Finally, the public wants action on the climate crisis. Now politics must catch up | Stephen Buranyi

A cosy consensus among politicians allowed lofty targets to be set, and then ignored. But now voters want actual solutionsThe most shocking political development of 2019 may be the end of the nearly three-decade old consensus that the public doesn't care about the climate crisis. People were hopelessly and permanently apathetic, the argument went, or unable to see beyond the present. They were said to suffer what Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger memorably called "apocalypse fatigue", a numbness brought on by years of scientific warnings about a dismal future. And this in turn meant they were uninterested in, if not outright hostile to, any kind of meaningful climate action.All of this appeared to be backed up by data. Years of polling and other measures of public engagement showed that even as awareness of the crisis grew, there was no interest in changing anything. Continue reading...