Bury your anger

Anger does not fix the climate crisis

I’ve just spent four weeks moving house in glorious 40 degree Celsius heat. This is Italy, so although the views have been superb and the pizza delicious, the whole process has been bureaucratic, antagonistic, bewildering and expensive. And then there’s that heat, by some counts the third heatwave of this devilish summer. Yes, I’m delighted to have moved, but oh yes, I have at times been extremely angry at doing the whole damn thing in this brutal climate. Moving in August FFS.

So now that the house move is largely complete, let’s talk about anger and the climate.

Usefully there’s a new study from Norway that’s doing the media rounds by focusing on how much anger motivates climate action. Here’s the original, and the main over-simplified take-away is that the more you’re angry about climate change the more you act to do something about it.

This article from the The Guardian summed up one response in its headline: “Anger is most powerful emotion by far for spurring climate action, study finds.” Helpfully there was a photo of what we all imagine when we see the words anger and climate action together: a couple of Extinction Rebellion activists, one with green hair and the other with piercings, doing their shouty thing photogenically.

The article quotes one psychologist who follows the logic and argues that what’s holding back effective climate action is that people aren’t “scared enough”. The article concludes with the argument that what we really need from the media is simply “an honest portrayal of the facts” – all, apparently, that we will need to motivate the masses to true climate activism.

Bollocks.

Think of an accident blackspot on a road just outside a school. A child is injured, and the parents – motivated by anger – campaign to get somebody to address the blackspot. Others join, such as the wider school community and locals. Something gets done and hopefully no more children are hurt trying to go to school. So what happened?

Anger was the first motivation, but it was really the catalyst that created a coalition. That coalition probably had some variable measure of anger among its members, but fundamentally it was about looking to create something new. Even the justifiably angry parents were not purely motivated by anger, but by a vision of what could be changed.

This is critical, because anger is dangerous when undiluted. It skews the ability to recognise and seize opportunities. It’s all about punishing and purity. Haven’t we all been angry at something or somebody, and resisted junking that anger to make friends with Bad Person X in favour of wallowing in our anger? Anger allows us to fixate on targets: in the case of climate this could be politicians, other generations, the Americans, the owners of big cars. If it’s not our fault then we lack the agency to change things (other than by gluing ourselves to infrastructure and dying our hair green).

Anger also pushes the despair narrative. I set out my arguments in the first three of these posts for why the sacrifice or doom narrative is such a bad look, as the environmental debate moves from Why to What to How governments and actors shift their entire economies to low carbon. We need to grasp our agency, see the opportunities as well as the need to build a new economy, and look at galvanising reasons to be positive. (How about this for instance? European nations look to be out-performing their targets for solar installation.)

Notably the Norwegian study also identified the role of contrarian anger, which motivated those who work against climate action in a similar way. In a world where some continue to think that the world is flat and that celery is a foodstuff, some will always find a way to believe obtuse things in the face of the evidence. But anger-driven action leads to morally-certain extreme positions which leads to political polarisation which leads to a rise in contrarian anger pushing hard against you. It might feed your anger – as I’m arguing, not good – but it does little for the climate.

There are four conclusions to this post.

1.       Use anger to catalyse action, but something more constructive is needed to power that action. At that point the anger and the angry people need to take a back seat.

2.       What people need is not just that ‘honest portrayal of the facts’. Leaving aside that there is rarely anything quite so objective, this is over-simplistic and fails to understand the political nature of the environmental debate. There are difficult options and choices, good motivations for people living their lives to make choices against climate activism. Politics is all about persuading people and building coalitions and understanding that obvious things are often bloody hard to do. Look for reasons to persuade people, not cajole them (angrily). This is the real climate communications takeaway.

3.       We have agency, we can do it, and the road to success is paved with opportunities in the building of an entirely new, cleaner, cheaper, fairer low carbon economy. Ditch sacrifice or doom and outline the opportunities in ways that motivate people.

4.       Never move house in Italy in August.  

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 Twitter @npw99.