A better way to face climate change

The current approach is ineffective, divisive, disempowering and will make life miserable

While 10 years ago climate activists had good reason to complain that governments and the media weren't paying enough attention to the dangers of climate change, the eruption of Fridays For Future after Greta Thunberg's school strike in 2018 changed the panorama. Since then, Europe's mainstream media have gone to great lengths to make climate change one of their top topics, and most European governments have certainly stepped up their policies in one way or another.

But climate activists from Fridays for Future, Last Generation, Extinction Rebellion, Just Stop Oil and others do not consider current government efforts sufficient. Instead, they are calling for more drastic, unilateral action by European governments. They fear that time is running out and that it is up to them to save the world at the last minute. If drastic action is not taken soon, many of these activists believe that billions of people will die and society will collapse. Many of these mostly very young activists are desperate because they feel like lone fighters in a world of ignorance. Many have experienced real trauma, or what is now often called climate anxiety. Their public behaviour often oscillates between fanatical calls for authoritarian climate politics and an inability to cope emotionally with the enormity of the task they have taken on.

At the same time, the public is living in an unprecedentedly fragmented reality when it comes to this issue. A significant proportion of the population now believes that much of what they have been told about climate change by the media and elites in recent decades is untrue. A study by the organisation More in Common in 2022 in the six largest European countries found that 21% of the population believe that climate change is "part of the natural cycle of the earth and human activity", 3% believe that "climate change is not happening at all" and 8% say they don't know whether climate change is caused by humans. These figures are significantly higher among the younger generation (18-29 year olds).

The ability of social media to spread and popularise ideas faster than ever before is one of the reasons why both the Friday for Future phenomenon and the climate sceptic communities have grown so quickly.

According to the same More in Common study, a large majority of the European population (68%) believes that climate change is real and caused by human activity. However, among this large majority, scepticism about efforts to tackle climate change and the solutions offered is high. Most people feel that international efforts to tackle climate change are failing and many are concerned that government efforts to tackle climate change will make life worse and be very expensive.

I'm writing this essay because I've come to the conclusion that there is something deeply wrong with the current mainstream narrative on climate change and the way governments and our main institutions, especially the media, are approaching the issue. This has real-life consequences: It makes people feel unnecessarily disempowered and guilty, and instead of solving the problem, it will make our lives more miserable for years to come.

How journalists became educators

Across Europe, the mainstream media narrative on climate change, which had previously been fairly neutral, shifted significantly in 2018, when Greta Thunberg was quickly elevated by the media to the status of a saint, like a Jeanne d'Arc who would save us from climate change.

Since then, as part of a wider phenomenon of change in journalism, the conversation about climate change has shifted from reporting the news to educating the public. It is very clear that many journalists, more often than not belonging to the green-left urban milieu, now believe that it is their job to sound the alarm about climate change, often in a moralising tone, as if they want - consciously or not - to make their audience feel guilty (for not doing enough about climate change). 

We know this from the Covid years, when most of the scientists who appeared in the media were those who sounded the loudest alarms about the dangers of the virus and called for the toughest restrictions, while dissenting views were rarely given airtime. A 2019 study shows a similar picture of the German media's portrayal of climate science: those scientists who are most certain about the catastrophic consequences of climate change dominate the media landscape, while the uncertainties clearly discussed in successive IPCC reports are rarely mentioned in the media.

The educational narrative is particularly evident in TV weather forecasting - the examples I know best are the public broadcasters in Spain and Germany. When temperatures are high, weather presenters now often add some dramatic phrases to the news, saying things like "we are experiencing the climate crisis first hand" or that these temperatures will be the new normal if we don't reduce emissions very soon. Many broadcasters have also changed the colour scheme of their weather maps to add some drama. Where 25 or 27 degrees Celsius used to be somewhere between yellow and orange, the same temperatures are now often shown as deep red. While the broadcasters deny that the intention is to add drama and make these temperatures seem more frightening, given the general dramatisation of weather news, it seems likely that the colour scheme also implies an intention on the part of at least some decision-makers in these media institutions.

Maps from the German TV news "Tagesschau". Left from 1997 and right from 2023

While it is clear that the intention behind these climate conscious weather messages is to raise public awareness of climate change, it is less clear whether this will ultimately lead to any positive change. However, it's very likely that these types of messages are contributing to the high number of young people who now suffer from climate anxiety - 50% of 16-25 year olds, according to a 2021 study.

Everyone in Spain knows that temperatures are rising - the last few summers have been particularly hot. There is no need to dramatise things further, especially when it is unclear what people can actually do about it. The weather presenter's message that "these temperatures will be the new normal if we don't reduce emissions very soon" implies that if we in Spain started reducing greenhouse gas emissions tomorrow, temperatures would soon return to normal. But this is a lie.

Spain emits less than 1% of the world's greenhouse gases. Even if Spain reduced its emissions to zero, it would have virtually no effect on temperatures during its own summers, and even if all the countries in the world coordinated and reduced their emissions immediately, it would take decades for the climate to be affected.

Almost the entire climate discourse ignores the fact that climate change is a collective action problem, and that national action will only make a difference if all the major climate-polluting regions and countries on Earth somehow take similar steps. The whole moralising discourse that accuses national government officials of being responsible for climate catastrophe if they don't change some national policy very soon is completely dishonest, and people know it.

Climate emergency without agency

Since 2019, the terms "climate emergency" and "climate crisis" have gradually replaced "climate change" as the standard term in public communication by governments and other institutions. This is clearly the result of a deliberate decision to sound the alarm on the issue and demand much more urgent action.

But it is also part of a wider trend to keep our societies in a permanent state of emergency. Since the terrorist attacks of 9/11, many Western countries have been living under permanent legal states of emergency. The Covid-19 state of emergency also appears to be ongoing, with the imposition of masks, for example, continuing whenever the authorities deem it necessary. And now we are being told that we must prepare for war with Russia.

The city government of Barcelona, where I live, offers so-called climate shelters (refugios climáticos), which are basically public buildings such as public libraries with air conditioning, where people can spend time on hot days when their homes are too hot. I think it is a good idea, but the language of 'shelter from the climate' adds to this sense of emergency with the explicit aim to communicate that what is happening is not normalcy. But a return to normalcy is not part of the plan. As it seems, the climate shelters are planned for the long term, for a permanent state of emergency and for living in a permanent state of fear.

An emergency is supposed to be an unexpected, acutely dangerous situation that requires immediate action. While I understand why climate activists are convinced that climate change fits this definition, it requires deeper reflection. I think the emotion that is being conveyed is counterproductive, will not lead to good solutions and will only add to the growing anxiety.

I remember meetings of climate activists in 2006 where it was said that we only had 10 years to change things before disaster struck. In 2019, the same 10 years were being proposed by a new generation of activists with the same conviction, and so on. I remember a respected activist saying on Facebook in 2022 that this was probably the last summer we would be able to enjoy.

I can well imagine that climate change will have a serious and potentially disruptive impact on our civilization in the coming years, but it is also clear that the many predictions of the end of the world have not yet come to pass. How the changing climate will affect human life depends on so many factors, including how we adapt to the changes, that it is impossible to predict. What is clear, however, is that we can't tackle climate change in the short term. The problem is too complex to be solved any time soon. Transitioning away from fossil fuels in a coordinated way across humanity is clearly immensely complex. (I am well aware that such a focus on fossil fuels is a reductionist way of looking at 'the problem', and that we need to look at things in a much more holistic way. But more on that later).

Any government or organisation using the term 'climate emergency' should be able to communicate what immediate, decisive action will solve the problem in the foreseeable future. The reality is that they don't have a plan, even if they pretend they do.

The case of Germany is the most striking. The country’s government and elite institutions claim to be able to switch the country's entire energy consumption to renewables in the next 20 years. The mainstream narrative sees this primarily as a question of sufficient investment in solar and wind energy and a move away from gas, coal and oil, while the economy continues to flourish as usual. 

It is already clear that this will not work. High subsidies for renewable energy have meant that energy costs in Germany are among the highest in the world, making Germany increasingly uncompetitive on the global market and discouraging many companies from investing in Germany. This is a classic example of misunderstanding the game theoretical implications of the global collective action problem that is climate change. Germans tell themselves that Germany is leading the way and showing the rest of the world the way. But the rest of the world increasingly sees Germany as a cautionary tale that no one wants to follow.

The German economist Hans-Werner Sinn offers another powerful argument for why unilateral national action to reduce consumption of internationally traded commodities like oil and gas won't make any difference to climate change: if one country reduces its consumption of oil or gas, the market price of the commodity will fall, and other parts of the world will be happy to consume their energy at a cheaper cost and increase their demand.

On windy, sunny summer days, Germany already produces much more (mostly renewable) energy than it can consume, leading to negative energy prices. Because wind and solar energy are highly unpredictable, fossil fuels cannot be easily replaced by renewables until cheap energy storage becomes available. So unless mankind finds a new cheap and reliable source of energy, or relies on nuclear power, it seems unlikely that industrial societies can become fossil-free and continue at current levels of production.

This is not to suggest that we should sacrifice the climate for economic growth, nor am I calling for degrowth. What I am arguing here is that our political and societal leaders are sounding the alarm by declaring a climate emergency, and while they pretend to offer a plan to solve the problem - by switching to renewable energy, electric cars, etc. - in reality their plan solves nothing.

The only thing the current approach achieves is to make more and more people miserable. Most people see that governments have no control over climate change. People don't know what to do about it either, because they don't feel they have any agency, and they fear that their lives will only get worse in the coming years, partly because of the effects of climate change, but also because of the immense economic burdens that governments are imposing on them in the name of tackling the problem.

An honest, empowering and hopeful approach

Here are a few ideas for how we could start creating a better narrative and steps towards a better future.

It's not an emergency, it's a long-term reality – Everyone should accept that the climate is changing and that it's going to be a long and bumpy road - that doesn't mean life has to be miserable, instead we should trust our human ingenuity to preserve the common good over the coming decades. We need to move away from the concept of emergency. Emergencies are situations with a clear time horizon and clarity about what needs to be done to solve a problem. This is not the case. Emergencies also make governments feel entitled to take away our civil liberties, but our recent experience with Covid has shown that authoritarian measures rarely solve anything, but instead create a lot of suffering. Change can only be positive if it is done with the people and without installing fear and anxiety. With such a different mindset, we can have much better conversations about how best to adapt to a changing climate, while seeking better ways to live in harmony with and regenerate our natural world.

Stop moralising about climate change – Moralising our public conversation stifles all creative exchange. It only perpetuates an apparent consensus that may be wrong and prevents us from exploring the best solutions to our problems. Everyone should stop referring to people in demeaning ways, such as calling them 'climate change deniers', or trying to make them feel guilty for not behaving up to a certain standard. It won't win anyone over to the cause, but will increase polarisation.

Rebuild trust in science –  I continue to trust that the majority of climate scientists who believe that climate change is largely anthropogenic are right. Of course, I can't know for myself, because I don't have a deep understanding of the climate models, so it's impossible to make my own judgement, but I follow who is saying what, and I see that even people who are sceptical about the political implications of the science and have a deep understanding of the science agree with the consensus view.

But more and more people have lost faith in climate science, and I don't blame them, especially after what was sold to the public as science during the Covid years was in fact the result of a deeply corrupt process that had nothing to do with science. It led to disastrous consequences for our societies, including very likely long-term negative health consequences for all of us who took the experimental so-called vaccines.

Unfortunately, climate science suffers from the same disease, where certain research findings are favoured over others, and find their way into the leading scientific journals much more easily than when the research contradicts the narrative. Climate scientist Patrick Brown went public last year with just such an accusation. He had just published a paper in the prestigious journal Nature. He revealed how he had deliberately designed his research to fit a narrative he knew Nature would ascribe to, and which would help him get published and further his career. He argued that cherry-picking data isn't uncommon in climate science. "It's just the general kind of zeitgeist of the field. To be a good climate impact researcher is to highlight the negative impacts of climate change."

Truly good science requires an openness to alternative hypotheses, which should be tested where possible. For example, I have no reason to dismiss the findings of a 2023 paper that argues that the global temperature increase from 1850 to the present has been significantly lower in rural areas than in a mix of urban and rural areas, consistent with most current estimates - in other words, that climate science doesn't take the urban heat factor sufficiently into account in its estimates. 

We should reject the modern idea of "following the science" and return to the idea that scepticism is actually a good thing and necessary for good science. A scientific consensus, no matter how strong, should never become dogma, but should always be seen as an interim state. 

Adapting to a changing climate – While climate science is full of uncertainties, if I understand the most likely scenarios for the coming decades correctly, we can expect rising temperatures (in some places more than others), more frequent extreme weather events and rising sea levels. My suggestion is that, since all this is largely inevitable anyway, let's stop painting a gloomy picture of our near future, accept the things we can't change, and make the best of the situation. Let's roll up our sleeves!

While this may seem like the obvious way to deal with the situation, I have come to believe that this is not the general mood. I'm sensing a mixture of denial, this sense of emergency that we must prevent this from happening, but also a degree of resignation, as if we must accept our fate and pay the price for having caused climate change.

Last March, the Mediterranean coast of Catalonia was hit by a severe storm. Many beaches lost all their sand and infrastructure was badly damaged. In the midst of this destruction, however, there was one large beach in a coastal town called Premià de Mar that was completely unaffected. The reason was that the mayor of this town had used funds provided by the Spanish government for beach protection measures, basically some simple dykes to protect the beach (see picture). Many other coastal towns had refused the money offered to them by the state. The mayor of Premià has the positive spirit that we should all have in the face of climate change. The beaches are such an important part of life in Spain that it doesn't make sense to let them go in resignation, especially when there are relatively cheap ways of preserving them for many years to come.

Premià de Mar beach in Catalonia (Source: On Economía).

In Germany, summers are also getting hotter and very few buildings have air conditioning. This includes offices, schools and universities. Even new buildings rarely have air conditioning. The main reason for this is that air conditioning is energy intensive, and using more energy when we should be reducing energy consumption in the face of climate change is seen as unethical. While I don't think that all buildings in Germany should have air conditioning, and I am in favour of saving energy wherever possible, I do think that it will have very negative consequences if workplaces, and especially classrooms and university lecture theatres, heat up in the summer to such an extent that any intellectual work becomes virtually impossible. 

There is even the possibility of running air conditioning systems entirely on solar energy, since hot days only occur when the sun is strongest in the summer, so there is no coupling problem. In any case, a nation that has built its economy on cognitive excellence cannot afford to have students in classrooms at 35 degrees Celsius.

But there is so much more we can do to reduce the heat in our cities, by making them greener, by planting more trees, by designing our buildings to be better adapted to the hotter climate, and by making them as comfortable as possible to live in without using more energy. The aim should be for everyone to be able to live comfortably in their homes, so that climate shelters don't become the long-term norm.  

Climate change doesn't mean we have to accept that important aspects of our good life will disappear. We can preserve much of it, although times may be harsher in the future. Adapting to climate change should be one of the big issues of the coming years. Empowering people to become part of the adaptation process could help turn fear into a sense of agency.

Living the good life in harmony with nature – Imposing expensive (net zero) climate change policies on the population inevitably backfires, as we are seeing in many European countries where populist parties are benefiting from the discontent. In particular, unilaterally damaging a nation's economy while other economies around the world continue to thrive is the wrong approach. But that doesn't mean that nothing can be done to reduce the negative impact of European societies on the climate.

There are so many signs that more and more people are realising, for a variety of reasons, that the modern energy-intensive lifestyle and the globalised energy-intensive production model are having more negative than positive consequences. 

The latest phase of hyper-globalisation is clearly coming to an end. The working classes in Western countries have been rebelling against deindustrialisation for years. The risks of disruption to our highly globalised supply chains are increasingly understood. There are clearly a number of win-win situations in a world where global trade is reduced to a lower level: more resilient economies, less environmental impact and decent industrial jobs, including in the West.

Our age of hyper-mobility and mass tourism is being challenged as never before, for reasons other than carbon emissions and environmental impact. In so many of the cities and places that have been invaded by tourists, the local population is increasingly rebelling against the business model of growth. People are realising that no amount of money can compensate them for the losses they suffer when their city is turned into a mere theme park. The latest anti-tourism movements in Spanish cities simply want fewer tourists. The idea that the only solution to the problem is for us all to travel less and stay at home more, and that travelling more and more doesn't actually make us happier, is now increasingly being discussed in the mainstream, whereas until recently it was a radical fringe idea.

Our hyper-individualistic and hyper-consumerist society has created an epidemic of loneliness and misery for many people in our societies. Our fertility rates in the industrialised world are at an all-time low and will create unimaginable problems in the years to come unless we can reverse this.

As I have discussed before, more and more people are now realising that the era of hyper-liberalism of the last 40 to 50 years has had too many downsides, and that we need a new model for our societies that creates more human flourishing. There is much potential for everyone in our societies to become actively involved in deliberating how to shape this new era of post-liberalism so that we protect the common good, create human flourishing and live in harmony with nature.

We should all refocus our energies on what really matters in life: creating strong families, stable and thriving communities, solidarity across generations, an economy that provides stable and meaningful work, and a new relationship with nature that is regenerative.

The effects of deforestation, soil loss, biodiversity loss, peatland drainage and other land use changes also contribute significantly to climate change. Any local activities that regenerate these ecosystems could potentially be more valuable than, say, installing solar panels.

Instead of instilling more fear about climate change and making people feel guilty about their lifestyles, we need to engage people in a process of searching for a model of society that actively promotes a good life for all in harmony with nature.

Tackle the collective action problem – None of this solves the collective action problem: the fact that a country that continues to rely more on fossil fuels for the time being is more competitive than one that tries to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels more quickly. 

The fact that international climate negotiations have not yet produced the kind of agreements that allow the sort of coordinated and controlled action that would be needed leads to general frustration every year when the big meetings take place. But then we don't discuss these issues until the following year. 

The reality that the West is increasingly viewed with hostility by the rest of the world community does not make it any easier to find a mechanism that works. Again, it is an urgent task for Western diplomacy to eliminate all the moralising in its dealings with the rest of the world's nations that has created so much mistrust. The focus should be entirely on finding fair solutions to our collective action problems. We should start leaving the rest of the world alone on issues that don't affect us. This could help us to focus on what is important for all citizens of the planet.

We should have much more and much more ongoing discussions about what can be done to improve effectiveness. Our political and societal leaders would gain credibility if they all acknowledged much more openly the centrality of the collective action problem.

When ordinary people see that their leaders are doing their best to find cooperative and fair solutions to our collective problems as a planetary community, this will create general trust. After all, this is the way cultural evolution has worked since its beginnings, however difficult the problem of collective action may have seemed in the first place.