As Greece burns, why are Europeans no longer motivated to fight climate change?
People here in Athens are staying indoors because of the wildfires surrounding the city. But climate change is falling down low among voters' priorities. Is this just being accepted as the new normal?
I’m in Greece this month, basing myself on the coast near Athens while doing some reporting. Last night I had the rather surreal experience of eating dinner at a lovely restaurant on the beach across from my apartment, with a beautiful sunset to one side and ominous grey smoke coming in from the other. Attica, the region around the Greek capital, is on fire. Villages just outside Athens have been evacuated, and I keep receiving emergency alerts on my phone (sent to everyone within range of an Attica mobile phone tower) warning residents of specific towns to flee and telling them which routes to take. Residents of Athens have been told to stay indoors with the windows closed because of air quality problems from the smoke.
Here at the sea the smoke weirdly seems to stop as soon as it reaches the water. But I didn’t heed the advice and went into the city center today to go to some museums. But after a few hours I realized I had to go back. The air is thick with smoke and everywhere smells a bit like being next to a campfire. It’s actually reminding me of being in New York in the days after 9/11. After just 30 minutes walking outside, my throat and nose were burning.
Greece is no stranger to wildfires. This is a hot, dry place where intence winds in the summer can easily stoke blazes and bring them across long distances. But the frequency and severity of these wildfires have majorly increased in recent years. I’ve been asking locals today if this is normal. They’ve told me that a few years ago there were also some wildfires around Athens that caused intense sky-darkening smoke in the city, but before that they can’t remember wildfires at this scale so close. Experts say that the extra heat brought on my global warming (the world is now on average 1.2°C warmer than in the pre-industrial climate) is bringing more frequent heatwaves and droughts - weather conditions perfect for wildfires. The fire weather index, which estimates how flammable vegetation is under certain weather conditions (temperature, humidity, wind speed and rainfall), has shown an increase in extreme levels in the Mediterranean more than anywhere else in the world. The Mediterranean now faces 29 more days of extreme fire weather per year than it did 40 years ago. Scientists says the current extreme fire weather in Greece was 50 times less likely in the pre-industrial climate. Last year more than 8,000 wildfires broke out in Greece, and this year June and July were the hottest months ever recorded in Greece.
Europe shrugged
Yet as these extreme weather events increase, polls and election results show that citizens are becoming less and less interested in climate change as a motivating issue. June’s EU election reflected this. The Greens lost massively in France and Germany, losing more than a third of their seats in the European Parliament. Ursula von der Leyen’s center-right EPP group campaigned against her Green Deal, the most expansive climate legislation ever seen in the world, and she herself is backing away from it as a result, transitioning to an “industrial clean deal”. She already effectively promised to axe the 2035 combustion engine ban i that’s already been passed into EU law in her speech to the EU Parliament last month asking for their confirmation (they voted yes). Despite the fact that their protests prompted the EU to pass the biggest package of legislation to fight climate change in world history over the past five years, the young people who marched with Fridays for Future and voted in Green and left politicians promising climate action in 2019 stayed home this year, and the youth vote went instead to the far right in Europe’s biggest countries. Those far-right politicians are pledging to dismantle legislation trying to tackle climate change, and a large swathe of the public seems to either be in favor of that, or they don’t care. So what’s going on here?