The small town of Penrith, on the edge of the Lake District, is in one of the most northerly English parliamentary constituencies. When Rory Stewart, its MP until the 2019 general election, first decided to stand for election in 2010, he spent six weeks walking through its towns, villages, farms and uplands, meeting the people he wanted to represent. So when, as part of a project with the think tank Green Alliance, we invited him to address and hear from a group of fifteen local people making up a citizens’ jury on climate change, we weren't surprised that he said yes.

The citizens who met that day were not climate activists. They had been selected to mirror the make-up of the constituency as a whole, in terms of age, social background and political outlook. Before they arrived in the church hall that morning, they didn't even know what subject they had been invited there to discuss. But as conversations about climate got under way, one overriding feeling emerged from participants: confusion.

The people assembled that day had heard about climate change, and were worried about it, but they were confused: if the reports that they were getting, from scientists, from the media and from TV documentaries like David Attenborough's Climate Change: The Facts, were right, then why wasn't there more political attention on climate? They couldn't understand why, if it was so serious, government was not taking a lead. They knew that there were things they could do for themselves – like recycling and driving less – but these seemed like insignificant contributions if they were not backed up by a coherent strategy, led by politicians. As one said, “the Government needs to lead by example – everyone from the top down needs to play their part”.

These discussions, between citizens and their representative, were a vivid illustration of what has gone wrong in climate politics. As we saw in Chapter Five, politicians have done very little to involve people in climate action, instead hoping that changes could be made through stealth, without impacting on people's lives. This becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.