Look out! The environment is low on the modern Greens agenda

British animal activist movement Animal Rising defaces the new official portrait of King Charles III.

We begin with an update on Germany’s transition from an economic powerhouse to a zero-emissions, zero-nuclear, zero-industrial dystopia.

Germany’s emissions last year fell by 10 per cent. Renewable energy enthusiasts may interpret this as vindication, thinking their plan to reduce emissions while phasing out nuclear power is back on track. Context matters, however. Over the past five years, Germany’s emissions fell 8.5 per cent while heavy industrial production fell 8.4 per cent in the same period. Coincidence? Probably not.

The exorbitant cost of electricity and natural gas has led to cuts in industrial production and employment with no net decline in global emissions. Shutting down caprolactam production at BASF’s Ludwigshafen plant last year, for example, transferred emissions and jobs to BASF’s plants in São Paulo and Shanghai.

Last weekend, German voters sought revenge on the politicians responsible for this gross policy incompetence in European parliamentary elections. The Greens’ share of the vote in Germany fell from 20.5 per cent in 2019 to 11.9 per cent. Similar declines in France and other Western European countries reduced the Greens’ contingent in the European parliament from 71 to 52 MEPs.

The declining support for environmentalist parties prompts a beguiling thought: Half a century after peak oil, has Europe reached peak Greens? Their fading electoral fortunes in Germany, in particular, has caused an outbreak of self-doubt, a mental state to which the Greens once seemed immune.

Robert Habeck, a leading German Green who was foolishly assigned Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action, told The Guardian his party needed to ditch its alarmist instincts and moral superiority complex. It has to abandon its “claim to have access to some higher form of truth that others don’t”, and transition to something with a broader political appeal.

Anxiety about global warming has been subsumed by a change in the climate of debate. Covid, the war in Ukraine, the ensuing surge in energy prices, the economic slowdown and rising interest rates have shifted the agenda on to jobs and the cost of living, reducing the demand for luxury beliefs.

Covid, the war in Ukraine, the ensuing surge in energy prices, the economic slowdown and rising interest rates have shifted the agenda from climate change to jobs and the cost of living. Picture: Maja Hitij/Getty Images

The European Green Party’s secretary-general, Benedetta De Marte, concedes the 2019 European election was the high-water mark for the Greens. There was a “drive towards climate action in a society that unfortunately we don’t see any more”, she told Euronews.

Some in the movement now regret the decision to become coalition partners in government. It denied them the indulgence of being high-minded critics and forced them to make trade-offs.

A consistent pattern has emerged: the Green vote suffered worst in countries where the Greens have been in power. In an opinion piece in the European Green Journal last month, Filipe Henriques pondered whether being in government was all it was cracked up to be. “Is it wise for Greens to enter government and push for reform, even if it means compromising their values?” he asked. “Or is it better to remain in opposition, at the risk of having no role in crucial political decisions?”

It is not just the loss of votes that worries the Greens but who is walking away. The Greens were at the forefront of the campaign to reduce the voting age to 16 in Germany, Austria and Belgium. The ungrateful teenage voters slapped the left in the face last weekend when a significant proportion opted for conservative nationalist parties such as Alternative for Deutschland.

It would be nice to think the Greens will gradually chin-stroke their way to irrelevancy as the Australian Democrats did in Australia. Yet there is every reason to believe the Green movement will survive the declining interest in climate change and find new vehicles to project their moral virtue.

Indeed, this is already happening. It was noticeable that the German Greens campaigned hardly at all on the climate scare and instead contrived a scary story about the threat of a resurgence of fascism. It has been illegal to display the swastika in public since the mid-1970s, but the Greens did it anyway, hanging posters from lamp posts to raise the spectre of the imminent return of Nazism.

Pro-Palestinian demonstrators in Berlin. In a bid to retain relevancy, the Greens movement has found a temporary distraction in the Middle East, throwing itself behind the Palestinian cause. Picture: Omer Messinger/Getty Images

The movement has found a temporary distraction in the Middle East, throwing itself behind the Palestinian cause. Its followers attempt to legitimise the move as part of a more extensive campaign to change social structures that perpetuate the climate crisis. The adoption of the term “climate justice” has granted the movement licence to hitch a ride on transient campaigns from transgender rights and Black Lives Matter to decriminalising drugs and sub-Saharan feminism.

However, none of these causes has the mass appeal needed to keep the movement in the headlines. They are mere skirmishes as the movement prepares to launch an assault on the next big front: constitutional animal rights.

In a portent of the shift in direction last week, Jonathan Yeo’s new portrait of King Charles on display in London was defaced not by Extinction Rebellion but by members of a group called Animals Rising. Its rhetoric goes beyond the conventional calls for humane treatment to grant non-human species full legal rights. Its intellectual foundation is an academic movement known as The Animal Turn, which makes a qualitative leap to view animals as sentient beings whose lived experiences are morally, socially, politically and even legally significant.

Activists are testing the waters for compulsory veganism on campuses with campaigns to restrict the sale of food in university canteens to 100 per cent plant-based products. All of this is evidence the Green franchise is far from exhausted. The sense of entitlement that encourages the anointed to impose their vision on the rest of us remains, together with the linguistic dexterity that enables them to turn eccentric academic arguments into mainstream moral crusades.

Nick Cater is a senior fellow at the Menzies Research Centre and a visiting fellow at the Danube Institute.