Climate action: it's all about the HOW
A three-parter in what we have to do to start an energy revolution and save the planet
When the Fearless Explorers went extinct
At my school you weren’t allowed to be a Fearless Explorer. The careers advice machine emitted parps of steam and little slips of paper that were stamped ‘steelworker’ and ‘librarian’. I rebelled, uncomfortable with the Dewey decimal system. I wanted to be a Fearless Explorer, just as others wanted to be steelworkers. Turns out we were both in the wrong place at the wrong time. Teesside in the 1980s.
It wasn’t just us. Imagine the brave, near-psychopathic winner of a Victoria Cross in Rourke’s Drift in a call centre at the burning furnace of the service economy. Imagine the skills needed to keep a Lancaster steady on its bombing run amidst murderous flak, suddenly transposed into a DEI session. Or those of an NKVD officer, not in the forests outside Smolensk but as a geography teacher in a Sydney suburb. Or an HR professional, convinced their latest initiative will lead to a more inclusive workplace, raiding Lindisfarne in 793.
People are born in the wrong era, or the right era. One moment’s hero is another’s lunatic, or misfit, or something worse. An accountant becomes a mass murderer. A hero for the ages becomes a drunk bar brawler.
Something similar is happening to the climate action community. Now, on the cusp of 2023, the climate warriors who made their hay back when they had to save the whale in 1980 are no longer relevant. Same for the boggle-eyed seers of 2000, who devoted their lives to making others aware that the world was burning. Same, in a similar way, goes for the young chaps gluing themselves to infrastructure in 2022.
The point is that the environmental cause has moved on, from why, to what, to how. If you bring the same mindset that worked in the past you will find time has moved on without you.
At first it was all about raising awareness: why. This was simple: the environment matters and whales and molluscs and orang utans all were being impacted by us. FFS don’t litter. But it was worse than this!
It turned out that the cumulative impacts of the industrial revolution and modern life affected the climate. We came to know about the ozone layer, and one-by-one we took our fridges outside and executed them. This seemed to work. But in the meantime evidence continued to mount that there was a general warming effect on the climate caused by the gradual accumulation of CO2 and other gasses up above us. And that this warming was bad. Even a couple of degrees might mean the unleashing of some Old Testament God’s wrath upon us all. Starting with the Maldives and the Netherlands.
The clock rolled on to 2015, 2020, and frankly just about everybody agrees. You’ll always find some nutcase scientist or an apparently unscrupulous political entrepreneur trying to find the hollowed-out advantage at the arse-end of any widely-accepted understanding. But on climate change, the idea that man-made climate change was happening and that there was going to be widespread awfulness was there. The ‘why’ was answered.
Then it was the ‘what’. That’s the extraordinarily tortured and dry process that is exemplified by the Paris Agreement and the COP meetings. What will you pledge? Coal free in 2034? Net-zero by 2089? Cow-fart-free by 2026?
This tended to be complemented by an array of targets and laws, at least where there was a bureaucratic machine that even vaguely thought these targets were real. In effect most were bargaining positions, for cash, for trade deals, for assistance. Think about it. At COPxx if you say you’ll commit to xxx by 2041, what does it mean? That you’ll require the requisite finance, competent governance, lack of war, and general happiness uptick needed to make these things happen. Then you’ll do it, or at least try and blame others if it all fails.
Which is why we get to ‘how’. Governments and companies are saying that they’ll do things, but this is not just a simple building 15% more wind turbines by 2026. It’s not just telling car companies to sell twice as many EVs. This is not just an Excel sheet of increasing numbers. It’s about a system.
How the hell do you get a modern industrial economy that has been running on fossil fuels to suddenly switch? That’s industrial processes, transport, home heating, home cooking, and the entire grid infrastructure that underpins it all, changed. That’s some task in a world where few countries have got a handle on potholes in the road. That’s why this is the question for our age: how the hell do you do this?
That is a question that I’ll return to in the second of this three-parter, just as the third will be about the role of journalists and communications. But here I’ll return to the problem at the top of this piece; the ‘fearless explorer/steelworker’ problem.
The climate campaigner who did part 1, the why, was by nature a mixture of extremist and prophet. They had an extreme message of annihilation and pillage, and how humankind was destroying the planet. This message is probably still needed in some corners of the world where the government controls what people read and everything is sacrificed on the altar of growth; but most people in most places get it.
You simply don’t need to raise awareness by gluing yourself to a piece of infrastructure: people know climate change is broadly real but they – and the politicians – have not come close to articulating an answer that makes most people comfortable enough to jump in. Knowing about a problem isn’t the same as fixing a problem. The extremist/prophet skill set is not what’s required to getting that fix.
Which is where we get to part 2: what? This requires a different skillset, suited to marathon negotiations and clever calibrations. It’s also an elite occupation. If you’re a politician you make your special pleading, you follow the herd, you insinuate that others are to blame, you cajole, and then you join lots of other people in suits and shake hands for the cameras as you talk about the milestone phasing out of strawberry jelly by 2083. You know that next time you talk the target will be 2073 and will include several types of chocolate. Some protests are useful for cajoling the politicians, and arguably this also works because those protesting are often the narky teenage offspring of the liberal elite. Sometimes its purity is counterproductive, but as a nudge from the edge there’s room for blue hair, tiresome tirades about meat, and clever protest signs.
But we’re now in part 3: how? How on earth do you turn an enormously complex fossil-fuel-powered economy around to run on clean energy? What about the food and land use system? What about the ocean as an ecosystem, or the way the forests are treated? At the World Resources Institute I worked alongside many ingenious people who spent a lot of time working out what to do about climate change. There are solutions, and people like this have spent a lot of time telling ministers and CEOs what to do, showing them the levers of change and willing them to pull them.
This is partly about the circular economy, about doing more with less. It’s about big decisions on infrastructure, and about reacting to short-term political decisions without building more stranded fossil fuel infrastructure that keeps you on that path for another couple of decades. It’s about vision and about complicated choices, areas in which the world’s politicians have a patchy track record.
And that’s it for part 1: that simple move from the why does climate change matter? To what do we do about climate change? To how the hell do we do this?
Part 2 is about that how question. Part 3 is about the communications and journalism around climate change, and what works best. See you there.