Need for change in climate messaging

Bank of England governor and as UN special envoy for climate action and finance. Faced with pressures on the economy from Mr Trump’s trade policies, he has become something of a fossil fuel cheerleader, scrapping green policies and betting on the country’s resource industries to deliver growth.

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Oxfam activists dressed up as US President Donald Trump and other world leaders in Belem, Brazil, on the sidelines of the COP30 UN Climate Summit. The political and cultural momentum behind climate action - especially in the West - is slowing, and in some countries already going into reverse.

(PHOTO: AFP)

In a similar mould is Mexico’s President Claudia Sheinbaum, an acclaimed climate scientist who was an author of a major UN climate science panel report. But since taking power in October 2024, she has largely continued the legacy of her backer and predecessor Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, an arch fossil fuel project enthusiast in the oil-producing nation.

That this drift is now a feature rather than a blip in democratic politics is well established. The bigger question is whether climate advocates — progressives especially — are willing to see it as a problem that calls their own approach into question. To use more contemporary language borrowed from Searchlight Institute founder and president Adam Jentleson, they need to confront the idea that “climate change has fallen into the friendzone of voting”.

Just parsing mainstream climate discourse, it is hard to say that this reckoning has sunk in. Many environmentalists who have spent years in the trenches to secure today’s remarkable achievements fall back on a familiar diagnosis: the problem is still political will, not their methods. The answer, in their view, is to keep pressing.

To use the imagery offered by climate writer David Wallace-Wells, some progressives see climate politics “as a tug of war in which tugging harder would pull many on the other side over the line into grudging support”, and so they tug harder. They hector, moralise and talk down to those who do not see eye to eye with them on the existential nature of climate trouble.