The suggestion that the UK should hold now hold 'citizens assemblies' about how to deal with climate change is an excellent one in my view, and one which parallels the best practice available in countries like Denmark. There (in Denmark) the approach has been on consensus building and bottom-up deliberations. This is in sharp contrast to the hierarchical and adversarial style of politics which dominates the traditional British approach to policymaking - an approach which, incidentally, has proved disastrous when dealing with Brexit ('nuff said on that one for the moment!).
Indeed I have written about the comparison between the Danish and British approaches to climate politics in an academic piece in the journal 'British Politics', which was co-authored with a Danish academic, Helle Orsted. Please see the paper 'Policy consultation and
political styles: Renewable energy consultations in the UK and Denmark',
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057%2Fbp.2015.38
What does surprise me is that this idea of citizens assemblies hasn't taken off in a way that I would have expected, in that it would seem a natural follow-up to all the climate action mobilisations we have seen in recent times. Indeed, I have even seen someone muttering that people might come up with the 'wrong' answers. Look, for pity's sake, if we can't take the people with us on this one, we're not going to get very far!
But, I am relieved that this approach is being pursued at least somewhere, for example in an initiative being organised by Oxford City Council. See https://environmentjournal.online/articles/oxford-announces-uks-first-citizens-assembly-to-tackle-climate-change/
We could do a lot worse than copy some of Denmark's approach in that a national conversation, informed by 'expert' reports, commissions etc, should take place, and of course lots of deliberation through citizen's assemblies. This type of approach is in sharp contrast to what happened in the UK in the wake of the passage of the 2008 Climate Change Act which established the target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent compared to 1990 by 2050. Now, I don't want to slag off the present Committee on Climate Change (CCC) under the current (wiser) leadership of Chris Stark, but the CCC could still do with being supplemented by bottom up citizen's deliberations and inputs.
But at the start (in 2007-2008) the first inclination by the Government in setting up the climate change advisory machinery was to invite EDF onto the committee to establish the CCC. Not exactly bottom-up deliberation! The attitude seemed to be: don't bother consulting before you publish your proposals, the industrial hierarchy knows best. The answer, of course, was .......Focus mainly on building lots of nuclear power stations, with a few wind turbines and solar panels to keep the greens quiet..........Indeed as late as 2011 the CCC issued a report saying that the Government should scale back efforts to build offshore windfarms and focus instead on nuclear power! (yes really!) see http://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.com/2018/06/how-committee-on-climate-change-gave.html|) In that period the CC was claiming that nuclear power was even cheaper than onshore wind - despite arguments to the contrary even then. See my blog post at https://realfeed-intariffs.blogspot.com/2011/06/climate-change-committee-shows-pro.html
However, fortunately, the management of CCC changed since then. But we shouldn't have to rely on the existence of a wise hierarchy, we should have bottom up discussions, of course informed by a range of expert opinions. Then, this country might start doing a bit better than it is doing at the moment!
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