A more ordinary climate story

This essay was first published in Ordinary Hope: A Mission to Rebuild. 

Just before the election, we went to the seaside. Together with More in Common, we at Climate Outreach ran focus groups in a few coastal constituencies, like Clacton and Hartlepool. We wanted to hear the real climate stories of people in places caricatured or even feared by greeny campaigners or commentators.

In Clacton, voters were set to vote in Nigel Farage, a man who hates wind farms and describes them as “useless”. So you’d have been justified in thinking people in Clacton hate wind farms too. There are no shortage of them to hate. Stand on the front at Clacton-on-Sea and you can’t miss the great big Gunfleet Sands offshore wind farm. It’s been out there for a decade, merrily spinning round on the horizon. Plenty of time to make enemies.

But here’s the thing. Pretty much everyone we spoke to thought Gunfleet is fab. “They look amazing,” said one of our participants, we will call him Adam, “and I think they’re a good thing.” Another participant, Katy, agreed. “I love them. I think they’re a good idea. I mean we should have a lot more out there.”

It was the same right across our seaside towns. People really like renewables: they are seen as good news, bringing jobs and secure energy to the country, and often something to be actively proud of locally.

Does that feel like a surprise? It surprised some of the politicians I talk to about it. MPs (and many of the rest of us) have long thought there’s more opposition to things like wind power than there is. It’s understandable, to an extent: parliamentary inboxes are dominated by the noisiest voices - amplified by social media and unhelpful bits of the press.

But we need to catch up with the new normal. You used to be weird if you cared about climate change. Try talking about it in the pub a decade ago and you’d find yourself drinking alone. Now though - with apologies to Tim Walz - these days the weirdos are people who don’t think climate change matters. In Climate Outreach’s pre-election Britain Talks Climate research, we found only 15% of people said they’d vote for a party that slowed down the pace of ‘net zero’.

There is, as the last Prime Minister found out, no real market for taking the wheels off climate action. Again I think this surprised some in policy and politics. That surprise may explain much about how politics has talked about climate change until now - strangely detached from ordinary life, and strangely timid - and why a new type of climate story is needed.

The new government has big plans for climate action, which is a good thing. It’s hit the ground running and can’t be accused of talking down the economic potential of its new clean energy mission. But the personal touch has still felt missing. This matters.

Listen to people and you find that phrases like “net zero” either don’t mean anything or, worse, feel cold, technocratic, uncaring. Instead people talk to us in plain language about the changing seasons they’re seeing, or the flooding they’ve endured, or the worry they or their families have about climate change writ large. And where they get the most excited about the transition - like Katy and Adam - it’s where it feels like something they can touch and feel, and perhaps even get excited about, as the backdrop to everyday life.

And that’s where the danger lies too. The emissions cuts to come are going to be more up close and personal than anything seen so far. Political pitfalls lurk within. 2/3 of the emissions cuts ahead need people to in some way do something differently to help make them happen. Like our homes, and how we heat them. Our cars, where we can drive them, and how much it costs. The jobs we do now and those our kids will do. And plenty more besides. This stuff is ordinary, and its cultural, and authentic and empathetic citizen engagement is every bit as mission critical as engineering and economics.

The climate story for the next decade needs to feel like everyone’s story. Normal, can-do, exciting, plain-speaking, and an answer to the stresses we all face. The risk is that by failing to connect with the ordinary then this grandest of projects can be portrayed as out of touch. At best that means progress will be slow, take-up weak, deployment rates less swooshy. At worst, it’s a red rag to the populist bull.

Take heat pumps - an impressive, if currently expensive, technology to replace gas boilers. Only 1% of the country currently has them: that will need to increase ten-fold by 2030. The comms challenge is that right now most people would rather stick with the devil they know - their boilers - seeing heat pumps as newfangled, costly to install, and unreliable. That’s a problem not just of a lack of demand in the short term, but also a honeypot for those seeking to delay or disrupt climate action. Look at Germany, where the far right have seized on that country’s push for heat pumps as a powerful symbol of the wokepocalyse.

What’s the answer? Well, making heat pumps cheaper and easier to install, for sure. But also in helping to make heat pumps feel like normal, a good option, and something people you know are already doing. After all the people we trust the most are those we already have strong relationships with in our lives. And heat pump owners tend to be evangelical when they’ve had the work done. This is persuasive. As someone in Edinburgh told us at the end of last year, while they weren’t sure at first, “my parents got a grant to get an air source heat pump. They got it installed. It’s already saving them money. They’re finding it really good.” Nesta’s ‘visit a heat pump’ scheme is an excellent template for what could happen in every town and city across the UK: showing that tech like this is normal, already here, and brilliant.

Citizen climate engagement is, rightly, a new priority for this government and we’re here to help. As a guiding principle, the more the climate story feels real, grounded in the things we care about in the here and now, and works out from trusted relationships we already have, the better.

David Powell is a Senior Advocacy Manager at Climate Outreach.

This essay was first published in Ordinary Hope: A Mission to Rebuild.