Climate “Pragmatism” is Cover for Climate Delay – Watts Up With That?

Essay by Eric Worrall

“Pragmatism” allegedly allows politicians to be in favour of climate action without actually having to do anything.

Politicians now talk of climate ‘pragmatism’ to delay action – new study

Published: September 5, 2025 3.28am AEST

Steve Westlake
Lecturer, Environmental Psychology, University of Bath

Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch has described her plan to “maximise extraction” of the UK’s oil and gas from the North Sea as a “common sense”energy policy.

Politicians are using language like this increasingly often – calling themselves “pragmatic” on climate change and invoking “common sense”. It sounds reasonable, reassuring, and grownup – the opposite of “hysterical” campaigners or “unrealistic” targets. 

But new research my colleagues and I conducted, calling on a decade of interviews with UK MPs, shows that political “pragmatism” is fast becoming a dangerous form of climate delay. By framing urgent action as “extreme” and steady-as-she-goes policies as “pragmatic”, leaders across the political spectrum are protecting the fossil-fuel status quo at the very moment scientists warn we need rapid, transformative change.

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The flawed assumption underlying these calls to pragmatism is that the public will not support ambitious, transformative climate policies. We concluded that whereas a few years ago MPs promoted climate policies “by stealth”, meaning they did it on the quiet, now they turn to ideas of pragmatism in an attempt to maintain a fragile political consensus in favour of net zero – a consensus that is already fracturing.

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Read more: https://theconversation.com/politicians-now-talk-of-climate-pragmatism-to-delay-action-new-study-264317

The flawed assumption is the public will not support climate ambition, even though the consensus is “already fracturing“. The linked already fracturing article blames – you guessed it – President Trump.

The most intriguing part of the article for me is what Author Steve Westlake didn’t mention, the reason why politicians would even want to evade the issue of “transformative change”, and keep the fossil fuel status quo in place.

The explanation for the need to keep the status quo is obvious – renewable energy is a colossal failure.

Despite 10s, likely hundreds of billions of pounds thrown at Britain’s Net Zero transformation, all Britain has achieved is large scale impoverishment of the working class, gutting entire regions of British industrial heartlands, and offshoring those manufacturing jobs to “developing” countries which are still allowed to emit CO2.

Climate “pragmatism” is somewhere between an admission of failure and a cry for help, by politicians who don’t have the guts to openly admit they got it wrong.

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