Our Climate Leaders Have No Clue. Here’s How to Overcome the Climate Leadership Crisis

The UN Climate Summit in September in New York was a failure. It was to be expected. In the build-up to the Summit, it became clear that the major economies were not ready to raise their climate ambitions. Setting targets is actually much easier than delivering on them. So raising the-still-to-be-delivered targets was clearly overstretching it.

And while some countries have pledged to reach carbon neutrality by 2015, getting there still remains a big question mark. ‘I haven’t met any leaders who know… how to get there’ Laurence Tubiana, one of the key architects of the Paris agreement, said to Climate Home News just after the Summit.

That sentence is frightening.

Our leaders are clueless about how to achieve zero emission. They only know about reducing emissions. So that’s what they’re talking about. A little bit of energy-efficiency, some wind and solar and a meat free day in our diet. That’s within their scope, fits enough within the current paradigm.

Yet they are unable to leave this paradigm. And of course, it doesn’t help that the other leaders, the unwilling ones, just don’t care. Unfortunately among them are some of the biggest emitters (US, Brazil, Australia…).

We know that with the current pledges we do not achieve the Paris objective of staying below 2C. And enshrining carbon neutrality by mid-century in one’s legislation, does not change a dime if you’re not acting on it. Some countries (and also regions and cities) even went as far as to declare a climate emergency. Again, hoping that the problem would go away by just setting targets.

And indeed, a state of emergency sounds radical as it allows governments to take radical measures, usually on very short notice. Yet, so far climate emergencies failed to have any impact on the daily lives of people living under these emergencies. On the contrary, a day after Canada declared its climate emergency it approved the building of an oil pipeline across the Rocky Mountains.

So, while the climate keeps heating, our leaders stay frozen in the current addiction on fossil fuels. And the Climate Summit laid bare that for now no leader of any importance is willing or capable to lead us the way out. Unwilling and incapable, that pretty much sums it up.

And that’s frightening.

In his seminal Ted talk, the conductor Benjamin Zander touches upon the qualities of a leader. Het states that one of the main characteristics of the leader is ‘to not doubt for one moment the capacity of the people he is leading to realize whatever he is dreaming’.

Imagine a leader, any leader that puts doubt in achieving his or her dream. Imagine a Martin Luther King saying ‘I have a dream, bit I’m not quite sure you’re up to it.’ You wouldn’t be moving, would you?

So there they stand… the doubtful lot that is somehow trying to somehow lead us through the Climate Crisis. No faith in themselves, no faith in the other, and above all no faith in the people they lead.

And so we (and our leaders too) rely on the leadership of a 16-year old girlfrom Sweden. And yet, she does not show us a dream. She only lays bare the moral vacuum and the total lack of imagination that our leaders wallow in. And for that they applaud her.

True, getting the world off its CO2 emissions is a complex and gargantuan task. There are lots of uncertainties about how decarbonising a world society should be taking place. The main reason for this is that decarbonising our society along the current path is in one way contrary to the normal evolution of humankind (traditionally transitions in civilisation move us towards a more energy-dense fuel, which solar and wind does not).

But with the IPCC warnings in mind, we’re rapidly crushing into the climate limits of what our civilisation can take. So somewhere, something has to give. And technology will just help us partially. Its development is just too slow to help us out quickly.

Yet the ideas on how to get to zero are out there. If you haven’t done so, then delve into project drawdown and your despair for our climate breakdown will melt away. Or at least a sigh of relief will escape you. We do not have to rely solely on technology breakthroughs that need to scale up at neck breaking speed, implementing smart policies will could do a great deal of the heavy lifting.

So our leaders don’t even need a lot of imaginative powers. They just need to start making a couple of clear policy choices and start believing a carbon neutral future is within society’s reach. Then others will put to work all those great ideas and start scaling them up (because most of the great ideas are already at work).

Now what’s holding them back to really start leading? Their inability to interact and dialogue with the people they represent? Their fear for the backlash on the measures they would of should be implementing? Their own lack of principles meaning they would not like to live themselves by the measures they know are needed?

Maybe it’s a matter of experiencing, as our current leaders are, on a day-to-day basis, shielded off from the consequences of the Climate Crisis because of their age and wealth. They don’t see and feel the crisis. Often, it’s only from outside the system that you see and realise its shortcomings.

So it would be a good idea to put all our climate leaders on a leadership course that humbles them and energizes them to act boldly. As we have COPs every year, maybe such an experience could be proposed a month or so before the yearly big meeting.

What experiences am I thinking of? Experiences where they can see and feel the Climate Crisis. Visits to melting glaciers, living with people displaced by climate change, interviewing farmers, biologists, meteorologists in places where you learn to see the changes they see, travelling at low speed, eating a while on a climate-neutral diet, planting trees (not one, but for a whole day).

And then of course reflect upon it, deeply. So the experiences develop a meaning and a connection with what needs to be done.

We could give the UNFCCC, as organiser of the COPs, the task of setting up such leadership training. That would not even be much a stretch, as it already provides all sorts of training. Granted, most of them are on the technicalities of the Climate Convention. But it shouldn’t be too hard for them to set out a tender.

I am waiting for such leaders to follow! And I just hope they’ll stand up quickly.