Everyone is calling for a reset on climate action these days – from the Cambridge Institute for Sustainability Leadership to Tony Blair and to the European Commission. These calls are co-incident with the new Trump administration, but not driven by it. They are driven more by a recognition of the flawed assumptions in our theories of change, which are becoming glaringly apparent as we sail past 1.5C with carbon emissions still rising.
We need to reset, not because we have the wrong goal, but because we have the wrong strategy.
There is less consensus on what that reset should be. That’s healthy because one reset we need is to reject the idea of a single creed for what climate action must involve. The definitive truth of climate science doesn’t translate into a definitive truth for climate action. There are trade-offs depending on our priorities, and people in different industries and different countries have legitimately different values and agendas.
To embrace this pluralism, here’s a proposal for a critical element of the reset. We should separate climate action from social justice.
This isn’t to say that social justice doesn’t matter, but we should address it independently of climate, ending the conflation of the two which we have accepted for decades and which is holding up our progress.
The arguments for separating the two issues are both practical and logical. Practically, when we position climate change as a progressive, left-wing issue integrated with social justice, we alienate those on the political right who worry about climate change, but won’t sign up to a response they don’t support. And we need them.
This matters more than we might think because today there are more people worried about climate change on the right than on the left. In the US, as many as 70 million adult Americans who consider themselves to be on the right are worried about climate change compared with 60 million who regard themselves as Liberal or on the left.
That’s 70 million people who could be voting and advocating for climate action, but largely are not because they don’t connect with the prevailing narrative that blends climate action with social justice, government control and constraints on freedom.
Aside from their numbers, these people are an attractive constituency because they are well disposed to the idea of transition. The climate-worried right are much more positive about the future than the climate-worried left and have a greater appetite for change.
Then there’s the logical argument. Among the many UN Sustainable Development Goals, climate action, together with very few closely related goals concerning resource loss, have a unique claim to our universal support. This claim comes from their objective urgency and importance.
For most of the goals, delay means maintaining the status quo. For these select goals, it means losing it, probably irreversibly. Failure in these goals is not just a missed opportunity to improve society. Failure would prevent the continuity of how we live today, whoever we are. Bundling these goals with others that do not share this objective urgency and importance invalidates their claim to universal support.
These arguments are challenging to many who work in climate and sustainability because the blending of climate and social justice runs deep. We see it in ESG, in whose composite metrics climate targets are interchangeable with diversity, equity and inclusion.
It is baked into our treaties on climate change, going back to the Earth Summit in Rio in 1992. The Paris Agreement links climate action to sustainable development, eradication of poverty, a just transition of the workforce, the rights of Indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, gender equality, empowerment of women, intergenerational equity and more. COP meetings are dominated by negotiations about the transfer of wealth from developed to developing countries and demands for climate justice.
Yet there is nothing inherent to climate change that makes it a progressive issue. Indeed in the UK, the first political leader to take it seriously was Margaret Thatcher. The politicisation has grown out of ideologically driven perspectives about how we should respond. To win support for climate action from the climate-worried on the right as well as the left, we need to challenge these perspectives. Which ones are fundamental to the objective urgency of climate change itself and which are a political choice among available options?
When you start looking with that lens, it is remarkable how often you see companies and financial institutions cross that line. Sometimes it is explicit, such as an intervention from a prominent corporate chief sustainability officer at a conference I recently attended to say that “making the connection between the sustainability movement and the social justice movement is the number one thing for corporates to do”.
Usually it is more subliminal: brief references to equity, or to creating “a just world” – apparently innocuous, but heard by some as an alarm signal of a redistributive social agenda that the audience must apparently sign up to as part of the climate cause.
Separated from the social justice agenda, climate teams – whether corporate or investor – are likely to make greater progress with corporate leadership teams. This is partly because they can focus on aligning the climate agenda with the commercial self-interest of the business, which is a critical part of the reset. In many cases it may also be because the corporate leaders themselves are representatives of the climate-worried right.
Simon Glynn is founder of Zero Ideas, challenging leadership thinking on climate action.
