Anti-Climate Policies Have Deadly Consequences
Turn Down the Noise and Follow the Facts
The growing backlash against ‘green’ policies is gathering momentum across the world. Anything designed to boost the health of humans and all living species is being weaponised as ‘woke’ or ‘unrealistic’ or ‘too expensive’.
Why? Because the fossil fuels lobby has tightened its claws around governments and opposition parties pretty much everywhere. They have unlimited resources, and money talks.
As the majority of people aren’t keen on facing up to the terrifying facts that simple measurements put before us (CO2 levels, temperature hikes, sea levels, ice melts, wildlife numbers etc, etc) it is easy for puppet politicians to come out with crazy buzzphrases that hit home.
So Trump can call the green movement “the biggest scam of all time” in the US, and Farage’s Reform UK party - currently miles ahead in the polls - can call it “Net Stupid Zero” and propose policies that will strip away environmental and health protections.
But these policies have deadly consequences. Whatever your political beliefs, whatever your views on issues such as immigration and patriotism, the devastating environmental impacts of right-wing populist programmes must be tackled head on - for all our sakes.
It’s a fact: Programmes that slow or reverse decarbonisation and clean-air rules translate into more premature deaths, more displacement, and accelerating ecological collapse.
A Contract To Kill
Let’s look in more detail, starting in the UK, where the rise of Reform cannot be ignored. At the moment, Nigel Farage is heading for 10 Downing Street.
Reform UK’s “Contract” is uncompromising: “Scrap Net Zero,” ban ULEZ/Clean Air Zones, end “bans on petrol and diesel cars,” and fast-track new oil and gas, with fracking trials.
The document - a blueprint for a Reform UK government - also promises to scrap climate-related farming subsidies and opposes using productive land for rewilding or solar farms.
But what happens when you actually remove those protections?
Start with the air we all breathe. Long-term exposure to traffic pollution costs lives - that is the basis of the UK’s policy appraisal and the reason medical bodies support clean-air zones.
Undoing them doesn’t just inconvenience cyclists - another enemy of the right - it actually shortens lives, especially in the poorest neighbourhoods.
Then there’s extreme heat caused by man-made climate change - with fossil fuels being the driver. The World Health Organisation points to 489,000 heat deaths per year. A Nature Climate Change analysis attributes about 37% of heat deaths to human-caused warming - which is shaped by politicians, through energy, transport and land-use policies.
Opposition to net zero and environmental protections has been rising among political parties - in power and opposition - in the UK, USA, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Netherlands, Germany, France, Italy, Poland, Spain, Sweden, Hungary, Argentina…. the list goes on.
It’s not just loss of life that sees the climate and nature crises already devastating populations. Displacement is a huge problem, with millions of people and wildlife on the move to escape the extremes we now have to consider ‘normal’.
The Internal Displacement Monitoring Centre recorded 26.4 million disaster-related internal displacements worldwide in 2023, and 75.9 million people living in internal displacement at the year-end - figures increasingly driven by storms, floods and drought in a warmer climate.
Rich countries are also being hit, but they have better safety nets to hide the hardship.
In the US, NOAA’s billion-dollar disaster reports now list hundreds of deaths each year across heatwaves, floods, wildfires and storms.
In the UK, storm seasons that used to be “once in a generation” now move rapidly through the alphabet.
The Damage Is Done
Let’s not forget the devastating impacts on wildlife - and associated ills served on humans.
On October 13, 2025, The Guardian reported:
The earth has reached its first catastrophic tipping point linked to greenhouse gas emissions, with warm water coral reefs now facing a long-term decline and risking the livelihoods of hundreds of millions of people.
I set that out alone because it is probably more devastating than 99% of the headlines you will read in the media this year - yet it won’t cause the waves of panic and reflection that it should.
It came from The Global Tipping Points Report 2025, led by the University of Exeter and financed by the fund of the Amazon owner, Jeff Bezos - and includes contributions from 160 scientists from 87 institutions in 23 countries.
Reefs support a quarter of marine species at some life stage, and buffer coasts from storms. Their collapse isn’t just tragic for wildlife; it erodes food security and coastal protection for millions of people.
Anti-climate programmes that delay the end of fossil fuels raise ocean heat, making bleaching events more frequent and severe. That link is undeniable.
More tipping points are close to the precipice. Scientists warn of elevated risks to the West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets, locking in centuries of sea-level rise.
There is a growing fear (and evidence) that disruption to the Atlantic overturning circulation (AMOC) will drastically change weather across Europe, while the Amazon will die back if warming and deforestation continue at current pace.
All these tipping points, and more, rewrite the rules for wildlife and people - submerging wetlands and mangroves, transforming fish and seabird ranges, and drying forests into flammable beacons of anti-climate agendas.
Forget Lower Bills, Expect Higher Death Rates
There’s a persistent myth that loosening climate policy lowers bills and protects the vulnerable. The evidence says the reverse.
If you keep today’s clean-air and decarbonisation policies, thousands of deaths per year in the 2030s will be avoided. Remove those policies, and you get the reverse - thousands of extra deaths per year. In every country.
So what can we do? Across the world, anti-climate manifestos share the same core moves: scrap net-zero targets, roll back air-quality and EV standards, license more fossil extraction, knock out nature-recovery budgets, and fight renewable build-out.
The near-term political promise is cheaper bills. That isn’t necessarily true, and in the mid-to-long-term, the effect will be higher mortality, bigger disaster losses, more displacement, and rising extinction risk.
But do enough people care? People falling for the rhetoric of Trump and Farage often talk about their value of “freedom”.
Well, how about the freedom not to breathe toxic chemicals on the school run; the freedom not to spend August indoors because the air is full of wildfire smoke; the freedom not to watch the sea take your marsh, your mangrove, your town.
You can deny the facts all you like. You can’t deny the body count.
Political analysis simply has to ‘drill baby drill’ down harder - into what these anti-climate policies would actually mean for us all.
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