Climate abundance is the only way forward |
If you care about climate change and the policies that go into combatting it, I have both good and bad news. The bad news is obvious: we are clearly in a moment of global policy recalibration — or retreat, if you like — where political commitments are being tested against the brute force of a revived American imperialism. Many countries, including Canada, are retreating from the more maximalist versions of their stated ambitions on climate policy.
Here’s the good news, which might be a little harder to see right now: retreats can also precede, and even produce, great victories. The climate movement has an opportunity to update its strategy and messaging in ways that could both advance good policy and better protect it from the next Trump (or Trump-like) government. This isn’t a call to abandon the fight for better climate outcomes. It’s a call to prosecute that fight more intelligently — and to eventually win it.
That fight has to include a more deliberate embrace of what’s referred to as “climate abundance.” For too long, the climate movement in North America has been motivated primarily by blocking, preventing or eliminating things, whether they’re pipelines, gas stoves or fossil fuels. But in a political and economic moment where people are operating on the lower rungs of their own Maslowian hierarchy of needs, the climate movement cannot afford to be seen — or portrayed by its opponents — as standing against things like growth and prosperity.
Instead, it needs to take ownership of those issues. It needs to learn how to be more additive rather than oppositional, and positive-sum rather than zero-sum. As Todd Moss, the founder and executive director of the Energy for Growth Hub,