Christopher Shaw - City Atlas

Dr. Christopher Shaw is a climate communications expert and the former Head of Research at Climate Outreach, where among the reports he worked on is a guide commissioned by the IPCC: Principles for effective communication and public engagement on climate change: A Handbook for IPCC authors.

Chris’ experiences in public outreach on climate are reflected in his new book Liberalism and the Challenge of Climate Change. From the publisher’s website:
“In this book Christopher Shaw analyses how liberalism has shaped our understanding of climate change and how liberalism is legitimated in the face of a crisis for which liberalism has no answers.”

Chris spoke about the barriers to action on climate change with Helena Rambler, just after the conclusion of Climate Week in New York City.

Listen to our Bridging the Carbon Gap podcast episode on Apple or Spotify:

Chris Shaw 00:0

If someone were to say to me, Look, we’re gonna go, there’s an old couple up the road. They’ve got a load of jewelry and money in there. We’re gonna go into the house. We’re gonna break in, tie them up, scare them a bit, and then steal the money. Do you want in? Do you want to come with us?

Well, I know it feels wrong, but they’re going to do it anyway, so perhaps I should go because they’re going to do it anyway, right? But I know in my heart, that’d be a wrong thing to do.

I wouldn’t go because it’s just wrong. It’s not the right way to behave. So I think you can’t think about what’s going to happen anyway. I think you, if you’re somebody who knows about climate change, you’re worried about climate change, I would just encourage you just take a moment look into your own heart, find what you feel is right and wrong for you, what you know, and be guided by that, and let that shape how you act in the world. And I think that’s the most powerful thing you can do as an individual.

Helena Rambler 01:12

Hi, my name is Helena, and I’m a junior at Hunter College High School in New York City.

Because climate change is not formally taught in New York City high schools, City Atlas started this podcast to connect high school students directly with experts to find out how they would design a high school curriculum for climate.

In today’s episode, I speak with Christopher Shaw, a social scientist and researcher on climate communications. Chris was, until recently, Head of Research at Climate Outreach, one of the UK’s leading public engagement consultants. I spoke with Chris at an outdoor cafe near Central Park soon after Climate Week, an annual event in New York City.

Helena Rambler

In your ideal world, how could people change their lives in order to become more sustainable and better suit the climate issue?

Chris Shaw 01:50

So I think it would have to be a very different world from today. Or the world I would like to see would be a very different world from today.

It would be a world of more community-focused action, sort of reflection on and a thinking about. Currently, at the moment, I think we look for satisfaction and happiness through consumption.

I’m as guilty as anyone. I’m no saint, and it’s easy to do what I can, just buy what…I could either go through the process of trying to organize people and fight politically and all the disappointments and difficulties that would come with that, or I could just buy what I want from Amazon and create the world I want around me by buying the things I want and get my happiness that way. And I think ultimately, in terms of climate change, that’s a dead end.

Also, I think the satisfactions we get from consumption are destructive to social relationships. So I think we need to find a different way of thinking about our relationships to each other, to nature, to the world around us, and to the future that we want. This is all very glib and easy to say, but I’d see no other way of doing it, but how we get from here to there is a big challenge.

Helena Rambler 03:21

How much of this change do you think needs to be on a personal level, versus, let’s say, the government, and like policies or laws, that they can deploy?

Chris Shaw 11:28

The job I was doing up until last year as head of research, we had a real focus on the individual, and I hope that this, what I’m going to say makes sense for your listeners, and I think it’s going to be difficult, challenging, and I get a lot of pushback on this.

Ultimately, I don’t know. So under our current system, we are all individuals, and we are encouraged to seek our own satisfaction as individuals on an individualistic basis, the idea of community is is sort of secondary, and also what lies at the core of that is freedom, that as individuals, we are free in this capitalist society to choose what we want to do.

The work I have been doing for a long time around language and climate change has been based on the belief that if you say the right things, if the right people say the right things in the right way, that people will say, Oh, okay, yeah, I see the light. I understand. Now I’m worried, I’m going to change how I behave as an individual.

Now, this has been going on for a long time, and it’s been a lot of research in the social sciences on this, and still that research, the paper I was seeing this morning, said the research doesn’t provide any evidence to say that we can achieve those changes through that just that simple use of language, through people being encouraged to, just as individuals, make different choices. They’ve been trying to do that for years.

Just a couple of years ago, I think it was pre-lockdown, there was talk of something called ‘flight shame.’ So people were, what you know, were ashamed of their flying because it’s the most kind of polluting thing you can do as an individual. Today, each day is a record number of flights. There’s more people on planes than ever before. So I think the evidence is clear that this doesn’t work as a strategy encouraging people as individuals.

There’s a number of reasons why it doesn’t work. One of the reasons is industries have much bigger marketing budgets than campaigners do for theirs.

And what do we promise as campaigners?

We promise a world that of giving up all the heart, all the pleasures of capitalism, in turn, for possibly you doing that, having some contribution to reduction in emissions. It doesn’t really make sense to people. So for all those reasons, I actually feel that we need to look to government and the state to take control. And in a way, when people surveyed are asked who do you think is responsible for the climate crisis, who do you want to see take change, take action, people always say in the surveys, we want business and we want government to lead. And campaigners just ignore this evidence what people want to say and turn to the individual again and say, Well, you must change your ways as an individual.

So I do think it’s about the government and the push back I get when I say this is also, are you an eco-fascist? Do you want us to be like China, etc, etc?

So you know, that idea of individual freedom is so ingrained into our Western culture and who we are, our ideas of ourselves and our ideas of how we’ll change the world, and it’s very difficult to change.

Helena Rambler 06:28

So how do you think that this would, let’s say planes and the economy, because I think that, I mean, like you said, with the flight shame, I think that governments could be worried about how this could affect the economy, or individuals could be worried about how this could affect, like, you know, their personal economies, I guess.

Chris Shaw 07:17

Yeah, so again, thank you, Helena, that raises a really important question. So let’s just step back a bit again. So when I say, Oh, well, perhaps, you know, we need kind of less democracy, somebody would say, Well, you know, democracy is under attack, and we’ve got to protect it. Now, someone, I can’t remember who it was, who said this. Said, Look, you can either have massive inequality or you can have democracy, but you can’t have both. And of course, that’s quite sensible, because if there’s a massive concentration of wealth into a few hands, which is the way of well, the US, the UK, most of the global north, then with that comes great power. So great power gets concentrated into the hands of a few, and so democracy suffers as a result, because the majority of us, our vote counts for less, and is manipulated by various kinds of lobbies, etc.

So whichever way you want to cut it, you know, I think we look at big changes, yet we do need big changes to the economy, not just because of climate change.

We have biodiversity loss. We have the destruction of rainforests, the loss of species, you know, pollution from plastics, all tied into consumption, which are at the heart of the economy and growth and so there does need to be a feeling, a need to move from this, these highly innate and unequal capitalist societies.

But it comes to a question. It really comes down to a question, well, what kind of problem do you think climate change is? How bad do you think it is? Now, the scientists are saying, just recently, in 2024 it’s been the hottest year ever. Oceans are much hotter, scientists are struggling to explain the uptick in temperatures in 2024 which have been quite, you know, quite catastrophic. I mean, the massive increases in heat in the oceans. This was meant to be so there was, in part, related to El Nino, when the oceans do get hotter, but it hasn’t dropped down as it was expected to.

So the climate is changing in ways that scientists can’t explain at the moment, for the worst. So I personally think climate change impacts are going to be very bad. And so you start to come to this, this question about what’s, what’s the most important thing, economic growth, or protection of the environment and the future. You know, there’s no economy on a dead planet, things like this. You know, these things people say, and again, in surveys, ordinary people say protection of the environment is more important to them than economic growth. But that’s not what our policy makers hear. So then, how do you talk to people?

The question you actually started with – but how do you talk to people about climate policies if they’re worried about their jobs and their economy and well, that’s primarily because it’s what capitalism has done to people. It has made it very difficult to afford your own home or pay the rent or mortgage on a home. It’s made work precarious. It de-skilled our work. Increasingly, we hear of AI and computers taking over our jobs. So people are losing security, economic security. They’re losing control of their lives and their futures. And of course, if someone says that now, we’re going to make it even harder for you, because everything’s going to become more expensive to stop you buying it in the name of the climate that people don’t want to hear that.

So it’s about this. I think we’ve reached the limit of what we can do, where we’re trying to think of these problems as separate from each other. There’s a problem of mental illness, there’s a problem of the economy, there’s a problem of biodiversity decline, and there’s a problem of climate change, and we treat them all separately. No, you know, there’s connections there, and we need to better talk about them in a holistic way and look at the total picture if we want to make progress.

Helena Rambler 11:28

You said that the government obviously plays a really big role in this. So how do you think we can kind of convey that to the governmental big, you know, big names like the policy makers who have the power to make this change. You know, like, do you think this means that we’ve, like, elect someone who already has this kind of knowledge and this priority? Or, do you think that we can kind of teach current policy makers and inspire them to make these environmentally focused decisions.

Chris Shaw 12:02

Fantastic question. Helena, and you know, I’m not going to sit here and offer glib answers about what we can do and do this and do that, because people have been trying. You know, people have been having this conversation for 200-300 years. You know, what’s the relationship between people and the state?

I’ve just been at a conference for the past two or three days, which was convened by some of the major funders who fund campaigns, and the reason they convened this conference was that because of the concern that we’re losing.

People who want to convince policy makers of exactly the way that you’ve just described, we’re losing.

For a long time, they said to what we need to do is we need to convince policy makers there needs to be a top down process, and they realize that they’ve lost that battle where they thought we’ve won the battle back in 2019 with Fridays for Future, all the protests that were happening, we have got this commitment in the bag to the targets and action. So we’ve done it, and they realize that they’ve all of a sudden, sort of dropped, that they took their eye off the ball, and they’re concerned that actually the right wing, and say in Europe, is gaining ground, that there’s sort of backtracking on climate commitments, things, the commitment to climate action at the state level is not as secure as was once thought. And they’re very worried.

And all of a sudden they’re saying, yeah, we’ve got to return. We’ve got to do, actually do this from the bottom up, the grassroots upwards, and convince policy makers that they want to win votes and keep the votes. Then they have to take that action. They have to respond to the will of the people.

So we sort of keep going round and round in circles. But, you know, short of really wanting to organize, I mean, just the other thing that’s happening is that governments are becoming more draconian in the way in which they’re responding to climate protests. Again, in the UK, we have and then in Europe, in the UK, we’ve seen people jailed for five years for planning.

A Zoom call I was going to be on, it was a Zoom call to plan an action to blockade a motorway. Or some, some such, just a call they listened to. I think a reporter from a right wing newspaper listened, recorded it, sent it to the police, and the police arrested them.

So the leaders, so for having a Zoom call, they’ve been jailed for five years. So states are becoming more draconian.

The impetus on climate change is dropping down the agenda, even as it’s becoming more serious. We have war. We have these geopolitical pressures. We have economic pressures. So how has change been brought about before?

Well, to come down to it, I don’t know to what extent the state can, at the moment, can be an ally. It hasn’t proved itself an ally. And, I mean, we can come to this in a bit more detail in a moment. But just to say, I haven’t offered a way how to do that. All I can say is, consensus within the climate movement is that if you get enough people on board, pressuring their congressman, their representative, to say, do some thing about climate change, eventually the politicians will act.

But we’re a long way from getting that level of public pressure at the moment. So because we are, because it’s more realistic, I said, I would say to like work from the bottom up, and kind of convince people to then convince their policy makers that, like, we need this change.

Helena Rambler 16:13

How do you think we can kind of convey the importance to those who not only deny climate change, or just purposely ignore it because maybe it’s scary to them or feels unimportant to them?

Chris Shaw 16:26

Yeah, again, these great questions. Thank you so much, Helena, for the chance to share my thoughts about them. So what we need to do, everyone really wants to hear and act and be respectful of those voices, is basically that be respectful. So what does that mean? That means actually sitting down and listening to what the concerns are of those people, but what the concerns are about climate policy, and then we start and then thinking authentically and honestly, well, how then can climate policy answer those questions that they have, and those questions, you know, those concerns are often, as you’ve highlighted, about their job, about their income, is one of those. It’s about the culture. It’s about, are we a bunch of middle class greens coming into telling them how to live their lives? Is it just another way these people have to put up with managers at work telling them you know what to do all day, and then they go home, and now some other person, some other middle class person, telling what to do at home or on their holidays or in their car. That’s of course, people are going to reject that, because if they’re not hearing or seeing their challenges, their concerns, their hopes, their stories represented in their stories that are being given to them by the climate change activists.

So what would we start to do there? Well, we do know…for example, like we might have this idealized image of the climate skeptic as a hunter who loves being out in the wild, that might be one one example. And then okay, climate change is a challenge to the health of nature, to the health of forests, to the health of the wilderness. So it’s important to start then, in that instance, relate talking about climate change, not as something about polar bears in the Arctic or about access to water for people in southern Africa. It’s not about distant places. It’s not about 2050 it’s not about parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. It’s about, you know, what’s happening in their lives now, and how those policies can help them achieve what they want to do, how it can help them address the concerns and fears they have and realize the hopes they have.

So that’s about now, and about how we think about the changes in our behaviors now, and it’s also thinking about what the future looks like and what future they want and what they’re looking for, and what they can do to be a part of building that future.

Helena Rambler 19:19

At a smaller level, at least at my school, I know that we do not really have any kind of climate education or any like class. Way to that, there used to be a class, but it has been removed this year. So how do you think that like climate education could be taught in schools or to students, or just younger people in general who could kind of take control of this initiative in the future.

Chris Shaw 19:46

I’ve done work with schools. We did some work with schools in Canada and Alberta and some of the challenges…so first of all, teachers need to feel, need to be resourced and helped and feel confident to teach about this subject, and that means, you know, providing the resources and the support that they need to tell those, those stories, that would be the first part.

Second part is to think about how the careful balance, I think there’s a lot of fatalism amongst young people at the moment, and understandably so, they sit, don’t really see a world, as far as I can understand it, that they feel hopeful about, as I mentioned before.

They’d see that for them, everything’s getting more expensive. Work seems more insecure, geopolitically, climatically, environmentally, it’s difficult to find a good story. So, if education reinforces stories of doom and gloom, there’s a risk of eco anxiety and feeding into that fatalism. So there are balances there.

But the work I’ve seen, as well as from what I understand, is that young people are thinking about how they make their place in the world as an adult.

How am I going to find a place of my own? How am I going to secure that income? How am I going to live the life that I want to live?

And so I think what education really can do to help is to speak to those concerns of young people and start to think about, okay, so in the future, these are the skills and attributes and abilities that are going to be needed to build that secure future for yourselves.

These are the work opportunities, career opportunities, that it opens up. And so to start thinking about tying it in, rather than it being a story of woe, and doom, and don’t, you know, say there’s no point in you thinking about the future, because you haven’t got a future. You know, it really is tying into those what it means for you as a young adult who wants to make their way in the world, wants to make their place in the world, it’s not about grand ambitions, but just that security, know that you can, you know, stand on your own two feet as an adult.

What can a climate education do that can do that in a way that is helping reduce the impacts and the harm of climate change? And I think that’s what the education system really needs to do.

Helena Rambler

For those who, like, you know, are very aware of the cause and are passionate about the cause, like, how can each individual person help contribute and do their part?

Chris Shaw

I think about this a lot. I don’t want to make, I don’t want to make big claims. I come from a social sciences perspective, where a lot of the campaigning that’s been done, where it’s gone wrong, I think it’s just offering solutions or actions that seem like a really easy, sort of conflict-free way of addressing this.

What I mean is, like, one of the ways you would hear is that we’ll just talk about climate change to people, you know, that we must break the kind of the climate silence.

So people have been saying this for a long time, and it sounds, you know, I’m sure it’s sort of like, talking about it is going to be a part of it. To what extent is it a solution? You know, something you as an individual can do and that would make a change. I really don’t know. I don’t see any evidence for it, so I don’t know. I’m not going to sit here and repeat that. Others would say something like that.

This is what I think young people should do. I think young people should find their way back to their own heart, their own sense of what’s right and wrong. Now I’ll just give you an example of this, and why I say this, and why I think it’s important.

For example. I mean, I’ve flown here, so I didn’t fly for many years for various reasons. I’ve had to fly a lot this year. But when I used to say to people like, Well, I’m not flying, and people would say, Well, look, the plane is flying anyway. So you know what? You know you’re not saving anything from not getting on the plane. So why bother?

And I thought about this a lot, seems like a logical argument. And so here’s the analogy I would give to your listeners, and I would really invite them to shed all – the wind of capitalism blows to everything we do. And really at the core of it is our own humanity and our own heart and our own sense of right and wrong.

So here’s the analogy I work with. If someone were to say to me, Look, we’re gonna go and there’s an old couple up the road. They’ve got a load of jewelry and money in there. We’re gonna go into the house. We’re gonna break in, tie them up, scare them a bit, and then steal the money. Do you want in? Do you want to come with us?

Well, I know it feels wrong, but they’re going to do it anyway, so perhaps I should go because they’re going to do it anyway, right? But I know in my heart, that’d be a wrong thing to do.

Helena Rambler 25:40

And it’s like, the same analogy you just said can be used for those types of arguments, like for many other cases. Like, I, I’ve heard, oh, but isn’t it happening anyway? a lot when it comes to becoming a vegetarian, or stuff like that, where it’s like, Oh, aren’t the animals being killed anyway?

And I just like, I’ve also been, like, stumped by that, because it’s like, because, like, I feel like people just kind of really want to be right, and they don’t want to kind of be wrong about something that could be so important.

Chris Shaw 26:15

Yeah, I think when we, when we talk about or communicate about climate change, I’m not a climate scientist. My background is in the social sciences, and I like reading. And I pick up like a magpie, pick up bits and pieces of quotes, but a quote I read the other day was and I think it’s very important. I think we need to recognize that every time, every communication is a provocation. And so it’s useful to think about how we talk about things, and that’s why I use that analogy. You know, I talk about what feels right for me. I’m not going to tell you you’re wrong, because the guard goes up, the defense goes up, and it’s all over, right?

So I think what good climate communication can do is it can just, it can open the door to a conversation. It’s not going to change the world, but if you go into that conversation with sort of dogmatic statements about right and wrong, and these are universal truths and and judging that person, the door shut in your face straight away, the conversation doesn’t even begin. So at least by respecting that other people have different values and coming into that conversation with a willingness to listen, then I think at least you can open the door, and that in itself, might lead to, then a further conversation. That’s probably as much as we can hope for in those kind of one to one interactions.

Helena Rambler 27:50

Kind of shifting gears here. Do you think that like new technologies, or, I mean, like the game, like new energy sources, or stuff like that. Do you think that those play a very large role in a possible solution? Or do you think that changing people’s views would have a larger effect?

Chris Shaw 28:11

This is something that I’ve thought about a lot, right? So there is a position, and this is a really sort of like a taboo position, I guess, it’s seen as Luddite.

I don’t think technology can save us, but that’s not a very welcome message. And again, I’m just, I’m just gonna reflect that when I was at this, this conference, and there’s a person who’s been writing about degrowth and degrowth communism and this guy is quite a kind of star or celebrity, at the moment, within this very small world. To the extent a documentary was being made about him, they were filming him, as part of a documentary about his work.

And so I spoke to him after the talk. And the debate is, sorry, this takes a long way to go round to get around to it, but I just want to give some context. And he would say that, you know, it’s very important that we mustn’t be, mustn’t be pessimistic about technology, and that we must guard against pessimism about technology. And that’s he’s probably about as radical a voice as is out there.

Now, there are a lot of people who thought about this, a lot of philosophers, and they say technology is the problem. One of the reasons is, when you say technology is the answer, what you’re doing is you’re sort of shaping and already making conversation. You’re making assumptions, pre-figuring ideas about the kind of world that we live in, that we want to live in now. So what the technologies are doing this is, what I’m going to, is one of the challenges I feel about bringing people along on the climate change message is not so much about climate change itself, but it’s about the kind of people that are telling the stories. It’s about the kind of world that they’re talking about.

The people telling these stories are the middle class people who’ve taken away their jobs. They’re the highly educated people who’ve introduced these new technologies which have sort of led to people losing control over their own lives. We’re in a situation now where the world kind of runs itself without us. We’re almost irrelevant with AI, most of this could go without us in a way, right? So we’re losing control over our world and over our lives, and this is really difficult for people, and what you see at the moment, certainly in the UK, and I’m doing some work around around this, whether where there’s control on what kinds of cars can come into cities to control air pollution, banning cars in the cities, or you have to pay a fee to enter the city in your car. And so we get the you get this discourse about the war on motorists and what so the car and the freedom, I put this in quotation marks, the freedom to drive, has really become now today, certainly in a lot of Europe, in a lot of Europe, and in the US as well, I think to some extent the US. It’s almost become focused, really, on the car. The car is the last symbol of freedom.

If I get into my car, then that’s my kingdom, right? I can, if I want to speed, I can, you know, take the risk, but I’m in control. I’ve got control of my car. I’ve got control of where I go. It’s my last area of freedom. And now you’re coming for my car. So when we look to technologies to solve this for us, we have to recognize that we are contributing to an agenda which is furthering and continuing this sense of loss and control distancing us from the world more and more and more. And I would argue it’s our distance from the natural world that sort of grown up alongside the destruction of the natural world.

The further, the more distant we are from it, the more we’re ignorant of the destruction to it, the less control we have over the world. So I do think this is about people. I think it’s about humanity. And I feel that the solution lies in less technology, not more.

Helena Rambler 32:41

What’s your perception of finding new renewable energy sources?

Chris Shaw 32:35

Yeah, well, again, I’m sure your listeners will be aware that you know, the rush to electric cars requires lithium and other new minerals. And what does this mean? Well, all of a sudden, that just plays into the existing power relationship. So all of a sudden you’re back to square one, where you’ve got the global North, the rich nations, looking to the poor nations as places where they can extract the resources that they need for these renewables to keep their own economies going at the cost of those global South, those poor economies.

That’s not to say renewables aren’t the answer, but this comes to the core of why we’re going to fail unless we really face up to the revolutionary change needed.

So at the moment, all the stories being told about our future, about when we get to net zero, when we get to, well, people don’t talk about one and half degrees anymore. That’s gone, you know, or two degrees. But when we get to this, this promised land, right? If you look at the images, there’ll be a few. There’ll be a world pretty much the same as today. There’ll be people cycling rather than driving. There’ll be solar panels on the roofs. There’ll be wind turbines in the distance, you know, on top of the hills. People will be cycling to the vegan supermarket, taking their clothes to exchange at the recycling shopping center, picking up some more new recycled clothes, and it’s all a very happy and very wonderful world.

There’s no climate impacts present in those scenarios. So what we’re being promised, we’ve been promised, the end of climate change, but there, you know, that’s not, the science is clear, that’s not on the agenda.

So renewables are really key and really important, but using renewables for the perpetuation and reproduction and legitimation of this capitalist system, which is kind of screwing people, which is screwing the natural world in so many other ways, which is leading to massive inequalities, which is leading to so many, so much unhappiness, and is reducing our freedom simply down to whether we choose a green or brown jumper of Amazon, whether we choose a ground source heat pump or an air source heat pump — renewables within a capitalist economic system have got nothing to offer us. Renewables are really key, but you can’t use that simply as a reason to ignore these very difficult political challenges and battles ahead of us.

So I think they’re key. I don’t think it’s one simple answer. Different renewables have different role to play under different circumstances. What do you call a renewable? Like in France, big investment into nuclear, seeing that as a clean energy source. But all of a sudden, in 2022 I think it was in and in 2003 when there’s droughts with climate impacts here, all of a sudden the rivers dry up. So nuclear power is a water-based technology. It needs water to cool it, and then faced by rivers, the rivers are drying up in droughts. Or suddenly nuclear power doesn’t work, or they’re based by the oceans. And as we saw, you know, the tsunamis, etc, threaten.

It’s not like renewables good, everything else bad really it’s a much more complex story than that. New renewables are important, but how we use them and to what ends are key to the successful use of them.

Helena Rambler 36:02

Going back to, like, our earlier part of, the government and businesses. What do you think businesses can do in order to kind of help this issue, while, you know, still being able to kind of make their money and, like, still stay in business. Because I think that I’m going back to like you said about how people are worried about their incomes. I’m sure that businesses have that same worry. But I’m like on a much bigger scale.

Chris Shaw 36:29

Great question. It comes back to this, do we imagine the world in which we have built an effective response to climate change has the same institutions, the same relationship between those institutions and the people as we have now, or is it massively changed?

So if we say, oh, it’s the same as it is now. That’s after 30 years, and it hasn’t changed. Then, I think one of the things that corporate businesses and corporations have to do is to build trust with people.

I’m a director of an organization called D smog. Is D smog UK, and there’s D smog us. And what we do, there’s a journalistic outfit which interrogates researches and exposes greenwash by businesses, and that’s huge, you know, where they just promising the future, promising, you know, a wonderful future, and promising and seeing themselves as as the good people in that you know, you’ll see all the adverts you know about arrow on the road to sustainability, a future of this, on the road to that, etc, etc.

So I think first of all, businesses have to stop the greenwashing. Be honest about their role in this. They have to, I think, also recognize that they’re not only not immune from the need to limit emissions, but they’re also exposed to the risks climate change poses.

So I think what needs to happen in society now that there needs to be a big shift towards adaptation, recognizing the idea of solving climate change, of it all going away, and there being a future where we’re not struggling against these kinds of challenges. It’s no longer available.

Food Chain risks, wildfire risks, drought risks and storm risks. No one’s going to escape that. So I think businesses need to explore how they can if the future we have is still a capitalist one in which businesses have the same role as they do now, then they need to also start exploring what adapting to those changes means what opportunities that offers to them as businesses, but also the state then needs to become much more closely involved, because the ultimately, right, there’s money to be made out of mitigation. You can sell something and paint it green, and people can buy it. Still feel good about themselves. So you know, so you can’t make money out of adaptation.

So we’ve got to find a way to do that if we want to bring businesses on, because otherwise, this is what’s going to happen if we ignore the need to adapt and recognize we’re not going to get that. We have to, we really do have to live with profound impact. Unless we do that, what is going to happen? Well, we’re not going to be able to organize a society’s effective responses to those risks, and as a result, who will suffer the most? It’ll be the poorest, the weakest, the most marginalized, as it always is.

So we’ll talk about a just transition, will be meaningless in climate justice unless we do this.

And also, what do businesses need, most of all, to really be able to make a profit, just they need to be able to plan for the future. They need to be able to make investment and know what, be able to see the future and invest for the future in order to be able to make profit, provide the things that people will need in the future. And climate change is a massive challenge to our ability to plan, our ability to enjoy security and peace and a stable future. So businesses really need to incorporate that understanding and look to what they can contribute to that, but I can’t see. I mean, your point was, how can they make, how can they continue to sustain high profit rates and do something about climate change? I don’t know that they can.

Helena Rambler 40:54

Okay, this is kind of shifting gears a little bit. But what message would you give to someone who maybe feels helpless in this kind of, like with climate change, or maybe they have climate anxiety, and you kind of addressed this before,

Chris Shaw 41:07

Yes, like, Yeah, well, I think I would say, you know, I think it’s about finding your tribe, right? I think you can’t do this on your own, even though we’re in individualistic society.

I want to talk about, again, talking to someone who’s involved. So, you know, I’m very much kind of something of a pessimist, a cynic. I try and be a positive one like, but a realist. Okay, so a lot of my work, I was very, I was very critical, and I’m still about how we got this idea, there’s a dangerous limit to climate change. We know what it is, and we can set that limit, etc. And so thinking, Well, how was that done? Who decided that, who was involved in that, you know? And there’s a real act of power, you know, of control of the world, which it actually was.

But I was speaking to someone yesterday from the UN and she was involved in building the 1.5 degree target, which guides policy in the world today, climate policy. And I’d always thought — this is a bit of a long back story, but at the end, there was a story of hope, it gave me, it gave me some hope.

And there was an idea, and I the scientists before. Well, how did this? It used to be that, well, two degrees of climate change. Two degrees of warming was a dangerous limit, and I’d written about that before. That’s why I did my PhD.

And I thought, well, that’s, that’s too high. That’s really high. How can anyone be saying it’s, you know, we have to say this side of it anyway. So now it’s like one and a half degrees, yeah, okay. There’s too much. One and a half degrees, okay, so, and I thought so. Someone told me, you know, I was criticizing it. Someone said, Well, no, it was the association of small island states in the Pacific, who, through sea level rise, would be the first to disappear, who were really driving this. They said, No, two degrees is a death sentence for us, that the target has to be lower.

And I couldn’t believe that powerful nations such as the US and other’s in the global north, the international community, would allow such a, you know, a petty, pathetic, weak, small group of nations to decide the whole future of humanity. That didn’t make sense to me, anyway. So this lady was talking of, she, she really led the negotiations on this one and a half degrees. And she said, and I said, Well, how did you do, you know, I said, I just thought, you know, it was just, you know, just a bit of propaganda, really, to shut everyone up. She said, No, it was a massive amount of work between governments, lobby groups, NGOs, campaigners, and these small island states, years and years of hard work, negotiation, pushing to finally get the United States and others to agree to it, and when it got signed.

So the only way they could do it said, so there’s a whole range of agreements being agreed to Paris, and they really needed a positive story. And Europe said, If you don’t sign up to this one and a half degrees, we’re out and America really, you know, she said, like John Kerry, at the time, was the climate envoy for the US, was screaming, what you doing? What you’re doing, what you do. She said, we’re not. You sign up to this or it’s all over. And so she actually forced them, under duress and screaming, to sign up to one and a half degrees.

Now it feels like we’re not…Most people say, yeah, one and a half degrees has gone but it showed that by working together, building coalitions, sustaining that hard work over weeks and months and years, Is that only way we can really achieve anything. Is it on its own? Sufficient? No, but it’s absolutely necessary as part of that. So that’s what I would say.

Find the tribe. Don’t try and do this on your own. Build those networks. Don’t expect to do this overnight. Look for the small wins that can encourage you in the short term, sustain momentum and believe, because the self doubt, that the beats will come. But if you’ve got the vision, if you’ve got that in your heart, that passion, if you’ve got that knowledge, if you know what’s true, why you’re here, what you want to do with your life, the difference you want to make in the world, it’s going to be with other people, it’s going to be with other organizations, and it’s going to be damn hard work. But what other choice have we got? Did we just sit back and watch it all fall apart?

Helena Rambler 45:51

Do you have anything else you’d like to tell the listeners or you like to address?

Chris Shaw 45:55

I would just, you know, I’d like to, like to apologize to your generation that these people of my age have not succeeded in fighting this. I would just all I would say is, I think that there is, there’s a saying, the obstacle is the way, okay, so that you meet the child, you see the challenge, and you turn away from it. No, it’s through the challenge that we grow as societies, that the good things that we do have in life, the successes that have been won, you know, the liberation. It’s such a better world today in the West, for women, for marginalized groups, and you know, it was in the past, and we have to celebrate that. We have to know that we can build better futures for people who don’t necessarily have the voice to speak for themselves. And so that fight goes on, that challenge goes on. And I think that all I would ask is, when you go into these conversations, if you decide to fight these fights, you know never just don’t take anything, always just double think about things and just, does this make sense to me, in my heart, or as it does, this feel like just something that’s easy to say, Just like avoiding the real hard issues. So I think one because my channel, because my work, has always been on language and climate change, I think we’ve just suffered for too long for making too many glib assumptions about, uh, what’s going to happen and how easy it will be to build that better world. Always Be suspicious of that. Recognize it’s hard, but through that fight, you grow, we grow, and the world grows, and I think it therein lies the recipe for a good life.

Helena Rambler 48:00

Thank you so much for speaking with me. I learned so much. This is such a great experience.

Chris Shaw 48:01

Love the questions. I love the work that you’re doing, and thank you so much, and here’s to tomorrow, and another step forward in the good fight. Thank you.