‘I think the Labour government is doing very well. The situation a little while ago, when the Conservatives had a lead over Labour in the opinion polls, was really brought on by the so-called fuel crisis. As far as I was concerned, there was not a crisis: it was all stirred up by the tabloid media and the lorry drivers, and personally I suspected some sort of right-wing plot at the back of it. I read somewhere that the CIA had managed to bring down the government in a foreign country by instigating a fuel crisis, and I really did wonder if that was happening here, as it all seemed so irrational.’ [A2212, Female author aged 44 from Watford]
Two events took place in the United Kingdom in the autumn of 2000 that, with the benefit of hindsight, were markers of a profound social and political moment. The first started on the night of the 7th September 2000. This was the blockade of the Stanlow Oil Refinery in Cheshire. An initially ad hoc protest by lorry drivers and farmers against rising fuel prices and the fuel duty increase of March that year, the protests spread quickly to other parts of the country and other refineries and depots. Over the ensuing week, as panic buying took hold and supermarket shelves started to empty, the United Kingdom faced the reality of just-in-time delivery systems based on fossil fuels. With government popularity collapsing in the polls, the Labour leadership was forced to signal that there would be a future reconsideration of the impact of sales taxes on fuel prices. The protests petered out after a week of crisis, and the government’s polling figures were restored. It was a remarkable indicator of the political power fixed within the infrastructure of petrochemical society. A motley ensemble of lorries and their drivers, tractors and tankers, motor cars and panic buyers, had brought a popular government to heel within ten days. No wonder it reminded some observers of a coup. In so far as the protests neutralised the possibilities of using fiscal policy to address environmental ends agreed democratically, the fuel protests of 2000 were indeed a coup.
As the fuel protests wound down, another crisis struck hard on its heels. This one was a force of nature. From the middle of September through until the following April, England and Wales experienced a period of unusually sustained and intense rainfall. There was a particular intensity to the autumn rainfall at the end of 2000, which was recorded as the heaviest since records began in 1766, and the most extensive flooding since 1947. The result was a period of sustained flooding affecting many areas across the country, especially the east coast stretching from East Anglia to the South East.
The confluence of these two events was significant in that they laid a marker for the intersection of social and ecological concerns in the noughties. Fuel protests as a Europe-wide phenomenon would become a continual source of agitation and public concern during the ensuing decade, as prices at the pump rose steadily in the wake of the geopolitical instability after the Iraq War. Major waves of agitation struck Europe in 2000 and again at the peak of the ‘global energy crisis’ of 2007-8. Simultaneously, flooding events across the UK and Europe (with particularly notable events in 2000, 2002, 2005, 2006, 2007, and 2009) signalled the first coherent intersection of changing weather patterns with rising public concern about the impacts of global warming. Climate change, and its underpinnings in increasingly fossil-fuel dependent Western societies, was, it seemed, starting to become a matter of concern in everyday life.
Or was it? Looking back from the perspective of a global atmosphere that exceeded 400ppm of carbon dioxide way back in 2013, and that is now rising ever more rapidly towards 450ppm, what is perhaps most pertinent about the first decade of the new millennium is how the leading polluting nations of the Global North failed to grasp the opportunity to stem global greenhouse emissions. There are many reasons for this world-historic failure of governance, one that may yet summon the end of the era of globalised capital, but one of the key ones is arguably how the logics of social reproduction bound up in petrochemical societies overpowered the possibilities for resistance generated by any awareness of their negative externalities. It was not that these externalities were not known, but that they failed to coalesce coherently in the year 2000. The antagonism between the everyday needs of mobility and economic survival, and the experience of increasing levels of climatic uncertainty and risk, remained too great to sustain a political demand for a route out of the global climatic crisis that the process of globalisation and liberalisation had reinforced and accelerated since the end of the Cold War. Nowhere is this contradiction in the field of everyday ecological relations and awareness more acutely present than in the writings of observers responding to the Mass Observation Project’s (MOP) Autumn directive of 2000. MOP was a large-scale social research initiative in Britain, founded in 1937, that collected diaries, surveys, and observations from ordinary people to document everyday life and public opinion.
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MOP offers a wealth of remarkably underutilised detail on everyday attitudes towards nature, environmental change and, in recent years, climate breakdown. Yet what is perhaps most characteristic of the 2000 directive is the way in which very few observers drew connections between the fuel protests and the floods and refused the logics of climate change. Given the supposed biases of MOP’s self-selected sample of observers, it is telling to find so many instances where the possibility of anthropogenic effects is denied or downplayed. Take the case of one woman in the South East of England, who wrote:
‘I believe that any influence man has on the weather is dwarfed by the activity generated by the sun. There always have been climatic changes before there was any mention of global warming and we are going through another one, resulting in a warmer climate in our part of the world and heavier rainfall, but it does seem that we need to learn from disasters and dredge the rivers and not build on flood plains. Riverside houses no longer seem so attractive.’ [B2605, woman born in the 1930s from South-east England]
This was not an arbitrary denial of any connection between human industry and global warming, but a well-worked-out cosmology. Climate changes are cyclical, human influences are dwarfed by natural ones, and floods are a product of mismanagement. Nor were such notions foolish; they embodied realities of the complexity of weather events in real socio-natural environments. Yet, the reference to sunspots, a previous obsession of Victorian apologists for imperial free trade and its associated ecological disasters, is a telling one. The theory that global temperature changes were a product of solar variation rather than atmospheric chemistry was avidly propounded in the late nineties by ‘denialists’ like Nigel Calder, the author of The Manic Sun: Weather Theories Confounded (1997). In the aftermath of the autumn floods, Calder could be found arguing that it was these and global cooling that were the real motors of recent meteorological events. He counterposed a popular historicism against climate science, an image of Little Ice Age revellers on the Thames reminding readers of the essential cyclicality of natural process in a way that chimed with a folk understanding of natural balance and the essential resilience of the natural world. A former engineer was ‘not totally convinced about global warming, we have had exceptional years weather wise for centuries, but we are without doubt pumping out all sorts of waste, toxic or otherwise which we know affects us and plant life. So on the balance of probabilities why shouldn’t we be affecting the weather as well and the number of exceptional weather years are probably getting more frequent. But will it be catastrophic, who knows the answer to that?’ [R1719, male born in the 1940s from Dorset]
There is a great deal more to be said about the insights that observers’ writings offer into the public perception of global warming and how it may have moulded public policy for good and ill. Perhaps most indicative of this is one mass observer’s viewpoint, which may be taken as the exception that proves the rule for perceiving, more clearly than any other, that there was a clear policy connection between the threat of global warming and the results of the fuel protests:
‘After that, when we had the floods, some members of the public said on television that they blamed the government for the flooding, in that they thought that something should have been done by the government to protect against it. I suppose they had in mind flood defences, when the more sensible precaution for the government to take would be to implement policies to reduce carbon emissions that cause global warming which might be the cause of the floods and other strange weather conditions we have been experiencing lately. Some of the problems had also been caused by a foolish practice of building on flood plains, which, though it had persisted while Labour had been in power, actually started many years ago when there was a Conservative government. It is therefore quite ridiculous to blame Labour for the floods, and the stupid demands to reduced fuel prices would only have tended to encourage greater use of fossil fuels which contributes to global warming and may be the root cause of flooding anyway.’ [A2212, female author aged 44 from Watford]
Perhaps it was not entirely ridiculous to blame the presiding government for the impact of the floods. The author’s own political inclinations are clear here. What is unusual, however, is the willingness to connect the outcome of the fuel protests with a historical reversal of the policy agenda on the environment. What might later come to be seen as common sense was anything but in the year 2000, as the pressures of everyday living and the material political power of oil proved a toxic combination for an approach to climate policy framed through the neoliberal logic of fiscal nudges on individuals.