Thread by @GeorgeMonbiot

Some prominent people are now arguing that, for climate movements to succeed, they have to reach across the political spectrum, appealing to conservative as much as radical and liberal values. I believe this reflects a mistaken theory of change. This thread seeks to explain why.

The big shift in the past year is the emergence of a truly global climate movement, and the sense that its leadership is now coming from the Global South. This is as it should be: poor nations are hit hardest by climate breakdown and their voices have for too long been unheard.

This is where hope lies. A global crisis demands a genuinely global response, led by those on the front lines of the disaster, and this is what is happening, at great speed. It’s hard to see the necessary shift happening any other way.

But just as we see this movement building, we are told we also need to appeal to conservatives in the rich world. If conservatism here means anything, it means sustaining the power and dominance of the rich nations, and of rich people within the rich nations.

At the heart of the global movement is the notion of climate justice. This means, among other things, that the remaining carbon budget is distributed fairly, that polluting nations pay compensation for loss and damage, and that the rich no longer live at the expense of the poor.

These ideas are fundamentally at odds with the conservative mindset, which seeks to preserve inequality and to claim the lion’s share of rights and resources for a privileged minority.

In other words, you can’t have both. You can’t have a genuinely global climate movement that appeals to people who want to preserve minority privilege in the rich nations. You have to choose.

But this is by no means the end of the problem. To understand the other ways in which the theory of change is flawed, think of one of the most successful recent movements: #MeToo, which rapidly altered social attitudes towards sexual assault, misogyny and everyday sexism.

Imagine that its leading lights had said “we also have to appeal to sexists.” Imagine they had trimmed their message to accommodate existing attitudes. How effective would they have been? How would they have inspired women to rise up and generate the wave of change?

Similarly, you might imagine how successful the civil rights movement would have been if it had sought to appeal to racists, or the anti-apartheid movement if it had tried to accommodate the views of people who wanted to sustain minority rule.

OK, you might ask, so what do we do about people with a fundamentally different worldview? We don’t. As a wide range of observational studies and, now, a set of empirical results, suggests, you need to reach ~25% of the population to trigger societal change.

This is the fundamental principle behind effective movements: you build a committed minority until it passes a social tipping point.
You don’t appeal to the status quo.
You change the status quo.

#MeToo did not achieve total victory. Sexism, misogyny and sexual assault still happen. But those who seek to defend or dismiss them now look like dinosaurs. Their groups are islands in a sea of change, whereas it was previously the victims who were isolated and shunned.

The power of #MeToo, the civil rights and the anti-apartheid movements, was that they did not compromise. They didn't call for a little less sexism or racism or apartheid. They called for them to end. It was their clarity and commitment that inspired people to join them.

But the most important aspect of #MeToo, from the point of view of the climate movement, was its speed. Other examples of a remarkably swift change in attitudes and practices include the general cessation of smoking and the decline of homophobia. Speed, for us, is of the essence.

Rapid change is causen by committed minorities reaching a critical threshold, at which point social tipping occurs. Just as it is no longer acceptable in most settings to be a sexual assault conservative, it will no longer be acceptable to be a climate injustice conservative.

How do we reach the critical threshold (roughly 25%)?
By inspiring people to join us.
How do we inspire people?
By showing our commitment.
How do we show it?
By refusing to dilute our message.
OUR AIM IS NOT TO APPEAL TO THE STATUS QUO, BUT TO CHANGE IT.