This article appears as part of the Winds of Change newsletter.

We all know who definitely not to vote for if you care about the planet.

Firstly, for those who don’t give a sun-shrivelled fig or are going the full climate denial route, there’s Reform. Theirs is a manifesto that tells us climate change is happening but it’s got nothing to do with us.

Compared to Reform the Conservatives almost look like Just Stop Oil just for the simple fact that they are at least backing net zero by 2050. But dig into the manifesto and you find those giveaway lines, like “pragmatic, proportionate and realistic approach”.

You find statements like: “We will boost our energy independence in an increasingly unstable world. We will legislate to ensure annual licensing rounds for oil and gas production from our own North Sea.”

But more than the manifesto itself, the tone of the debate, Rishi Sunak’s talk of the costs rather than the benefits of green transition has indicated lip service to net zero. Even the former Conservative net zero tsar, Chris Skidmore, has had enough and has indicated he plans to vote Labour.

Skidmore accused the prime minister of breaking the consensus of the past on climate action to “seek division and polarisation”.

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Winds of Change | Taylor, Keir, Rishi... Scottish Greens have your private jet days numbered

But what to vote if you really do care about the planet? And not just climate change, but also plastic waste, biodiversity, and wider ecological crises that are directly caused by humans, by the capitalocene as some now call it?

This election campaign is a confusing one in which climate has featured mainly in debate about job losses and just transition, with relatively little questioning of what plans mean for the climate and nature. 

Various organisations have created analyses of the manifestos for climate and nature, among them Greenpeace, which rated the Green Party top of the UK parties, followed by the Liberal Democrats, which, it said, “have set a high bar on climate and nature, with a fair approach to the transition that shields those struggling with the cost of living, and recognises the UK’s responsibility to support climate-vulnerable countries around the world.”

The Conservative manifesto was described as “worrying reading”.

The Labour ‘change’ message

With Labour a likely winner, it seems appropriate to look at their offering first. A feature of many of the manifestos is an emphasis on clean energy and growth, rather than climate. But at least Labour is not talking up the negatives, it’s pushing the positives of green growth with a whole section dedicated to ‘Make Britain a clean energy superpower’. 

“The climate and nature crisis is the greatest long-term global challenge that we face,” it says, and there is indeed a lot of climate-positive policy in there.

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But let’s look at what’s not in there. There’s no revoking of the oil licenses that the Conservative government put through, and that glaring absence, the £28 billion a year green investment pledge that Labour scrapped back in February. Green growth and the clean energy transition, in Labour’s plan, is going to happen through private investment, with only the tiniest of priming through public money – a mere £4.7 billion, £1.2 billion of which will come through the windfall tax.

The excuse may seem reasonable – the Conservatives left us with too little money! But is it credible? Back in February, political economist Richard Murphy said that what Labour is doing “is the worst thing possible, which is to cut the pump-priming investment funds from government that get the growth cycle he's desperate for underway, and which pays for itself with extra taxes paid in the end”.

It’s therefore no surprise that £28 billion features in other manifestos. The Scottish Green Party, for instance, says: “the next UK Government must introduce a £28 billion per year Green New Deal investment programme.”

Read more:

The SNP declares: “The UK Government must invest at least £28bn a year in the green economy to deliver a step change in public and private investment in net zero and major investment in the domestic supply chain.”

Also key in the manifestos is the matter of just transition. A key question for me is, are they committed to both protecting jobs and speeding through green measures; and to bringing benefits to communities impacted by, for instance, by grid expansion? 

The SNP “in between” strategy on oil and gas licenses, with its talk of a climate compatibility checkpoint, does not fit that bill. But some of their just transition talk does.

“Instead of benefiting Scotland’s interests, our energy resources have bankrolled successive UK Governments,” it says. “Scotland as a whole should see far more of that benefit, but we also believe the local communities who house the infrastructure – like pylons and wind farms – should get a much greater degree of benefit.” 

Isn’t there more to this than green growth?

Everything I’ve mentioned here is a debate and conversation about green growth. It’s about the benefits of net zero progress in terms of increasing jobs and GDP. It takes the assumption that we can decouple rising GDP from its pollution and resource impacts. 

But it’s worth remembering that the climate crisis is not the only crisis humanity is careering into – and we don’t want to slash carbon dioxide but diminish biodiversity, add to our waste problem or pollute environments in other ways. That surge of growth and electrification is only going to go so far towards helping us to live well and sustainably on this planet.

Most parties are talking about green growth over the coming years. It is a key part of the massive infrastructure-building process of the next zero transition. 

But the message too often is that tired old line that growth is a good thing in itself, There are no mentions of limits to growth – unsurprisingly given we are just coming to the end of two crisis years in which GDP per capita loss has been the equivalent of £1500 per household.

Read more:

Winds of Change | No new North Sea oil and gas licences? Or lots? Or maybe some?

But an agrowth perspective in which we stop seeing growth as a belief system and answer to all problems, or at least acknowledge where growth may not be a good thing, would be good to see.

I'm looking for suggestions of ways of reshaping our human relationship with the natural world we depend on that aren’t about pushing up productivity and consuming more – a bit more of the doughnut economics espoused by Kate Raworth.

I’m looking for words like “wellbeing”, there in the Scottish Greens manifesto. “We need a radically different approach to our economy – one which prioritises the wellbeing of people and planet over individual profit; which creates decent well-paid jobs for the future; and which reinvests in our public services and local communities.”

I’m looking for “nature-positive economy”, mentioned in the Lib Dem manifesto. I’m looking for “making polluters pay”. 

(Image: Derek McArthur)

Protect nature

Yes, we need a green transition, a mass building of new infrastructure, and that will represent growth. But we also need the right restraints so that biodiversity is guarded. We need significant funding for the switch to more nature and climate-friendly forms of agriculture. These areas are barely mentioned in the Labour manifesto, though a separate pledge was made to deliver a “countryside protection plan”. 

The absence was highlighted by calls like those of the Greens, SNP and Lib Dems for more funding for farmers to deliver sustainable agriculture, and by the recent march in London, which demanded, ‘Restore Nature Now’.

Clean energy powerhouse? Yes please, but that’s not all we need to save the planet.