Perfection is the enemy of good when it comes to climate crisis

Too many of us are fatalistic about the environment, except for one cohort I have learned a lot from

Cast your mind back to 2019. There were record heatwaves in Europe, an apocalyptic fire season in Australia and near-record melting of Arctic sea ice. The mood was bleak, best captured in the title of the bestseller, The Uninhabitable Earth ,by David Wallace-Wells.

Yet there was also hope. The world’s schoolchildren were rallying to Greta Thunberg’s cry. There was a sense of solidarity and a growing consensus. Ireland launched an ambitious Climate Action Plan. The European Commission got near-consensus backing from member states for its European Green Deal (Poland demanded more time). Westminster approved the UK’s “net zero” transition plan with — this seems extraordinary now — not one MP opposing.

That consensus is now gone. In Ireland’s fragmenting political landscape, opposition to climate action is gaining traction. Not merely the Tories, but Labour are fast backpedalling on climate commitments; so, too, are the commission and EU capitals.

Huge progress has been made on emissions since 2019, with the worstcase scenarios that were still possible then now almost certainly ruled out. But the mood today among environmentalists often seems bleaker and more weary. Climate scientist Michael Mann calls this “doomism”, and it can be infectious.

But there is one group, at least, that appears immune from doomism. These are the geeks, whizz-kids and hackers who work in “climate tech”, seeking technological solutions to climate problems. I spent two days among them and their financial backers at a conference in London last week, the Climate Impact Summit, run by my brother Stephen. Here’s some of what I learned.

POLITICS IS DOWNSTREAM OF BEHAVIOUR

Climate has got caught up in the culture wars that increasingly dominate politics. Joe Biden’s landmark climate legislation was called the Inflation Reduction Act: as Rachel Payne, of Google’s “Moonshot Factory” ,pointed out, “the narrative has been politicised to such an extent that we couldn’t even use the word ‘climate’ in the title of the legislation”.

Still, many climate policies are now firmly embedded — despite the tumult of a global election year.

“With these kinds of incentives [in the Inflation Reduction Act], especially when you’re talking about tax reductions, it’s very difficult to take them away,” noted Payne.

Chris Skidmore, a former Tory energy minister who resigned as an MP in January in protest at his government’s relaxation of net zero targets, described recent political obstacles in the UK as merely “flotsam and jetsam” floating on a current that remains irreversibly on course towards decarbonisation — sustained by a “net zero economy” that, he said, grew by 9pc in the last year.

James Arbib, of the think-tank ReThinkX, likened climate action not to Sisyphus pushing his boulder up the hill (and being defeated by political interventions), but to a snowball rolling downhill. The change that is coming will be so transformative and disruptive and driven from the ground up that it will transcend politics, he argued. Behaviour will change in response to the demands and opportunities of climate change; politics will change in its wake.

PLAN FOR ENERGY ABUNDANCE, NOT SCARCITY

At the core of that change is the energy system. The new energy system, Arbib explained, will have to be able to produce enough power for the darkest day of winter; that will mean that, on most days, energy will be “superabundant”. He likened the impact of this change to the internet, saying: “We could see it would disrupt existing communications, but there were also lots of things we couldn’t see.”

IT’S NOT ABOUT THE SCIENCE

Every second person at the conference was a scientist, working on everything from seaweed textiles to nuclear fusion. But there was a strong narrative that the core problem was not the science — the key science has been done.

“We’ve got most of the technologies we need to execute a rapid clean-energy transition,” said Mark Campanale of the Carbon Tracker Initiative. What is most needed now is investment, infrastructure and the policies to support them.

“In a lot of cases, climate solutions exist, but the market by itself will not adopt them,” observed Greg Jackson of Octopus Energy. That’s where both government and philanthropy come in — to boost those solutions until the market catches up.

WE NEED TO COUNT BETTER

Perhaps surprisingly, a sector so defined by science still struggles with basic counting.

“If I can prove that carbon is sequestered in soil, how long does it have to be there to equate to one avoided emission?” asked Ichsani Wheeler of EnvirometriX, a Dutch company specialising in climate data.

“A metre is a metre; a kilo is a kilo. We need to understand how to measure the climate if we’re going to affect change. We need good enough metrics that people can talk to one another.”

CAPITALISM IS NOT THE ENEMY

The climate debate has been dogged for decades by the irreconcilable imperatives of protecting the Earth for future generations and protecting quality of life for this generation. In that conflict, climate was always destined to lose out.

“The idea of ‘degrowth’ makes for very good intellectual discussions with very little political outcomes,” noted Akshat Rathi, author of Climate Capitalism. As Wheeler put it, “the organising principle on which the world runs is capitalism, so you need to figure out how to make capitalism work for climate”.

Thanks to the energy revolution and other innovations, this looks increasingly possible. More specifically, markets in carbon credits have immense potential. These can offer “a hugely catalytic amount of finance that can change energy systems in the ‘global south’ with money from the ‘global north’”, argued John Browne, the former head of BP, now a leading advocate for climate action.

PERFECTIONISM IS THE ENEMY

A recurrent theme was the nature of risk: the governments and philanthropists that are vital to stimulate innovation are often too risk-averse.

“We need to be comfortable with making some mistakes now,” stressed Henrietta Moon, of Carbo Culture, a company that captures carbon from waste. (She carried with her a kilo of captured carbon in a glass jar.)

In our everyday environmentalism as well, we, too, often let ourselves be overwhelmed and give up.

“We’re looking for people to become imperfect environmentalists,” said Jo Ruxton, of Ocean Generation, an ocean conservation charity.

That, I felt, was a mantra apt for the jagged mood of today. It may be less idealistic than the spirit of the climate strikes of 2019, but perhaps it may prove to be more resilient.

Attempting perfection can be very wearying.

Surprisingly, a sector so defined by science still struggles with basic counting... we need good enough metrics