Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
I was chatting with my teenage daughter the other day when she mentioned climate change. Inevitably, it causes her anxiety. She will probably live to see many coastal cities go under, countries become too hot to inhabit and rich havens shut out climate refugees. My instinctive response was to change the subject. I was exhibiting the new, mainstream form of climate denial: a refusal to think about climate change because it’s too painful.
I understood the “new climate denial” only after hearing a talk about it by Wolfgang Blau, head of the global climate hub at the consultancy Brunswick. Most of us practise the new denial. We’ll activate it next week during the UN’s COP28 climate summit in Dubai, which will achieve almost nothing and be overshadowed by wars and nonsense. But saving my daughter’s generation will require ditching denial. Blau, speaking at the recent Faith Angle Europe conference, suggested how to do that.
Old-style climate denial first pretended that climate change wasn’t happening, then that it wasn’t man-made. Today, Donald Trump is one of the last mainstream politicians (yes, he is that now) peddling the old denial. It’s dying out, overwhelmed by evidence.
A small group at the other end of the spectrum lives in full consciousness of the potential catastrophe. This can be traumatic. When Blau spent almost a year immersed in studying climate, his heart rate reached dangerous levels. He was becoming ill.
Most of us stay sane by looking climate change in the face only for a few days each summer when it becomes unignorable. Otherwise, our daily mental load of tasks and problems leaves just a tiny slice of headspace to devote to the world outside us. Almost all that headspace goes on thinking about the latest news in our own country. And so, says Blau, people try to “normalise” climate change as “a stable background”. However, he adds, nobody alive today will experience a stable climate again. The “normal” of the last 11,000 years is gone for ever.
This new denial takes many forms. One is “delayism”: we’ll cut emissions later, when the economy is stronger. Philippe Lamberts, co-president of the Greens in the European parliament, identifies another version of denialism — the sort that believes: “Technology will save us, so we don’t need to change anything significant.” In this comforting story, the shift to renewables will be painless. It might even make us richer! This, Lamberts warns, is a fantasy; it’s too late for a smooth transition.
We made a civilisational blunder. Correcting it will require huge collective effort now. To help people understand this, Blau recommends learning to see ourselves “as a comparatively young species, as mostly well-intentioned highly gifted kids, who compared to most species have just arrived, and are still learning to live here without breaking things.”
Then, he says, people need to know we can combat climate change. In other words, we need a sense of agency. The climate scientist Michael Mann says, “Urgency without agency just leads us towards despair and defeatism.” That produces an attitude of, “We’re doomed, so let’s just keep partying.” People could acquire that sense of agency by shrinking their own carbon footprints.
Admittedly, this risks being a diversion. Even a billion humans cutting their emissions wouldn’t achieve anything significant, with seven billion others getting richer and emitting more. Obsessing about personal footprints also plays into the strategy of fossil-fuel producers, which love to cast climate change as an individual moral responsibility. In reality, we can reach Net Zero only by transforming collective energy, and industrial and agricultural systems.
But, argues Blau, if people cut their own emissions, they can use their newfound sense of agency as citizens to elect parties that will execute a green transition now. When infrastructure changes and people can choose everyday greener alternatives such as cycling and electric cars, their sense of agency will grow.
What’s the model message to encourage collective action? Try Churchill’s speeches in spring 1940. He’s realistic, promising Britons only “blood, toil, tears and sweat”. He offers agency: “we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills.” And he admits the possibility of failure: “If this long island story of ours is to end, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground.”
If the comparison between facing peak Hitler and climate change sounds melodramatic, that’s just your denial kicking in.
Follow Simon @KuperSimon and email him at simon.kuper@ft.com
Follow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first