Climate policy has become one of the principle casualties of America’s political polarisation. The Trump administration, for instance, recently announced it is dismantling a key ocean monitoring system, despite growing scientific concerns about the rise of a “Super El Niño” and the prospect of disruption to key Atlantic Ocean currents. This move is consistent with Project 2025, the conservative policy blueprint that explicitly calls for dismantling major elements of US climate science capacity.

As a British climate scientist and former chair of UCL’s Climate Action Unit, I am concerned that the UK should avoid following the same path.

For more than a decade, political scientists have documented the rise of what is known as affective polarisation: the tendency for supporters of different political parties not merely to disagree, but to view one another with deep and uncompromising animosity.

In a landmark 2015 study, researchers at Stanford and Princeton universities found that partisan identity in the US had become a powerful source of social polarisation, shaping attitudes and behaviour in ways that rivalled or exceeded many traditional social divisions.

The UK can still avoid that trap. Not because British politics is immune to division – it clearly is not – but because Britain’s distinctive institutional........

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