In 2015, the global community – Britain included – signed up to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 140-plus targets, on critical development areas ranging from climate change and poverty reduction to health and education and lifelong learning, which countries committed to achieving by 2030.
As we pass the midpoint on the road to 2030, it is clear that progress on most fronts is woefully insufficient. The UN’s preliminary assessment found that only 12 per cent of the goals and targets were on track, with close to half ‘moderately or severely off track’ and 20 per cent either regressing or showing no progress at all. On current trends, the UN estimates, 575 million people (almost 7 per cent of the world’s population) will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, while 670 million people will still be facing hunger in 2030, some 8 per cent of the world’s population, the same as in 2015. Worst of all, action to address the climate crisis remains wholly inadequate, with the 1.5 °C target ‘at risk’ and the world ‘on the brink of a climate catastrophe’.
There is little chance now that global warming will be kept to 1.5 °C and I suspect most leaders in the wealthy West privately accept this and are, in different ways, planning for it. The opportunity to keep to the target has likely been squandered, and the worst predictions of climate scientists are beginning to play out in real time before our eyes. Parts of the world are already well on the way to becoming uninhabitable for humans. Amid the warmest month on record in July, the UN Secretary General warned that ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived’. It is here and it is going to get worse. Countries’ current commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions put the world on course for at least 2.5 °C of warming by the end of the century, a level consistent with catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every bit of fossil fuel burned contributes to global heating and exacerbates these risks.
Yet, as the world heats and 50 °C temperatures become the devastating norm in many places, the fossil fuel industry is increasing oil and gas production and making record profits in the process, aided and abetted by politicians, many of whom are on its payroll. In fact, rather than upping their game at this crucial moment and shutting down oil and gas production, leaders are loosening their commitments, often in the name of ‘energy security’, and reconciling themselves to failure. Some, such as Lord Frost, are even waking up to the benefits of global warming (a new and really remarkably stupid form of climate denial). The UK, which once positioned itself as a leader in tackling climate change, now leads the world only in the audacity and insincerity of its rhetoric. While the government’s decision to grant more than 100 of new oil and gas extraction licences in the North Sea has been condemned by environmental groups as sending a ‘wrecking ball’ through its green pledges, it continues, straight-faced, to describe itself as a ‘world leader on net zero’.
The truth, though, is that rather than listen to environmental groups and climate scientists (including its own), the UK government has little interest in honouring its climate commitments, only in appearing to do so. While it ‘maxes out’ Britain’s North Sea oil and gas reserves, it is confident that it can manage the public’s perceptions, as it has quite successfully over a decade or so of austerity politics and economic stagnation. And if that fails, it is in the process of introducing new laws to curb dissent and criminalise protestors who disrupt ‘everyday life’. Whether they believe it or not, politicians still talk as though an accommodation can be found between extractivist economics and environmental protection. Continued fossil fuel extraction will bring more jobs and boost energy security, they say. It will even reduce our reliance on oil and gas in the longer term. The Prime Minister meanwhile eschews sustainable forms of transport in favour of private jets and helicopters, justifying this as the most efficient use of his time. Such supposed trade-offs are, of course, false and unjustifiable. Every private jet journey contributes to making the planet uninhabitable. Every oil and gas licence issued brings us closer to environmental collapse. To talk as though such risks could be counter-balanced by increased efficiency or greater economic or environmental security is, to be frank, risible, as is Mr Sunak’s Orwellian claim that increasing oil and gas production is ‘entirely consistent’ with net zero goals.
None of this though should surprise us, demoralizing though it is. Generations of politicians have been ideologically captured or else co-opted by the fossil fuel industry. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, for example, received £3.5 million from individuals and entities linked to climate denial, fossil fuels and high-pollution industries in 2022 (a lot of money in Britain’s eminently biddable and reassuringly affordable political landscape). Many senior politicians have stakes in oil and gas companies or accept donations or gifts from them. And these are just the interests that are publicly declared. They tell the story of a party that is simply too close and too dependent on an industry to effectively regulate it, still less to close it down or even limit its production. Instead, Britain now finds itself a leader in the group of countries prepared to increase fossil fuel production, ‘truly dangerous radicals’ pursuing ‘moral and economic madness’, as the UN Secretary General put it (a group that also includes the United States).
We are facing a crisis in climate leadership, globally and in the UK, which is symptomatic of a more general failure of political leadership over the past few decades, itself emblematic of a wider crisis in democracy. Politicians in Western democracies now operate in a kind of post-truth environment in which slogans have supplanted argument and rhetoric outflanks reality. Pledges – on climate or anything else – matter only in the moment they are made. They are a cheap way of generating some positive news. Achieving them matters rather less. It is a problem to be dealt with through the careful management of public expectations. And for a government that convinced a large proportion of the British electorate that the global financial crisis was caused by reckless domestic spending and that austerity was a necessity rather than a political choice, no lie can really be considered too big.
Politics – real politics, that is, in which real decisions about things that really matter are made – has to a large extent become about personal enrichment and private collusion. The access given to Big Oil and to oligarchs of various stamps, including the media barons to whom senior UK politicians of all stamps bend the knee, gives them a direct say over policy, while public debate, such as it is, takes place largely within parameters already set behind closed doors. Policy debate has become mean and small, with politicians stoking culture wars and fabricating outrage, particularly through policies on asylum and immigration, which they know will divide people and frequently have no greater purpose. There is no serious attempt to resolve the underlying issues or to make people’s lives better. We are all now used to the dissembling of politicians. Johnson and Trump were the apogee of this, openly lying to the public while selling this, quite effectively, to their supporters as a facet of their charismatic leadership. Meanwhile, a demoralized, under-informed electorate veers between infantile sentimentality about the past and a fear of otherness, both enthusiastically nourished by their leaders, though neither does us any good.
I think the implications of all of this for education and learning are quite profound and pose an important moral choice for educators and advocates. Can we carry on with business as usual when business, to put it mildly, is anything but usual? Is it the job of education lobby groups to contract to support government policy and make it work? Should education aim narrowly to supply the economy with the skills it needs and be blind to the industrial uses to which these skills will be put? When I worked for the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), the institute aimed to act as a ‘critical friend’ to government, supporting policy it felt was progressive and looking to improve policy that was not. There was a presumption in this that there was broad alignment between the values of the organization and the ministers and civil servants it worked with, as well as a joint understanding of the challenges faced and the areas of policy intervention to be prioritized. I no longer think this presumption holds. Some would say it never did (while NIACE’s achievements are now widely recognised and the institute fondly remembered, its decision to work more closely with government met with bitter resistance from many of its supporters). It is no longer clear quite what the government means to do, what its true priorities are and why it does what it does. Its commitments cannot be ascertained simply by listening to what they say they will do. In such circumstances, it becomes important to take a critical approach to engagement with ministers, and to reflect thoughtfully on the dangers of co-option and what this might mean more broadly, across different areas of public policy. There is a responsibility for all involved in public advocacy to think between and beyond their silos, and to not talk only to their members and stakeholders. We cannot afford to be in it only for the money.
Of course, it is important that education, and adult education, in particular, provides people with the skills required for the much-vaunted ‘green transition’. There is a clear role for lifelong learning in the retraining and reskilling of adults to work in new and changed industries, should this become a reality (though training alone won’t deliver this). But the crisis in leadership and democracy described above suggests another, still more important role for adult education, one that points to a reassertion of is past values and objectives. The ‘deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ demanded by the IPCC won’t be delivered by politics as it is currently construed. It requires mass public engagement, cooperation with environmental groups and a redirection of political will, driven by an informed, committed and politically savvy population. Lifelong learning has a critical role to play not only in generating informed, critical public support for climate action but also in encouraging political action and fostering shared agency for change.
One of the interesting, more positive outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis was people’s willingness to act with agency and joint purpose in responding to the pandemic, demonstrating the moral clarity, solidarity and willingness to make sacrifices Britain’s political leadership so plainly lacked – Dame Ruth Silver coined the term ‘leaderhood’ to describe it and we write about it here (behind a paywall but please get in touch with me directly if you would like to read it). Leaderhood, as we frame it, can characterize leadership but goes beyond it: ‘Where leadership concerns an occupation or activity—managing a school or college, for example—leaderhood is more a state of being, recognizable not only in formal leadership situations but in every part of life, emerging not from policy and regulation but from a sense of fellowship and an awareness of our responsibilities to others and our community. These qualities are at the heart of good leadership—are, indeed, indispensable to it—but can be exercised anywhere, by anyone’. We see this as an antidote to the sort of closed, introverted, conservative leadership that is focused on retaining what we have rather than building for the future. Leaderhood, by contrast, is ‘about how we position ourselves and our sector in relation both to our values and to the wider context’. It is leading that ‘transcends institutional settings and exists powerfully at the interface of different contexts … that builds bridges to the future and embodies an ethic of care and public service, rather than holding on to the past and refusing to do better or different’.
It is this sort of shared agency that education is in a unique position to promote. The early twentieth-century adult education movement saw its purpose in broadly these terms. It recognised its social purpose in giving working people the means to be active citizens and thus change the world, ‘without a revolution’ as historian John Harrison put it. Adult education can give people hope that another world is possible, and it can give them the means to be the change they want to see in society, a platform for joint action and activism. Lifelong learning should be the enemy of quietism and the friend of creativity, courage and critical thinking. It should grow people’s collective agency and empower them to become active citizens who believe the world can be different and that they can contribute to that transformation. To transform society and our relationship with the planet we must transform education too, recognizing both its limitations and its largely dormant potential. Of course, education concerns skills and employability. We need skilled people in key roles at every level of society, and that is important. But by focusing only on skills and training, we are starving democracy of the oxygen of active citizenship, dissent and critical thinking it needs to survive and thrive, as well as stifling human development in its fuller sense.
The planet is crying out for a different kind of leadership. But it will not come from politicians. Change of this sort can only come from the ground up, and it will not happen without dissent, disruption and civil disobedience. As educators and advocates we can make a difference, strengthening the links between education and social movements, promoting critical thinking, and fostering shared agency among learners and joint propose with others in their communities. Only through the distribution of leadership can we begin to make collective sense of the world and start to change it. We need to think of leadership as an ensemble undertaking in which everyone can play a part. As I write elsewhere, the austerity fundamentalists have persuaded people that while another world may very well be possible, it is simply not affordable. But the situation is really the reverse. Unless we transform our world, our relationships with each other and with nature, in a truly profound way, against the entrenched interests of many powerful and wealthy people, we will remain on the road to climate catastrophe. This, it seems to me, is unarguable. More of the same means more extreme heat, more depleted oceans, more uninhabitable zones, more death and morbidity. It is in all our interests to change course. This should form part of a new common sense about climate change and planetary sustainability. We are in an emergency after all, even if, for the most part, everything feels the same. The real ‘climate radicals’ are the politicians who are ditching their commitments and stepping up oil and gas production in full knowledge of the terrible consequences their actions will have.
The Learning Age 