Dear politicians, don’t ask for sacrifices to save the planet

This article is written by Martin Bruncko, Managing Partner at Steam Capital and one of Apolitical’s advisors. He is a deep tech (R&D focused) entrepreneur, investor and former minister of innovations of Slovakia. For more like this, see our environmental newsfeed.

“We will all need to make sacrifices to our way of life in order to avoid catastrophic damage to our planet.”

Finally, we are starting to hear such statements from honest politicians who are serious about addressing climate change. This should be great news for the planet and for all of us who take all the overwhelming evidence about the causes and consequences of global warming seriously.

Well, actually not. If you are a politician and this is your line, you have probably already lost: not just your future elections, but the whole fight against climate change.

There are two fundamentals problems with promoting lifestyle sacrifices in the name of climate change. First, it does not work politically and second, it is simply a false choice.

What climate action and dentists have in common

Politically, such a message is based on a negative framing that tries to justify the need for climate action in terms of avoiding major losses in the future. In effect, it amounts to telling your voters: “Today I am going to make you give up some of the things that you really like, so that your life in the future will not be as bad as it otherwise would be.”

There is strong evidence that such framing does not work in the real world. People hate to be made worse off today only in order to avoid much more negative outcomes in the future.

They feel the present sacrifice as concrete, whereas the future loss as abstract and hypothetical. This is precisely why economic reforms have been so difficult to implement over the past few decades in Europe, from Greece, through France, to Italy. If you push through such “belt-tightening” policies, no matter how necessary and beneficial they are in the long term, most of your voters will hate you for it and punish you.

Or as Jean-Claude Juncker once famously said: “We all know what to do, we just don’t know how to get re-elected after we have done it.” I call this “the dentist effect.” No matter how smart you are and how much you realize that your teeth need to be repaired after your dentist is done with you, you do not want to see him again for a very long time.

The political effect is not only that the reformers lose power. They often lose it to populists and reactionaries whose central campaign promise is to roll back the painful policies instituted by evil elites that do not care about the suffering of the common people.

It’s not about sacrifice

The good news is that such sacrifices should not be necessary for the most part.

When it comes to climate change, there is free lunch. It is called technology. Instead of asking people to give up certain goods and services, we need to provide them with equivalent ones, both in terms of price and quality, but based on new technologies that do not generate so much pressure on the environment.

Telling people to drive less does not work. But if it doesn’t cost more, switching from gasoline and diesel to electric cars and driving the same is an easy choice. The example of the classical light bulb shows this point even more pointedly. Few of us have started spending more time in darkness to save the planet. Most of us have even hated switching from classical light bulbs to fluorescent light bulbs just because of their simple drawback that they reach the full brightness quite slowly. But who would not be happy to use LED bulbs which work just as well as the classical ones and consume less energy?

The same mostly painless switch could be achieved in all key areas that are the main drivers of climate change: energy, buildings, industry, agriculture and transportation.

The human ingenuity is infinite. It can and it will deliver innovations that provide the same benefits as our existing technologies, but without destroying our planet. Getting to such innovations is not even a matter of lack of money. Governments around the world are already spending more than $20 billion every year on low-carbon energy technology research and development (R&D). Tens of billions more are being spent by private companies and investors.

However, we do need to create ways of spending this money more effectively, with less duplication and better focus on concrete outcomes. We also need smarter policies and regulations that stop incentivizing dirty energy sources and drive a much faster adoption of environmentally friendly technologies that are already available today. This will lead to the creation and rapid growth of new companies and industries worth trillions of dollars.

The climate change crisis does not have to be synonymous with sacrifice.

Sure, it does entail real dangers and some of our cherished activities, such as air travel, will be very hard and costly to decarbonize. But climate change is also a great economic opportunity thanks to technology: companies and countries that embrace it as such stand to win big for decades to come. The politicians in charge need to grab this opportunity with serious urgency. — Martin Bruncko