If almost all the world wants climate action, why is it slowing down?

Public polling from citizens and business leaders released this week suggests that climate action still has overwhelming public support. But years after the school strikes movement peaked, the cost of living crisis is silencing what we all secretly want, says Chris Wright.

I first met Greta Thunberg in 2016 when she was a shy but determined young school student who had begun an intriguing personal quest: to protest every Friday for climate action.

That personal drive soon turned into a global movement. By 2019, hundreds of thousands of young people around the world were putting their parents to shame, protesting outside schools, town halls and government offices. Legal cases against multi-billion-dollar corporations offered a new sense of hope, and the era of the “Green New Deal” seemed almost inevitable.

Then came the first hit to the climate movement: Covid. It ripped the world apart and pushed climate protests from Main Street to the breakout rooms of Zoom. But the built-in momentum continued to echo across electoral politics. With global interest rates at record lows, pro-climate governments prospered – from the United States and Germany to Australia, Brazil and South Korea – and climate action maintained centre stage on the global political map.

But what proved to be a turning point for the global climate movement was the invasion of Ukraine. First, the price of gas, then coal and oil, went through the roof, bringing global headwinds that have since shifted politics until today. If the energy crisis was the first blow, inflation became its one-two punch. And this year, Donald Trump’s return has undoubtedly landed as an uppercut right to the chin of our collective sense of hope.

Against this backdrop, it would be easy to believe the public has moved on from climate action. Yet new evidence suggests that such a belief may be badly misplaced and that we may be underestimating just how much we still want climate action.

When researchers polled 130,000 people across the world, they found not only that 89 per cent of those polled still want politicians to do more on climate action, but two-thirds said they would even pitch in to fund it. Yet in every one of the 125 countries polled, people underestimated just how much their fellow citizens wanted action too.

A similar silent majority may exist in the business community. While a handful of mega-corporations have loudly pulled back from “woke” climate targets this year, the vast majority seem silently committed.

This week, a poll of 1,500 global executives revealed that 97 per cent of the world’s business leaders support a rapid move to renewable-based electricity. Even more surprisingly, half are now considering moving their supply chains to markets with better access to renewable energy.

This research goes to highlight how headlines from a small handful of companies have misrepresented the real action being taken by the vast majority of the business community.

By now, companies know it’s not just future profits at stake, but past emissions have already exacted a staggering cost. Research released this week indicates that the global economy would have been USD$28 trillion (£21 trillion) richer in 2020 were it not for the extreme heat caused by the historical emissions from only 111 of the world’s biggest emitting companies.

Even in the US, where it sometimes feels as if the cleantech momentum has all but disappeared, a Climate Opinion study from March revealed that two-thirds of Americans still support a clean energy transition – even if that support is less robust in rural communities dependent on fossil fuels and related jobs. The same pattern holds in places like the UK and Australia.

It’s true that the cost of living crisis has reshaped public attitudes. When the costs of climate policies become more visible, for example through higher energy bills, support tends to slip. People still understand the need for action, but they’re increasingly sensitive to its economic costs.

Among younger generations, the pressure is even more acute.

In big cities, the work-from-home generation has moved from skipping school for climate marches to struggling just to afford a home. Many now find themselves torn between seeking a stable climate in the long term and demanding immediate relief on living costs today.

This is the new face of the climate crisis. The long-term benefits of the cleantech revolution are clear, but unless governments can find ways to deliver short-term savings and sustainable jobs, they may not survive the next trip to the polls.

The challenge for us all is to build a future where both are possible, but in the short term, we need to find the political framing and real energy savings to balance both sides of this shifting political reality.