Aspiration in climate communications

And what is really important about a Tesla

The wedge-shaped Lamborghini Countach was many things: a startling piece of automotive art; the most absurdly impractical car ever; and – critically – the airbrushed fantasy car of choice for 10 year old boys in the 1980s. Here’s one. Ridiculous, isn’t it?

That mantle of fantasy car has now been firmly passed on. A few years ago the father of my son’s friend turned up at school driving a spanking-new Tesla. A crowd of kids stood, mouths open, as the doors opened in funny ways and the father used his mobile phone to set off some kind of weird remote disco mode with flashing lights and music playing. My son’s friend drove off with a grin as wide as a Countach’s turning circle.

Tesla’s place in history will not be about battery range, market capitalisation or ridiculous acceleration; Teslas have won their place in history by making electric vehicles cool.

Aspiration comes in different forms. For environmentalists there used to be a hair-shirt quality to buying green. When it came to cars that translated into the virtue-signalling lump that was the Toyota Prius. It represented an aspiration that could be measured in emissions rather than beauty, speed or horsepower, and its target audience was others who knew that we were destroying the world.

This neatly maps onto the why phase of how I break down the environmental movement, when it was all about a radical core and spreading the word. We went through the what phase – I get it, let’s cut vehicle emissions – and now we’re in the how phase of finding a way of turning the world over to EVs. Without aspiration this would be a spreadsheet process of government directives, financial incentives and boring practical stuff like recharging points and increasing range. So thank god for the Tesla. Now we want EVs because in many ways they’re better cars, and they’re cool.

This matters, but it really matters is in those large chunks of the world where people are getting much wealthier than their parents. Think of Shanghai, Shenzen, of Mumbai and Bengaluru and Jakarta and Sao Paolo, of Hanoi and Johor Bahru and Mexico DF. I’m talking about places where in the space of one generation there’s been a leap between having a bicycle and having a moped or a car, between a dusty bus journey and a cheap flight, between non-existent village plumbing and big city air conditioning. These parts of the world move fast.

They’re also easily ignored, especially if you leaf through a few environmental NGO websites. They tend to leap from the ultra-developed to the massively under-developed, from the US to Niger or Bangladesh or Bolivia. It’s the States and the Sahel. But the fact is that the bit of the world that’s going to have the biggest impact on climate outcomes will be the other bit, the one where people are able to do things their parents never conceived of. This is where the big populations are, the massive increases in consumption, the changes in diets and infrastructure and lifestyles. This is where the concrete is poured and rapid crazy growth happens in real time.

The world will not hair-shirt its way to lower emission choices in these places. A Toyota Prius or some virtuous and condescending talk about saving polar bears will not work. What is needed is for environmentally-friendly choices to be aspirational, for them to be cool and desirable and do a job better. Clean transport needs to be sleek and reliable and safe, a break from the polluted, noisy roads of not-long-ago. Greener housing needs to be funky and modern and comfortable, something that looks great on Instagram. Behaviour change such as awareness of waste and pollution or diet needs to be built around a message of an aspirational lived environment. You cannot make lower-carbon food aspirational when it’s about chomping on insects and going vegan! Make it delicious, make it about health and taste and beautiful plates, and stop the grim lectures about beef and pork. Burgers are great, but make them better burgers rather than the centrepiece of a deadly diet.

You know where I’m going with this. It’s simply to return to that well-worn theme of mine that if you want the low carbon transition to take off, you cannot sell it as doom or sacrifice, as a form of punishment, as a self-satisfied sermon from some git who thinks he or she is better than everybody else. It has to be aspirational. It has to be cooler and cleaner and tastier. Thank goodness for the Tesla.  

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I’m a journalist, author and think-tank-comms worker. I’ve lived and worked all over the world, and I’m currently in Italy. My free substack is aimed at unpicking a few thoughts about the world of environmental actions/communications/journalism, but I’ll branch out more broadly - probably looking at how to understand countries and places by getting out and walking around them. Get in touch at nicholaswalton99-at-gmail.com, or on X/Twitter @npw99.