Climate as a defining policy priority? Get real.

Now, more than ever, climate advocates need to avoid magical thinking about political support.

An unintended consequence of writing about Canada a few weeks ago is that the algorithm, in its artificial wisdom, now thinks I’m interested in Canada. Which led me to a new research report showing a 15% year-on-year jump in the number of Canadians who say they are concerned or very concerned about climate change. Similar research from other countries suggests that despite the best efforts and loud voices of the US government and populists elsewhere, Canadians are by no means alone.

One of the report’s eye-catching conclusions – unsupported by data – is that "there is genuine space for a third-voice narrative that elevates climate from a balancing act to a defining priority." It suggests that public concerns about climate have finally reached a tipping point whereby other concerns like growth and jobs will become somehow subsidiary.

It’s a beguiling prospect for anyone who cares about meaningful action to address climate change. But it’s also simply not realistic. To understand why, compare climate with the other global-scale existential crisis the world has had to deal with recently: Covid19.

The pandemic galvanized governments, business, science and citizens in a way many climate campaigners would like to see repeated for climate change. People changed their behaviour substantially and immediately. Business pivoted pretty much instantly too, many of them in industries like travel or hospitality staring or falling into the abyss in the process. And despite widely differing approaches (and levels of competence) exhibited, national governments got things done at a whole new level.

But climate change is different. It’s not going to be a “defining priority” that spurs action and change at pandemic levels, at least not in time to head off the worst and most irreversible impacts and the highest cost of dealing with them. It will continue to be a balancing act that requires advocates for climate action to engage with hard economic realities and trade-offs.

Here’s why. The pandemic enabled widespread and unprecedented change for two notable reasons. First, it was immediately terrifying. Sure, once it became normalized, that terror quickly gave way to jadedness among many, but that initial fear – largely of the unknown – was necessary to snap the world out of business-as-usual. Second, it was immediately relevant. Outside of countries that maintained national quarantine systems (most of which had immediate memories of the 2003 SARS outbreak), most people knew friends or family members who fell seriously ill or even died. It was right there in front of us, up close and personal in a way that climate change isn’t. Yet.

Climate change is deeply concerning, but not yet immediately terrifying. It’s not scary for most people, unless you happen to be, right now, in the path of a wildfire, flood, hurricane, or other geographically specific manifestation of climate change. It’s also not immediately relevant because those impacts, statistically speaking, are always happening to someone else.

This will change, of course, if/when weather patterns and natural disasters caused by climate change get so bad, so numerous, and so economically ruinous that they become perceived to be a clear and present threat to the lives of the majority, as well as the fortunes of the rich and politically powerful. But by then it will be too late, or at least very, very expensive.

So, if waiting for climate to get so bad that people are terrified into changing their behaviour isn’t the optimum approach, what is?

First, recognize that as long as climate change isn’t terrifying most people, most of the time, a “balancing act” of policy priorities and outcomes is the only way to get things done.

Second, by extension, stop trying to make climate the defining priority. Yes, it’s an important issue to majorities of people in pretty much every country in the world and getting more important in most, but still not urgent enough to get the level of change needed.

Instead, climate outcomes need to be integrated into a broader raft of policies that work systemically to impact most people’s more immediate needs, their quality of life, economic opportunities and overall wellbeing (needs that the Canadian research cited earlier shows still top of people’s lists). Policies, like taxing carbon and distributing the proceeds on a per capita basis, that recognize that there is a price to be paid today for dealing with the climate challenge, but secure popular support despite that by putting the burden on the minority most able to pay.

I don’t know of any government or political party, in the either the developed or developing world, that’s doing that effectively right now. That’s a huge opportunity for someone to convert the real and growing climate concerns (and demands for government action) of large majorities of populations into tangible popular support for effective climate policy.