In a reasonably policy-lite election campaign earlier this year, the most notable, and most debated, pledge was the SNP’s surprise promise to cap the price of essential food products.

I don’t think this will happen.* But I do think it’s an interesting (if inevitably flawed) proposal because it attempts to, indirectly, answer a vital question: who pays for the impact of climate change?

Food price inflation is not solely an environmental issue – the disruption of war also looms large, as do wider inflationary pressures. But one of the most predictable impacts of climate change is that it will make food production harder and more volatile and that this will result in higher consumer costs. Indeed, this is already happening – and is why chocolate doesn’t taste as good anymore.

Two years ago I predicted that this dynamic would force politicians to adopt radical solutions:

“One of the most fundamental questions of 21^st century politics will be “who pays?”. In the case of food, there are four groups who may share the burden of rising costs: the consumer, the farmer, the corporations, or the government.

I don’t think this is an issue that the environmental movement can, or should, be neutral on. Instead, we should be building common cause with both the consumer and the farmer. Farming must be kept viable, which means adapting to a warmer world while mitigating the sector’s own emissions, and many small farmers should be better paid for this. At the same time, ordinary families shouldn’t be forced into food insecurity by rising costs… Sooner or later I expect this will become a major political issue and governments may need to move past old orthodoxies to find a suitable response.”

The SNP proposal would require large supermarkets to offer a range of essential food items at a legally capped price. This would be not unlike the ‘value’ range in supermarkets that sit alongside more expensive products, but with price rises set in Holyrood rather than supermarket HQs.

From those four options – the consumer, the farmer, the corporations, and the government – this approach would firmly put the costs onto the major supermarkets.**

Notably this was pitched entirely on the grounds of cost-of-living and public health. Unless I missed it (entirely possible), nobody has explicitly drawn a connection between this proposal and climate change. But increasingly I feel this is the territory in which climate will be debated: not as a distant environmental issue, but as a set of more immediate challenges around household incomes, lifestyle changes, and adaptation.

This is not necessarily a bad thing. Basically everything we have to do to tackle climate change is a good idea for other reasons. If somebody switches to an electric car or buys second hand clothing, the outcome is the same whether they are motivated to save money or to save the planet. 

It was revealing that when challenged post-election on whether the Greens had stopped talking about climate change, Gillian Mackay batted back by saying (and I paraphrase from memory): “We did talk about climate, we talked about free bus travel.”

Intervening on the price of food is the sort of policy that would have seemed unimaginable – even Soviet – a decade ago. Today it is an idea pitched by a mainstream party of government and picked up by the UK Treasury. What ideas unimaginable today might be achievable after another decade of record-breaking heat?

* There are plenty of examples of the state intervening in the price of essential goods – rents, energy, public transport. The food price cap was pitched as a public health measure, suggesting that the minimum unit pricing of alcohol is seen as a model. MUP was introduced before the Internal Market Act limited the ability of devolved governments to intervene in the provision of goods (and it set a price floor, rather than a price ceiling, which is a pretty fundamental difference). It does not seem likely that the Scottish Parliament actually has the powers to legislate for the scheme as initially proposed.

Of course a price-cap is not the only way that government can choose to intervene in food provision – see for example Zohran Mamdani’s plan for city-owned grocery stores in New York, or the proposal for public diners in Scotland. For many people in poverty the cost of food, at least in crisis situations, has already been socialised through foodbanks.

* Industry lobbyists were quick to point out that supermarkets are low-margin businesses (though, through their scale, highly profitable) and that a price cap could force them to sell products at a loss. Whether farmers could be shielded from this is debatable.