The Silent Majority on Climate Change
The left can’t save the planet on its own. Luckily, it doesn’t need to.
If you had a campaign budget to drive government action on climate change in the United States, what would be the most effective way to spend it? In a meeting I was in to discuss that question, someone came up with a striking answer: We should spend it all on the issue of abortion. They argued that the best way to drive government action on climate change is for the Democrats to hold power, and the best issue to campaign on to achieve that outcome is not climate, but abortion.
This type of thinking, even if rarely so crisply formulated, is entrenched in the climate movement. Even the corporate and financial worlds, which have been puffing their own ability to lead the climate effort, increasingly see that we depend on bold government action to tackle greenhouse gas emissions. And they figure that it is much easier to get that action from a government that is conducive to it, which a future Kamala Harris administration would likely be.
But grounding climate action in progressive politics is self-limiting and ultimately self-defeating. Most people in the climate movement would agree that to tackle climate change we need support and action across the economy and society, continually reinforced over time, and therefore over multiple election cycles. It may be true that if we could first elect progressive pro-environment governments all across the democratic world, it would become relatively easy to do what needs to be done. But nobody can seriously expect that to happen.
The progressive-only approach is not only unfeasible; it is also unnecessary, because there is a strong foundation of support for government action on climate change on the political right. Unwittingly, the narrative of climate-as-progressive-politics is suppressing this support. We don’t see it because we don’t speak to it, so it stays silent and largely latent.
Last year, I co-authored a major study on attitudes towards climate change. We surveyed 58,000 people in 23 countries, and the results show a remarkable commitment to solving climate change across the political spectrum.
In Europe, it is often assumed that the recent elections showing a swing to the far right were a blow to Europe’s climate agenda. But a large number of these voters are actually in favor of climate interventions. In France, 71% of people who support Marine Le Pen’s National Rally agree with the statement, “I support immediate action by the government to address climate change,” and only 12% disagree. The numbers are similar in Italy for Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy: 74% agree and only 11% disagree. In fact, only one major party among the European countries we surveyed had less than a majority of supporters in favor of government action on climate change: Alternative für Deutschland in Germany (26% agree, 47% disagree).
The results are similar for North America. Among supporters of the Republican Party, more agree with the need for immediate government action on climate change (41%) than disagree (39%). Canada’s Conservative Party meanwhile has a majority of supporters in favor (52% to 29%).
These results show that large numbers of people on both left and right support tackling climate change. But while their motivations are similar—both left and right want to leave behind a better world for the next generation—the measures they will support in order to achieve this are often different.
Using the same research data, we segmented the global public into groups based solely on their self-declared moral values and beliefs. This segmentation revealed two quite different groups who support climate action: one left-leaning and one right-leaning.
The left-leaning group are a familiar type. These are people who trust their national government and believe in an egalitarian role for the state to meet basic needs for food, housing, healthcare and education, with society run for the sake of the public rather than special interests. As a broad generalization, the prevailing global narratives on climate change, from organizations like the United Nations and from the climate movement more broadly, seem designed to appeal to this group.
The right-leaning group are less familiar. These people are skeptical about the government’s role in their everyday lives, and generally believe we would be better off with less state involvement. They, too, have strong egalitarian morals, but they look for equality more in shared opportunity than in government intervention. They are optimistic, confident about the future, and believe that the world will be a better place for their children than it was for them. Particularly prevalent in the Global South, they tend to be younger, more urban, actively religious, and socially integrated into their families and communities. These supporters on the right are looking for growth and prosperity, and see sustainability as the way to achieve that, not as a substitute for it. For example, they are twice as likely to agree that we should solve climate change in order to “protect ourselves and put our national interests first.”
Unsurprisingly, the prevailing global narratives on climate change do not fit so well with this second group. The tension is most overt in language about climate policies, often heavy on restraint and social justice and light on opportunity and growth. The 2015 Paris Agreement, for example, talks about “the rights of indigenous peoples, local communities, migrants, children, persons with disabilities and people in vulnerable situations and the right to development, as well as gender equality, empowerment of women and intergenerational equity.” The tension is amplified by much of the climate movement, and reflected in titles such as “Decarbonization requires redistribution,” the chapter co-authored by Thomas Piketty and Lucas Chancel in Greta Thunberg’s The Climate Book. It also permeates the corporate world, with its heavy focus on “environmental, social and governance” (ESG), which lumps the climate agenda together with diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives.
Simple arithmetic, however, shows the importance of appealing to both the left and the right. The left group of climate supporters alone is not the majority in any of the countries we researched. But the left and right groups, between them, make up the majority in 15 of the 23 countries. Connecting with those on the right is critical to winning support for climate policies, and won’t happen naturally when climate narratives are tuned to the left.
In fact, the prize for connecting with the right is bigger than just making the arithmetic work. Here are three other vital benefits from winning the right’s support.
The first is continuity. The deep, structural transformations needed in our energy systems, agriculture, transport and industry require investors’ confidence that government commitment will be sustained over multiple election cycles. Cross-party support is critical to achieve this.
The second is global reach. The left group is particularly prevalent in Latin America and some countries in the Global North, but is under-represented in big Asian countries which have high and rising emissions. By contrast, the right group accounts for the majority of people in some of these Asian countries, such as China and India. As the world’s carbon emissions rebalance, with emissions generally decreasing in North America and Europe and rising rapidly in Asia, it will become increasingly important to connect with people in these countries.
The third is technology. The left group, which provides much of the voice of the climate movement today, is strong when talking about the scale of the problem, but is often resistant to the technologies we need to solve it. Many oppose, for example, nuclear energy and genetically-modified foods, both of which are critical for providing fossil-free energy and agriculture at the scale needed across the world. The right tends to be much more accepting of these technologies. Bringing them onside will unlock a broader range of climate solutions.
So how do we make the missing connection? People in the left group, who support government intervention and are already somewhat downbeat about the future, are relatively open to a story that emphasizes the role of government and constraining economic growth. People in the right group, who are both skeptical of government and optimistic about a better future, are looking for a more empowering story about opportunity and abundance. They desire agency, and prefer to view responsibility as a moral choice (“I am a responsible person”) rather than an imposed burden (“I have been given responsibility through the position I have been put in”).
It is possible to satisfy both sides. Emotionally, the left and right share a sense of loss and longing, and a motivation to protect what they love for the next generation. We can build on that shared starting point, and embrace the legitimate differences the groups have about how to act on that motivation.
To do that, the left needs to be less didactic about its preferred approaches, and more open-minded about what society can achieve and where it is necessary to make compromises. For example, they should accept that we can “decouple” carbon emissions and other environmental damage from economic growth: Countries such as the United States, Germany and the United Kingdom have each seen rising GDP per capita and falling emissions per capita for over ten years. We don’t have to follow a fatalistic playbook.
If we position government-led climate action not as an act of rationing or sacrifice, but as a responsible and positive choice to build a future of sustainable abundance and prosperity, we can connect with climate supporters on the right as well as the left, extend the support for climate policies from a minority to a majority, and achieve the cross-party consensus that can sustain climate commitments in the long run. But first we have to invite both sides into the tent.
Simon Glynn is the founder of Zero Ideas, challenging leadership thinking on climate action.
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A good article and no one can deny that it would be beneficial if those on the right and left sides of the political divide agreed on such a divisive topic as climate change. But as the author points out, the focus of the climate change lobby has encountered mission creep and now involves itself with many of those ideologies that are those of the Woke.
It is undeniable that the inability of the climate science community to predict the future does not mean that climate change is not happening, that changes in climate are insignificant, or that humans are not influencing the climate system. The IPCC is very clear that humans are influencing the climate system through greenhouse gas emissions, land use change, particulate air pollution and other factors — and those changes poses “risks.”
But pouring billions and billions of $$$$’s into useless alternative energy sources – Green Energy, Hydrogen, Renewables, Government subsidies for EV’s , setting target dates to reach Net Zero, for the banning of gas driven cars, phasing out oil and LNG as an energy source – is sheer lunacy perpetrated by ideologically deranged elite authoritarians of the ruling classes.
Such a calamitous rush to “transition” from oil and fossil fuels as the major supplier of the Planets’ energy source is going to bankrupt nations, have millions of those in the Third World starve to death and worse. Such deprivation of hunger, history tells us, lays the fertile ground for continuing chaos, mass migration and may well lead onto armed insurrection, before the World returns to a path of stability, adopted after the liberal Enlightenment.
The real problem is "climate alarmism" with Thunberg frightening children with her unfounded utterances.
How can people be so dishonest? Is the profit model so great that the ruling classes will waste trillions doing the wrong things? Extremely frustrating. Read Bjorn Lomborg, he certainly believes so.
The human influence on climate is thus not about certainties and crystal balls, but risk management and no regrets.
I think this is a great article. One of the big lessons of the rise of populist political views has been the role of liberal elites in implementing policies that may have overall benefits, but have had specific and targeted collateral damage--e.g. the rust belt in the US. Success with the energy transformation will not mean everyone living happily on Jeffersonian organic farms.
We need a massive increase in invention and technology, which requires a huge industrial and creative base. And that means lots of work for lots of people, many of whom have missed the recent ill-distributed progress. And it means lots of place for private corporations and investors.
But the lessons of the past make it clear that there needs to be some central control to keep self-serving behavior to a dull roar. Finding a consensus interpretation of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution may allow people to agree on the critical things that are in (almost) everyone's interest to pursue together. And leave the remainder of political differences to be worked out in an important but separate arena.