for families to live their lives,” unlike the country’s “anti-motorist” opposition Labour Party.
Sunak’s embattled Conservative government subsequently announced a review of “anti-car” measures aimed at improving air quality and reducing traffic, as well as a massive expansion of oil and gas drilling licenses in Britain’s North Sea.
The prime minister claims the U.K. can do all this and still reach net-zero carbon emissions by 2050. But it was a sudden turn in a nation where there has largely been a political consensus over green politics — and experts told NBC News it may be only the beginning of a broader shift in which right-wing parties view opposition to green policies as an opportunity to win votes.
Bolstered by a surprise local election victory last month in which the Conservative Party emphasized its opposition to new charges for drivers in London, Sunak has wooed voters by embracing a protest movement that sees such attempts to restrict car usage as an attack on personal freedoms.
The move comes as several European countries face political turmoil over environmental issues. The Netherlands saw the Farmer-Citizen Movement become a leading political party this year, thanks to its fierce opposition to government plans to reduce or shut thousands of farms, while Poland’s right-wing populist government has criticized the European Union’s renewable energy targets, which commit its 27 member states to reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 55% by 2030.
“What you’re seeing is once again, as with immigration, a center-right party beginning to take on some of the typical tropes and rhetoric of radical right-wing populist parties, who present themselves very often as the friend of the motorist and say all these environmental concerns are overblown,” said Tim Bale, a politics professor at Queen Mary University in London and an expert on the Conservative Party.
On July 21 the Conservatives unexpectedly won a by-election in Uxbridge and South Ruislip, the parliamentary seat in London’s western suburbs that was vacated by former Prime Minister Boris Johnson.
The election became a referendum on ULEZ, the ultra-low emission zone, which charges drivers of older, high-polluting vehicles 12.50 pounds ($16) a day to drive in London’s central boroughs. At the end of August the zone will extend across Greater London — and suburban residents’ concerns over this gave the Conservatives a much-needed victory.
Some protesters opposing the change are heavily influenced by elaborate right-wing conspiracy theories, and such is the level of disquiet, cameras installed to enforce the scheme have been vandalized or stolen.
London’s mayor, Labour’s Sadiq Khan, has nevertheless passionately defended the policy and said it was needed because thousands of people in the capital die each year from air pollution.
The vast majority of cars also won’t pay any emissions charge. But the Uxbridge result sparked wavering on ULEZ from Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer, eager to avoid any potential wedge issues that could help the Conservatives keep power.
And Sunak’s media blitz comes as many Conservative lawmakers and party members believe environmental policies will cost Britain too much and have only a limited effect, said Bale.
“Uxbridge has accelerated or amplified those voices and probably, given the government’s in so much trouble on all sorts of other fronts, encouraged the government to weaponize the issue in the hope of mobilizing some of its base,” he said.
The Uxbridge win defied political gravity, however.
The Conservatives were soundly beaten in two other by-elections the same day, with Labour taking the seat of Selby and Ainsty in North Yorkshire, a dramatic and unprecedented reversal from 2019, when a Conservative lawmaker triumphed by 20,000 votes.
There could be more to come: Labour leads by about 20% with a year to go until a national election, according to opinion polls.
With an ongoing cost of living crisis dominating voters’ thoughts and most areas of the country untouched by the planned emission zones or similar low-traffic schemes, some analysts have questioned the wisdom of Sunak’s strategy. An opinion poll in May found that 39% of Londoners were in favor of ULEZ, with 35% opposed.
Many lawmakers in rural seats backed the prime minister’s stance, though Conservative former energy minister Chris Skidmore said the North Sea drilling expansion put Sunak “on the wrong side of history.”
Protesters from the campaign group Greenpeace took direct action in response to the new North Sea licenses and draped an oil-black covering over Sunak’s home in his North Yorkshire Constituency on Thursday while the family was on holiday in California.
A determination to appeal to a perceived median voter, often seen as a driver, is nothing new in British politics. But this debate — a perceived trade-off between personal liberty and environmental policy — is a sign of things to come in politics, according to Neil Lee, a professor of economic geography at the London School of Economics.
“I think that environmental policy will rise higher up the agenda as climate change and other environmental impacts become more obvious,” he said.
“It’s not the first of these debates where small groups can hold back moves, which I think in our hearts we know we have to make.
Lab-grown chicken coming to restaurant tables
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Lab-grown chicken coming to restaurant tables and, eventually, stores
The age of lab-grown chicken is taking flight at one of chef José Andrés’ famed Washington, D.C., restaurants, where diners will have the chance to be some of the first people to taste what researchers have been working on for years.
The chicken doesn’t come from a bird, but is instead grown from chicken cells. Good Meat, the California-based company supplying the lab-grown poultry, calls it cultivated chicken.
“Cultivating meat is a way of starting with a cell and ending with chicken, beef, pork, without all the other issues in between,” said company cofounder and CEO Josh Tetrick.
The chicken cells are bathed in a nutrient broth in tanks called bioreactors.
“The genetic profile is the same as a slaughtered chicken,” Tetrick told CBS News.
Federal regulators in June approved the sale of lab-grown meat from Good Meat, based in Alameda, and the nearby Berkley-based Upside Foods.
Environmental advocates say cultivating meat is more sustainable compared to traditional livestock farming because it uses less water and land. But some researchers say the environmental impacts of cultivating meat will need to be closely monitored as the industry grows.
“Just by the virtue of creating this meat in a lab doesn’t necessarily mean it’s better for the environment,” said Ned Spang, an associate professor of food science and technology at UC Davis.
The other question: Will people eat it?
While there were some who didn’t care for the lab-grown meat, many people CBS News spoke to in Alameda said they did.
“If you didn’t know, you wouldn’t really question it,” one woman said.
Diners can reserve their chance to try it at Andres’ China Chilcano in the nation’s capital, where it will be available as part of a tasting menu. Reservations for the first seating sold out in four minutes.
The cultivated chicken won’t land in stores until the companies figure out how to scale up production. Good Meat’s next target? Beef.
Trump’s rivals let GOP voters believe he’s a winner — and it’s coming back to bite them
Donald Trump’s primary rivals have had a hard time convincing GOP voters that they’d be more electable than the indicted former president — but they may, at least in part, have themselves to blame for it.
Most of the 2024 candidate field has spent the past two and half years validating or turning a blind eye to Trump’s false claims that he won the 2020 election, priming the Republican base to believe that Trump is a proven winner against President Joe Biden. Now they have only a few months to try to undo that perception but appear reluctant to press the case.
“A lot of these GOP primary contenders are paying the price of enabling Trump throughout the course of the last three years,” said former Florida Republican Rep. Carlos Curbelo, a Trump critic. “The best way to beat him is by … showing that Trump and his movement have been rejected in general elections three times in a row. But you don’t hear [Florida Gov. Ron] DeSantis or the other candidates speaking to voters in this way. It’s impossible to defeat someone by following them.”
Trump, of course, has obsessively promoted conspiracy theories that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a falsity that crystalized into fact among many Republican voters after it went mostly unchallenged for years by most of the party’s leaders.
Numerous polls show a majority or large plurality of Republican voters believe Biden won in 2020 only through cheating. And if those voters believe that Trump effectively beat Biden once, they may be more likely to believe he’s the best candidate to do it again.
“If Trump didn’t really lose then why should GOP voters look for someone else who is a winner?” Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist who has since broken with the party over Trump, said. “Trump set this trap for his opponents and they all have walked right into it.”
A new Monmouth University poll released Tuesday found that 69% of GOP voters said Trump is either “definitely” (45%) or “probably” (24%) the strongest candidate against Biden in next November’s general election. Fewer than one third said another candidate would be stronger. And only 13% said another candidate would “definitely” be stronger.
Polls of key early voting states paint a similar picture.
In Iowa, 45% of GOP respondents to a Fox Business poll released this week said Trump would be the most likely candidate to defeat Biden, compared with 23% who picked DeSantis. In South Carolina, 51% picked Trump as the strongest candidate against Biden, while 17% chose DeSantis.
That sentiment is a major hurdle for candidates like DeSantis, who premised their campaigns on the expectation that even Republicans who like Trump would be looking for a fresher face with less baggage to have a better chance of winning in 2024.
“There is no substitute for victory,” DeSantis said during his first visit to New Hampshire in April, decrying a “culture of losing” that he said had taken hold of the GOP in recent years, referring — without mentioning Trump — to Republicans’ disappointing performances in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 elections.
Quietly, Trump’s rivals have hoped that the front-runner’s mounting legal challenges would help convince primary voters he’s a liability who should be replaced.
Few, though, have been willing to actually make that case directly, aside from lower-polling candidates like former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie and former Arkansas Gov. Asa Hutchinson.
DeSantis, for instance, has repeatedly refused to say if he believes the 2020 election was rigged against Trump. He bristles at reporters whenever he’s asked about it and typically dodges by saying he’s focused on issues he sees as more important.
“I’ve been asked that a hundred different times. Anyone have a question on the topic of the day?” the governor said at a June press conference in Florida.
And last year, DeSantis and other Republican candidates stumped for candidates who made Trump’s election denialism a centerpiece of their message, such as former Pennsylvania gubernatorial candidate Doug Mastriano.
Most of the other GOP 2024 candidates have also dodged the question, or only glancingly acknowledged that Biden won, and even then have bolstered the idea that voter fraud cost Trump significant votes.
“I think we all know there were irregularities in there and there were some issues that happened,” former U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley said this week during an Iowa forum moderated by former Fox News host Tucker Carlson when asked about 2020. “We know there was mail-out balloting that shouldn’t have happened. Do I think that changed the results of the election? No.”
Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is also a contender for the GOP 2024 nomination, has previously dismissed Trump’s claims about the 2020 election, but it took until this month for him to directly say that it wasn’t stolen from the former president.
“There was cheating, but was the election stolen? There’s a difference. I think [in] every election there’s cheating,” Scott said in Iowa on July 14.
Still, it’s impossible to know if calling out Trump’s loss would have changed the minds of many GOP voters.
And even some of Trump’s fiercest critics on the right say he may have a point about electability. He commands tremendously loyal support, turns out low-propensity voters (those who vote mainly in presidential elections only), and polls of hypothetical matchups against Biden show the former president performing about as well or better than his main rivals.
“It makes it harder to sell the ‘Trump is a loser’ argument — though, to be honest, that was always more of an argument for donors and elites than voters,” said Bill Kristol, the longtime conservative commentator who now runs Defending Democracy Together, an advocacy organization made up of conservatives who oppose rising authoritarian inclinations. “Republican voters know Trump is the one winner they’ve voted for since 2004. I also think if the polls consistently showed Trump losing to Biden while DeSantis was beating him, that might have had an effect on voters. But they don’t.”
