Why Short-Term Thinking Is Holding Back Climate Action

Like releasing a car handbrake, reducing short-term thinking will accelerate climate progress.

Long-term, big-picture thinking is needed to make progress on climate change. Photo of the Earth by NASA on Unsplash.

As the last few weeks have gone by, I have felt my frustration with politicians growing. On the one hand, this July was likely the hottest month in the last 120,000 years, with wildfires raging across North America, Europe and Asia. The fears scientists have been sharing for decades are finally being realised sooner, and on a bigger scale, than was previously thought.

On the other hand, politicians are starting to backslide on the policies needed to achieve Net Zero. In the UK, I have woken each day to new headlines like ‘[Prime Minister] Rishi Sunak downplays green policies to court middle England’ and ‘UK government cuts cost of polluting in latest anti-green move’. Why, in the face of overwhelming evidence and the need for urgency, are many governments turning away from doing the right thing? Why aren’t they, given the mountain of evidence, doing everything to prevent the worst impacts of climate change and repair the environmental damage?

There are genuinely hard-to-solve parts of the climate crisis. From creating the right economic and R&D incentives for green energy and technology to solving the global coordination problem so that large…