Climate anxiety isn’t the enemy: Embracing it can speed change

The just completed COP27 meeting in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt seized a modest victory from near defeat. 

After days of disagreement and a refusal to call for the phase-out of all fossil fuels, at the last moment after protracted negotiations, delegates agreed to create a loss and damage fund for those lower income and poor countries worst affected by climate change impacts they are not responsible for causing.   

Great news, right? Not so fast. 

World leaders have been unable to deliver the paltry $100 billion annual funding for a just transition that was announced way back in 2009. The new loss and damage mechanism currently contains no money. Expectations that it will suddenly somehow be brimming with billions in funding for the green transition are foolhardy and unrealistic. 

The many nations affected by advanced economy greenhouse gas emissions are right to demand redress, and figures such as Barbados Prime Minister Mia Mottley, leader of the climate financial insurgency, wants a great deal more — as much $1 trillion in funds from multilateral development banks and $3-4 trillion in new financing as part of her Bridgetown Initiative to pay for a just transition.  

Is this achievable? Perhaps — if leaders recognize the threat and act with the same dispatch that they did to COVID. We should applaud and support Mottley’s campaign for truly transformative global action, even if it is a very long shot.

But we cannot wait for the COP process to deliver. We may be waiting too long, and we have too little time left.  

In tandem with continued global pressure for action, we also need to reappraise our reliance on the COP process to deliver us from a hot-house world. As the United Nations secretary-general warned at the meeting, the world is on a highway to hell with our foot placed firmly on the accelerator. The latest COP has done little to slow our careening path toward climate disaster. COP is in the end a diplomatic mechanism, not an actual solution. 

The way forward to a net-zero carbon-neutral or negative future is global, but it also must be fundamentally national and local. The urgent essential ongoing net-zero shift will be led by voters anguished, depressed and alarmed by what they see unfolding in their own communities. The rising alarm seen among young voters is potentially politically pivotal. 

Depression and anguish can lead to action. The alarmed act. The anguished shift behaviors and choices. They vote. Those reactions can alter outcomes for the better.

In the U.S. two-thirds of voters  believe the government should do more on the climate, tax credits, incentives, and so on.  Half of voters said it was important to them in the recent midterm elections; 89 percent of Democrats and 46 percent of independents compared with only 27 percent of Republicans. Climate change comes in as one of the most important issues, right after the economy and abortion.   

In elections where outcomes are affected by base turnout and independent voters’ worries, climate change positions are important, especially for younger, more diverse voters. This evolving political reality helps explain why the Inflation Reduction Act’s historic climate change provisions were so popular: The IRA’s policies align with a growing number of voters’ concerns. The GOP hoped Biden’s spending, including the IRA, would cause a backlash with voters but the red wave election failed to materialize.   

The recent U.S., Australian, and German election outcomes also show the effects of climate as a vote galvanizer.   

Today three quarters of young people polled said the future is frightening and 64 percent said governments were not doing enough. Fully 45 percent of 10,000 young people polled in the global study, led by the United Kingdom’s University of Bath and the Stanford Center for Innovation in Global Health, said climate anxiety is affecting their daily lives. This climate alarm affects who young people will vote for.  

Our response to repeated disappointment with the failure of the incredibly complex U.N. COP process should therefore be to shift our focus and recommit to voting, acting and changing behaviors — including our own — where we live, work and socialize.  

In the end, it is national and particularly local plans that make the difference and shift decisions on EVs, solar and wind, incentives, penalties for polluting and greening our communities and economies.   

We are voters. Anguished and energized, pushed onward by youth climate activist Greta Thunberg and her peers, we can become people who act rather than tweet and lament. Action and green choices are reaffirming, effective and restorative. Taking matters into our own hands can be a salve to our alarm and doing so can help us solve that which keeps us awake at night. 

Stuart P.M. Mackintosh is the author of “Climate Crisis Economics.”