Is there really a movement for climate action?

If you kick out the technocrats and advisors, the doomers and shysters, who is really left at the sustainability party?

The opinions expressed in this blog post are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of EY, it’s Partners, or employees.

Here’s a sobering proposition: the window to address climate change is too narrow for democracy to negotiate the solutions.?

To the growing legions of Collapsniks, this is painfully self-evident. “Wake up and smell the embers”, they will scream. Our institutions are hopelessly ill-equipped to negotiate even moderate compromise, let alone a mass socio-economic transformation.

To many others though, the implications of that proposition are intolerable. If democracy is not the solution, what is? Some techno-corporatist plutocracy or some shadow rule by a pseudo-progressive deep state? However bad climate change is, they will say, the cure will be worse than the disease.

Last year, we went to New York Climate Week to test this dangerous hypothetical, and record some interviews with some leading thinkers on the topic (you can listen to Antithesis Talks here ), they are now ready for release and I am delighted to share their remarkably distinct takes with the sustainability collective.

By the people, for the people?

As the avoidance of catastrophic climate change is in the clear interests of a majority, the pro-climate agenda and the pro-democracy agenda have always been seen as sharing the same philosophical bed. The fact that undemocratic vested interests have always played a hand in delaying climate action has further welded the causes together. But the closer the world gets to the tipping points of this catastrophe, the more this marriage is under strain. It is not simply that the democratic process is considered too slow, or that leading democracies are backsliding into various states of disfunction. It is also that the very scientific strain of utilitarianism that has come to dominate the pro-climate narrative has as much interest in the needs of the future as it does in the wills of the present.???

At an event on the opening Monday of Climate Week, at the Tribeca offices of an investment advisory firm, this dilemma was put to a panel of eminent and committed sustainable systems thinkers. One declared that any evaluation of the ability of US democracy to address climate change was moot, because it no longer was one. One said that on due reflection, the best model for a fair and sustainable society was actually a benevolent dictator. Another pointed across to midtown and the UN building, saying the only thing that would come from the leaders at the General Assembly was “bullshit”.?? No one in the room expressed any rebuttal; these were absorbed by a selection of US civil society as self-evident truths. “There are no good choices in a bad system”,” the final panelist declared in summary, to the endorsement of a room of nodding heads.

To be clear, the climate community is not calling for the overthrow of democracy - far from it. But the community does seem to be succumbing to a sort of nihilistic utopianism.? This is the belief that real progress will only be achieved through such a fundamentally reformed democracy that the present-day efforts of ordinary citizens are effectively hopeless.?

Even at the more benign events throughout the week, investors, clean tech entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 executives?were heard calling for little less than a complete overhaul of capitalism and the social contract for the climate crises to be properly resolved. “Our leaders are failing us” said panels of powerful people , universally introduced to their audiences as leaders , adding, “we are missing the political will to expedite the transition and foster new equitable pathways for sustainable growth”. It seems in the analysis of climate inaction, the pressure to demonstrate political will flows only upward.

Observing the activity around Climate Week, one could be forgiven for thinking that democracies only produced anti-climate governments determined to frustrate the will of the people. In fact, remarkably enough, the opposite is true. The US, India, Indonesia, Brazil, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, Canada, Spain, Australia and numerous others have all elected governments with pro-climate policies. To be certain, some of these governments have expressed less appetite than their opposition, while others have expressed just enough token ambition not to make themselves unelectable. But in most cases, the popularly elected government has expressed more climate ambition that their main opposition, including in the US. But a far more important factor unites these examples — all these governments were elected on a pro-climate non-interventionist platform.

While their opponents usually cast them as deep-green fundamentalists, in reality, none of these governments even toyed with the idea of big-government interventionist systems change.? None of them proposed nationalizing industries to force through emissions reductions; none of them legislated science-based emissions reduction targets or sought any substantial increase in power to achieve economic decarbonization. Why? Because a majority of the voting public would not stand for it.??? To get elected, every pro-climate campaign across the democratic world had to commit to letting the citizenry fill the gaps between high-level policy ambition and real-world outcomes. While this is also very politically convenient, the fact remains that the consistent public will has been for political will to only go so far.?

It’s interesting then, that political will should be so consistently regarded as the fundamental missing ingredient of meaningful climate action, particularly among the corporate community who make up a large cohort of the ‘’socially progressive, economically conservative’’ center-left voting bloc that have kept interventionist proposals on a tight leash.?? This group have been arguing for years that corporations should be accountable for their impacts and externalities, but they have never supported any substantial movement to further empower governments to do so. Climate politics across so much of the democratic world has amounted to accountable and empowered people asking for elevated responsibility and effectively getting it.

This does not absolve governments from having primary custody of the climate change agenda. But, a system where the weight of responsibility to achieve real-world emissions reductions falls on an empowered citizenry is, for better or worse, one of the more popular proposals of this torturously?divided era.

So, why are we still appealing for leadership and institutional overhaul? Why is the baton not being thrust into the eager hands of the privileged classes to get on with it?

Perhaps, it’s because the climate movement is actually at a complete loss when it comes to people power — who has it, who needs it and how to mobilize it at scale.

While in New York, I peeled off from the mainstages and interviewed two of the US’s leading thinkers on the topic of private versus public power, Anand Giridharadas and Douglas Rushkoff. Giridharadas authored one of the most devastating recent critiques of corporate sustainability in Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World, which was followed by The Persuaders, a study of the art of collaborative change-making across social divides. Rushkoff has authored numerous books on the need to wrestle the open-source potential of the internet back from the hyper-industrialism of big tech, culminating in his most recent title Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Elite.

In interviewing Giridharadas and Rushkoff, (you can find links to their podcasts here ), we expected a healthy challenge to the corporate solutioneering widespread at Climate Week. But what we did not expect was such an eye-opening (and at times withering) appraisal of the failure of pro-climate movement building, in particular, our failure to make climate action an expression of democratic freedom rather than a complaint against a detached political class.

To be fair, major climate conferences like COP and Climate Week NYC have never set themselves the task of popular movement building, nor, generally, do the people who attend it. It is a gathering of business people, consultants, non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and diplomats engaging on the intellectualized end of the change spectrum, on nature-based solutions and artificial intelligence (AI), and on reporting protocols and systems change driven by reimagined conceptions of growth and value. The grass-roots climate movement has always been seen as the other end of the spectrum, and its simmering anger and inter-generational resentment has helped us justify why institutions needed to heed us before they were forcibly reformed by the mob. It has been such a useful devise that we’ve largely forgotten that there never really was such a movement, or at least not one worthy of the title.??

White-collar allies ought to have realized that if there was a major climate movement capable of shifting the course of history, we would need to be in it.? By the crudest estimates, the number of white-collar professionals around the world runs into the hundreds of millions. Hundreds of millions of people with, generally speaking, more resources and access than the rest of the population. A material percentage of this number are under the age of 35.? Take this group out of the mix, and the climate movement becomes little more than a sub-culture.

Your author?joined the New York climate march on the Sunday before Climate Week, that wound through some of the most corporatized and gentrified streets on the planet, and there was barely a white-collar archetype to be seen. Almost everyone there came from a pre-mobilized community who would have turned up for almost any progressive rally on that day.? The crowd skewed visibly younger and older, and the chants were of people on the economic margins shouting inward, there was no real sense of actual rebellion or of people on the inside refusing to do as they were told. Corporate insiders, even corporate sustainability and environmental, social, and governance (ESG) professionals (with which New York teems), seemed largely to have stayed home.

It is easy to explain their absence as cynical self-preservation and for a certain number, this about sums it up. But to our guests, the real explanation is that the climate movement doesn’t really move people despite all the reasons it should. In Giridharadas’ words, we’ve turned what ought to be an inspiring and captivating cause into a “broccoli party” — a dour and purist agenda that leaves ordinary people lukewarm.?

The tireless and gracious hosts of this broccoli party who, after all, have been slugging it out in our collective best interests, might reasonably question if they should have to jazz up the canapes to get the guests in the door.? Is the fate of human civilization not enough, and do we really need to find a way to make self-preservation fun?

But to Giridharadas and Rushkoff, it is less about fun and more about eudaimonia — the classical notion of happiness through virtue. Viewed in this way, the criticism becomes fairer. Outside of committed alternative lifestylers, the mainstream climate and sustainability community have never really encouraged everyday people to find inspiration through struggle. We have, ironically enough, tended to assume that self-interest was its own reward.

Furthermore, climate and sustainability advocates have actively distanced themselves from the topic of individual responsibility, seeing it as a calculated diversion from the real origin of the majority of the world’s emissions: large corporations. But this overlooks the responsibilities of the individuals within those corporations, who are not in the boardroom or on the picket line, people who are just ‘‘doing their job’’ well behind the front lines of public debate.

The idea of students and retirees being asked to make personal sacrifices for industrial decarbonization can seem tragically idealistic when one investment decision by one corporation can lock in more emissions that a thousand of their lifetimes. But who is speaking to the individuals facilitating those investment decisions? What source of moral courage are they going to draw upon to take the path of most resistance, triple bottom line reporting?

The reality is that the avoidance of catastrophic climate change will only succeed if the corporate classes acknowledge the problem as theirs. This does not mean a bunch of millionaire executives finding their north star in some alpine retreat?— this means people with mortgages, school fees and a host of other challenges interpreting their responsibilities in ways that make their lives more difficult. Because, it’s one thing to embrace conscious capitalism at a facilitated workshop, but it is another to live it when no one else in the room wants you to, particularly when sales are down, budgets are being cut and it’s not in your position description anyway. This, along with a chorus of ”why aren’t you a team player” and “don’t you know who pays the bills”, and all the other lazy obstructions heaped on new ideas when the timing isn’t perfect.?

The uncomfortable truth of the corporate world is that the shortest path to happiness is to disassociate from the wider consequences to the real one and see your responsibilities through the aperture of what you’re paid to be responsible for. This might seem like an esoteric problem, but it is far more consequential than the muted will of a comparatively miniscule political class.

And that is why Giridharadas and Rushkoff argue that we need to try much harder to move people, and why we can’t bury the reality of the privileged persons dilemma behind technocratic fixes that attempt to magic up economic rationales to solve inherently moral problems. We need to mobilize the white-collar mass through the truth of the challenge, not the fantasy of the win-win.

It is the seeming hopelessness of this task that has long steered us toward techno-institutional change rather than mass behavioral change but, they argue, there is little evidence that we have really tried. Where, asks Giridharadas, are all of the great presidential climate speeches? Not one, in all the years — this has been a definitive issue for mankind. Indeed, what are the great climate orations generally, and where are the speeches that mark a permanent change in the discourse? Most people, when asked, can’t think of any. Most people, asked to name the great moral authorities on sustainable development, revert with the same two names, David Attenborough and Greta Thunberg. There are numerous other thinkers and politicians who have greatly enriched the discourse and who will rightfully be remembered as warriors for the cause, but only a handful who are iconic of it.?

This is starkly at odds with the potency and universality of the issue and speaks of how unromantic our movement has somehow become. Climate and sustainability advocates grew so tired of being dismissed as “utopians” that we switched to the language of dystopia, trading the hard work of inspiration for the faster effects of fear, and for a while, it felt like it was working. The notion of catastrophic risk helped climate change permeate the world of “good governance”; it helped to activate the precautionary principles of long-term investors; it built moral authority out of scientific authority and mobilized a certain number of parents through the fear of the future being left to their kids. On paper, it seemed like a winning formula to reach more people than environmentalism could, and many still argue that it is, but the natural instincts of people, when facing a risk, is not to actually solve the underlying problem, it is to hedge against its effects. Once people feel like they have done that for themselves and their dependents (as many of the worlds privileged people believe they have), the case for systemic change becomes significantly harder. The language of dystopia has driven privileged people to work even harder to insulate themselves from vulnerability, while ultimately diminishing the belief that the underlying problem can be solved in the collective interest. This does not mean we shouldn’t remind the world of the peril it is putting itself in, and the fixed window in which we have to fix it, but this has to be the context for the message, not the message itself.?

People like to draw parallels to the Allied mobilization around World War II (WWII) to demonstrate that we can pivot entire societies toward a shared problem when we really have to, but while it is a tempting analogy, it is perhaps not the model we’re after. WWII involved mass conscription and martial law and it was all over in six years. It was a fight or flight moment that did not require prolonged preservation of consensus to sustain change. Perhaps a better model, however lofty, is the Renaissance. Despite powerful and entrenched orthodoxies, and the distraction of plagues and crises, a network of thinkers drove remarkable leaps forward in science, philosophy and the arts, that steered the course of history onto a markedly higher plane.

While scholars will debate the specific mix of ingredients that drove the Renaissance, all agree that a central feature was humanism — the belief in human agency and freedom and our responsibility to invest in our own moral reasoning and development. Humanism liberated freedom from the edicts of institutions, but still made it something to be worthy of, not just defended.?

The climate movement needs to re-engage with the grand humanism at the heart of sustainable development, an agenda that is less about saving the planet than it is about realizing its potential. It must reinforce that sustainability is an expression of human genius, a way to liberate ourselves from those who would tell us our destiny is preordained. Perhaps most crucially, it needs to embolden people to take risks, flirt with outrage, to hunger for the solidarity of counter-culture and, in the words of Rushkoff, convince people that if we’re not doing it now, we’re not doing it at all.

?