Stop making things up about climate change
As I write this, it’s January. I don’t do new year’s resolutions, but there’s one thing I’m over, bored of, done with.
Climate progress is suffocating on a certain type of weird, existential anxiety, and I’m taking a zero-tolerance approach to it this year. And the year after that. And the year after that.
So let me tell you about New York City; about the time last summer that the Big Apple went up in smoke – and exactly why New Yorkers did nothing about it.
Climate Nihilism
You’ve seen it: it’s the skull, cleverly integrated into Just Stop Oil’s logo. It’s protest signs proclaiming ‘The Future Is On Fire.’ It’s the best-known climate book being called The Uninhabitable Earth. It’s your Gen Z cousin tweeting ‘lmao we’re doomed af’ every two news cycles.
It’s the founder of Extinction Rebellion telling children they face ‘annihilation.’
People are done playing nice, beating around the bush, acting like things are ok. They say it’s time to sound the climate alarm bells and shock the world into action with an apocalypse slideshow. Wake up, people.
Just Stop Oil have leaned into Climate Nihilism more than most. Their new slogan is ‘1.5C is dead,’ next to a skull emoji. Whether they mean that 1.5C isn’t a worthwhile goal, or that it isn’t attainable, neither of those things are true, let alone inspiring. Of course, we should judge Just Stop Oil on results, not methods – except, they’re not getting results: only 1 in 6 people actually like them. To put it bluntly, noone in government feels under any pressure to listen to a group about as popular as Matt Hancock.
I get it. We’re facing the biggest problem our species has ever seen. There’s an insane group of people who wake up every day trying to stop us from solving it. And it’s unbelievably jarring for us to all to have to just go about our days as if nothing’s wrong: I want to go round and shock people awake too. But what if a wake up call actually isn’t what people need?
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After two decades of arguing with climate deniers, we’re so scared to sound like them that we actually prefer exaggeration to accuracy. With noone hitting the brakes, the claims we make get bigger and bigger until a guy saying that there “won’t be a human left in 2026” isn’t just platformed by real news organisations, he’s taken seriously by the host.
And that could be harmless, if there weren’t a lot of undecided people listening. Think about it from their perspective: I know I couldn’t be friends with people whose only two gears seem to be ‘anger’ and ‘despair.’
Just Stop Oil and Extinction Rebellion are good people with a good cause, climate protests are often – are usually – beautiful, and David Wallace-Wells has done more for the world than I ever will; but as Rebecca Solnit put it: climate despair is a luxury.
Panic and anxiety are the coal and oil of climate progress: plentiful; powerful; completely unsustainable. Climate experts have been saying this for years, and we should trust them: they’re the people who spend every single day thinking about the climate without giving up – they’re comparative marathon runners in this world. The rest of us? We’re more likely to see the latest front-page spreads about wildfires in Greece and stick our heads down the news feed rabbit hole, resurfacing two hours later with eyes aflame and cortisol pounding in our veins, suddenly desperate to think about literally anything other than the words ‘Celsius’ or ‘Tipping Point’.
Some people argue this is actually good: that pessimism is exhausting but a better tool than optimism. Anxiety is just the price we pay for progress and action.
Except, it’s not working.
In June 2023, sparked by record temperatures, wildfires raged out of control in Canada, sending plumes of toxic smoke over New York City. The sky went orange. People literally couldn’t go outside. It presumably felt like a disaster movie rated Rotten by the Tomatometer. The climate beast had come for America and gobbled up the Big Apple – and this time, noone could deny it.
If shock tactics worked, then coming face-to-face with the real, undeniable consequences of climate change would spark action. With the apocalypse itself hanging around outside their windows like the Tiger Who Came To Tea, New Yorkers would surely be googling protests near them, talking about action, how to organise, asking what they could do – or at least just trying to learn more about the problem.
But no. As the red clouds descended over the Hudson River, searches for ‘climate change’ peaked just a little on June 7th, the highest point on the chart above. Then, they fell on the 8th. And again on the 9th. And then.. they didn’t fully recover. For three whole months. And all that for what? Searches for ‘climate action’ and ‘climate protest’ didn’t even budge.
The natural experiment concluded, having traumatised New York with something infinitely scarier and more real than any leaflet from your community climate groups. The results: this late in the game, shock works only on the anxious – and they’re the first to burn out.
It’s a mistake to assume New Yorkers didn’t already know. It’s a mistake to say they just needed to wake up. They know – just like everyone else. They were marching for the environment way back in 1970.
There’s a kicker. On April 22nd, searches for ‘climate change’ were twenty times higher than on June 7th. The reason: Earth Day. Some people might consider it cringe and outdated but if anything, it creates sustainable interest: searches remained a little bit higher for a few weeks after. The right kind of nudge can still make a difference.
I think the truth is that people – at least the sane majority – don’t doubt that something needs to be done. I think what they doubt is that anything can be done, at least by them. Or perhaps more specifically, that anything will be done.
So will they? Do they need to? Let’s talk about it, because the answer might tell us how to talk about climate change.
Money Talks
It feels true that our leaders are failing us. Some are; but most are just doing what their voters asked them to do (which is often: not enough).
But often we don’t give them credit even when they do enact good green policy. In 2022 Joe Biden passed IRA, possibly the most significant piece of climate legislation any leader of any country has ever passed, somehow turning the USA into the West’s leader on climate action, overnight. A year later, after breaking a campaign promise, he was branded a ‘climate traitor’ and a terrorist. Biden’s a mixed bag, but that’s the despair talking.
But how much do the people in charge actually need to do?
When you look at the current expectations for CO2 emissions up to 2050 (above) it’s not hard to see what actually needs to be tackled: Europe and North America might be responsible for this mess (and need to be the leaders on cleaning it up) but… we aren’t the main worry any more. The new problem is that dark blue band that overtook everyone around 2000: Asia. And at the country level (below), we’re not very shocked to see that it’s almost entirely driven by China and India, with their current combined population of 2.8 billion. The future of the climate depends largely on just two countries. If they can figure it out, well, nothing happens in a vacuum: the rest will most likely be taken care of in the process.
But what happens to growing economies when they set their mind to decarbonisation? Do emissions ramp down slowly? The answer in the UK was: no. Carbon emissions from electricity generation rose in the 1900s as the population and the economy expanded, and then they slowed as nuclear power hit the shores. They climbed again as nuclear power failed to fully take off, and then something happened around 2010: emissions plummeted.
What happened? Well, the only thing that ‘happened’ is that the Tories came into power. Boris Johnson may today be surprisingly sympathetic to the green revolution, but his colleagues and voters definitely weren’t. No: wind and solar just… got cheaper. Even the Tories couldn’t say no and the country turned a corner, almost overnight. And they weren’t alone.
The speed at which clean energy has been getting cheaper is the stuff of fantasy. Or sci-fi. The downward line on this next graph isn’t just pleasingly steep, it’s on a log scale: prices of solar panels aren’t just smoothly decreasing, they’ve been halving every 5.5 years for the last half century. Since 2008, they’ve been halving every 3.5 years.
Solar is already the second cheapest form of energy after onshore wind, and it looks like its price will keep halving. And unlike the UK, China and India are sunny countries: soon, it’ll be cheaper for them to replace active coal power plants with solar farms than to keep them operational.
But is it naive to look at their emissions going up and up, and say ‘this is fine’?
Maybe not. China, the world’s current CO2 monster, looks like it’s just getting started, soaring up exponentially – and certainly not like their emissions are about to fall any time soon. But in fact, it’s happened already. Chinese emissions actually peaked in 2023, after yet another record year of wind and solar installations. It’s not ‘job done,’ but it’s a stunning turnaround that very recently didn’t even seem plausible.
China has a lot of engineering to do to ween itself off the coal that still produces 30% of its power; but as a self-confessed dictatorship, it’s actually pretty well-placed to do that quicker than any country in the West. Environmental Impact Assessments are very much part of China’s process; but public consultations with local residents less so. But also, they’re just way better at building than us.
China’s knack for doing stuff fast is especially visible in a Tiktok that was going around, showing a busy junction in the centre of Shenzhen, a city where electric cars have now actually overtaken fossil fuel cars: the future is here, and it’s… silent. There’s some beeping, some whirring, and then literally just the sound of people talking. It’s eerie. It’s incredible. Shenzhen has pledged to quadruple its electric charging points from 200k to over 800k by next year, and it’s on track to triple its number of electric cars from 250k to 750k in the same time period. To put it lightly, this is great.
It’s especially great because to ‘succeed,’ the green energy revolution requires a ridiculously sharp and global transition to electric cars – it’s the type of U-turn the automotive industry has never experienced before. What happened in Shenzhen needs to happen across the globe – which seems a big ask. And yet. It’s happening already. Just like solar ten years ago.
Meanwhile, India, that ominous low line creeping upwards on our emissions graph, could (if it wants) be the first major economy to decarbonise before it ever fully carbonised. With solar energy as deployable – and now as cheap – as it is, it could make good use of its extreme sun and ample land area, connecting its rural communities to the grid and cleaning up the toxic air pollution in its cities with electric cars and scooters. Best part is, a solar revolution isn’t just realistic in India, it’s (say it with me) happening already – masterminded and carried out since 2014, notably, by two non-leftist governments.
What’s next?
The UK, USA and others are all caught up in Climate Guilt, with the transition away from fossil fuels usually framed as a moral imperative, rather than a financial opportunity. But that should change – and it will. China chose to rabidly pursue a green transition for selfish reasons. India is in the process of doing the same. Cheap electricity is a limiting factor for economic growth, and solar and wind are just too big a boat to miss for any economy.
If radically-leftist politicians – which Joe Biden, Xi Jinping, and Narendra Modi are not – aren’t needed for the world to take its first, faltering steps towards true sustainability, can we all just put our feet up? Can the protestors go home?
Yeah, course not. Clean energy is now, finally, in (nearly) everyone’s long- and short-term interests. Clean air, clean water, sustainable growth, green jobs, cheap power. We’re finally coasting to a brighter future; but it’s up to politicians to pump the accelerator.
To criminally oversimplify, the two simple ways to do that are to tax dirty stuff or subsidise green stuff. Carbon taxes aren’t very popular: the public supports them in theory (especially if you call them ‘polluter fines’ instead) – but only until they see their heating bills go up. In 2022, the US went mostly with the latter option, throwing money at hydrogen, wind, solar, electric vehicles, and all kinds of green tech, getting cheaper greener energy into everyone’s homes faster. That same bill, rather than being ‘paid for by our kids,’ was the stimulus that sent the US to record-low unemployment, cut inflation, and put its GDP back on track as if 2020 and 2008 never happened.
Since 2020, no other country has come close to the US’s economy – if they want to, they should do their own IRA. And that’s where politics comes in. Politicians hold the keys to climate progress, and they also want to win elections. In the 21st century the rules of activism have changed; campaigns that polarise people are now doomed to fail. It’s the movements that win over centrist weirdos that will make new things politically possible.
Everyone – or at least, everyone who matters – knows that there’s a problem. New Yorkers know there’s a problem. What they need to be told is: there’s a solution, it’s realistic, and it’s urgent.
Climate activism in 2024 should follow three rules:
Don’t exaggerate: being threatened with annihilation and wastelands doesn’t create sustainable engagement
Focus on what’s being given, not taken away: talk about clean air, not banning fossil fuels
Campaign for green subsidies: people hate sticks, but they love carrots
We can talk about the problem. To convince politicians green policy is popular policy, we have to talk about the problem – but we need to do it in a way that’s magnetic. So: speak like you’re talking to your conservative gran. Avoid words that didn’t exist twenty years ago. Stick to the facts. Talk about opportunity and protection. Talk about accountability and responsibility.
Climate nihilism is embarrassing. It’s done. It’s time to retire it.
Please, for the first time in ten stupid, scary fucking years: talk about hope.
