Historians will quite likely say about us, “They ignored the biggest issue of their time: climate change.” In last month’s US midterm elections, there was far more hysteria over the so-called migrant caravan. In France, President Emmanuel Macron has just given into the gilets jaunes protesters by suspending planned fuel tax rises. The COP24 climate summit in Poland isn’t even the story of the week. In short, green communications have been disastrous.
Yet somehow we’re going to have to transform our economies. The world needs to reach net-zero carbon emissions in 50 or 60 years, says Nicholas Stern of the London School of Economics. The EU aims to get there by 2050. So how can we revamp the selling of green?
Talk about “green growth”, not about saving the planet. Roger Pielke Jr of the University of Colorado formulated the “iron law” of climate change: when societies are asked to choose between economic growth or cutting emissions, they always choose growth. So the green story should be: let’s modernise our economies, creating jobs and cleaner air. The green transition would create 18 million more jobs than it destroys by 2030, estimates the International Labour Organization, while the Congressional Budget Office predicts only a slight impact (perhaps positive, perhaps negative) on US jobs. Green growth isn’t simply a growth story, says Stern, “it’s the growth story”, because continued carbon-fuelled growth would make earth uninhabitable.