2023-07-06 20:00:00
‘What does climate change do to you?’ There is a lot of laughter in the House of Representatives when Lammert van Raan, Member of Parliament for the Party for the Animals, asks his colleagues an emotional question. He himself is open about his feelings of grief. How do other politicians view this?
Annelies Roon6 July 2023, 22:00
In parliamentary debates and during working visits, Lammert van Raan, Member of Parliament for the Party for the Animals, often tends to name the elephant in the room. An elephant that is not recognized as such by many: climate mourning. Or, in good Dutch, climate anxiety. Because the climate is changing, with all its disruptive consequences: what does that do to people emotionally? And with those who are at the controls?
“Do you ever feel sadness or mourning about what is being lost due to climate change?” Van Raan asked his colleagues in the Lower House sometime early this year. The question fell like a punctured ball in a sandbox. Are we going to talk about feelings now? There was some nodding, but also some snippy laughter and looked away. Climate minister Jetten agreed that he saw a lot of ‘climate stress’ among young people. But Van Raan wanted deeper, more direct. “We also have to talk about ourselves. As we all sit here together. What’s it doing to us?”
The sense of imminent loss
Since then, he’s been naming the theme pretty much whenever and wherever he can. “First I tell you what it does to me, that feeling of imminent loss. It’s a feeling you can’t name at first. A gut feeling, which manifested itself in me in gloom, stress, unrest, insomnia. When you realize we’re not going to turn the ship around in time, you know you can’t go on with what you’re doing. You see what it means for the future of your children. It is an existential loss. Only when you have identified and lived through that can you move on. In that sense, it can certainly be compared to mourning.”
That term feels just a bit too intense for Kiki Hagen, MP for D66, she says earlier this year. She associates her feeling about climate change more with fear of loss than with loss, she says. “With me it is mainly the deep restlessness that I feel when I look at my four-year-old son. When I see him searching for worms in his bare feet in the grass, I worry about what the world will look like in ten or twenty years. In that respect, what Lammert says really touches my heart.”
Member of Parliament Suzanne Kröger (GroenLinks) can do more with the term ‘anxiety’, she says. “For me, grief is about what you have already lost, anxiety more about the fear of what you could lose. I feel the irreversibility that comes with grief less. We have already lost a lot, but we still have a lot to gain. I do feel sorrow for the loss of a carefree future. In the first place for my three children, but ultimately for everyone.”
Quest
Regardless of the naming, Van Raan sees emotions as a ‘possible instrument of change’ in the context of climate change: a crowbar to get out of one’s own ideological groove and find each other in a common interest. “I have been in the Chamber for six years now,” he says. “And all the time I hear the same arguments to hesitate, to doubt, not to follow through. Every week dozens of motions are submitted, both from the coalition and from the opposition. I estimate that 75 percent of that is about business as usual, about getting on with what we’re doing. Of the remaining 25 percent, about 80 percent are voted down. Parliamentary history is full of motions with which we could have tackled the climate problem a long time ago. Ever since the seventies. Didn’t happen. When you realize that, you start looking for new ways. Naming and discussing emotions is a first step in that search.”
“It can be good to discuss this among themselves, as MPs,” agrees Henri Bontenbal, member of parliament for the CDA. He responds by email to the question of how he sees the role of emotions in the climate debate. “Various scientific reports outline future scenarios if we don’t do enough about climate change. They make me gloomy. But above all, let’s use the public debates to improve climate policy. It actually helps me to be able to contribute to real solutions.”
Michiel Suijker, chairman of the JOVD, the youth organization of the VVD, is more or less on the same line. Now that the promised response from the VVD fraction has not materialized, he is very willing to shed his liberal light on the theme in a video conversation. “As JOVD, we try to press a little harder on themes that are electorally sensitive anyway. Climate is one of them,” he explains. But discussing feelings about climate, he has nothing to do with that. “Normally I am quite an emotional person, but when it comes to climate I am not. I don’t feel any fear, it doesn’t keep me awake.”
Caroline van der Plas, chairman of the BBB, uses similar words in her email. “I have no climate emotions, in the sense that it keeps me awake,” she writes. “What worries me is that in more and more countries food production will suffer from drought or heavy rainfall. And in connection with that, the great concern about the disappearance of the most sustainable and efficient food producers in the world: the Dutch farmers, market gardeners, cultivators and fishermen.”
Don’t become a climate drammer
To what extent emotions belong in politics at all is a question that arises. Bontenbal especially lacks the exchange of ideological points of view and a more constructive attitude, he writes. “Also from the parties that consider climate policy important, but are in the opposition.” According to Van Raan, such points of view are indeed exchanged. Two pillars apply to him, he says: “What does science say and what is the ideological basis from which you conduct the debate? I would rather have science prove that the climate is fine than win an ideological battle.” Ten years ago he would not have called it that, he admits. “Because at the time I was still insufficiently aware of the existential risk we run. That was the old era of left-right antagonism.”
JOVD chairman Suijker does realize that it is important that everyone is on the same page in the climate debate. “Climate is often a far-from-my-driveway problem for the right wing. As JOVD, we want to help change that. But you shouldn’t point fingers if someone else doesn’t experience the same as you. That creates resistance. We believe that freedom of life comes with responsibilities. If you cause damage, you must compensate for it. If you want to influence the debate, do it the right way, by holding people accountable. Make sure you don’t become a climate dram, because that won’t work.”
“Involving emotions in the climate debate clearly has something to do with it,” says Kröger. “We will be increasingly confronted with the consequences of climate change more and more intensely. That makes it inevitable that we will also talk about what it does to people. There are more and more young people with climate depression, more and more people who are becoming very desperate. That dimension becomes part of the debate.”
Scaremongering
Van der Plas sees such intense emotions as part of the problem. She writes: “My concern is the scaremongering of many young people by the climate lobby. People who really think that the Netherlands will flood due to rising sea levels and who really think that in a few years it will be too late and Maastricht will be by the sea. Young people and others who no longer want children because of this. If more people start to think this way, this could lead to major problems in terms of the labor market and care for the elderly in a few decades, because there will then be too few new generations to absorb this.”
VVD youngster Suijker will not easily choose that route: “If you read, as recently, that the chance that we manage to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees is now only around 50 percent, then you realize right that you have to do something with it. People usually only act when they see the consequences, just look at Groningen. Moreover, the influence of the Netherlands is relatively small in this global problem. You feel like an ant. But still: we will all have to take our responsibility now.”
Van Raan’s plea for a more sensitive climate debate seems to have resonance mainly with the left of the centre. In that case, it is a condition that you start from the facts, emphasizes Member of Parliament Hagen. “You have to address the feeling from the right content, not from half-truths that are in the interest of the one who expresses them.”
These MPs also realize that not all parties have the same idea of what those facts are. But for them the picture is clear: “If you really understand the implications of the IPCC reports, it affects how much you feel that we have to do something,” says Suzanne Kröger. Van Raan goes the extra mile: “Science provides enough elements to make you feel terrified. But we are masters at removing discomfort. The only way to survive all the bad climate news is to ignore it and carry on as usual. The discomfort is continuously taken away because we have all created an eternal here and now of instant gratification, without past and future.”
Shared concerns, shared approach?
Van Raan is now a few months further in the search for his tool for change. He conducted what he calls a few ‘generation talks’ with older and younger people and organized a group talk with fellow MPs, also from the right wing. Van Raan does not say anything about this, because of the agreed confidentiality, but that conversation did not only result in mutual understanding and rapprochement. The PvdD Member of Parliament caught himself assuming that shared concerns about the future would lead to a shared vision and approach. “Where you both feel the pain, you start hoping that someone else will think the same and will accept your motions. But that doesn’t have to be the case, I’ve noticed. And you may even understand that.”
So you don’t necessarily come closer together if you better understand each other’s opposing course? “That is the question. I’m still looking for that. Where you are building a coalition, because you want to govern together or are working on a bill, it can be very helpful to understand each other’s deepest motives or fears. Where cooperation is ideologically too far apart, you might be better off spending your time differently.” Perhaps he should look for the key to unity in a shared love of nature, he muses, or in parental love. Also powerful and universal motives. “It is a development story,” concludes Van Raan. “I will keep looking for now. But if another solution presents itself, that is of course also good.”
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