Telling the right story to make (climate) change

Life is extremely complicated and will only become more so. The just-completed Glasgow Conference of Parties (COP26) that signed the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change seems to have generated a lot of agreements, but Greta Thunberg is still saying, "There is a still a very, very long way to go." Just having some agreement is better than nothing, but the hard work is only just beginning.

All the leaders and signatories now have to go home and start delivering on their promises. The fact that the US and China (the two largest carbon emitters) actually agreed to work together on achieving the 1.5 degrees Celsius temperature goal set out in the 2015 Paris Agreement was welcome relief on many fronts. The typical reaction was positive, because if Presidents Xi and Biden could deliver on their own domestic commitments, that would be steps in the right direction. 

But how do we convince more people to make the change on climate action?

There is so much distrust of authority at this stage that many are cynical. Elections do not seem to solve anything, because when the majority margin is wafer-thin, coalition governments cannot make tough decisions. We find ourselves like the principal character Joseph in Franz Kafka's book The Trial, where he finds himself in a faceless court case facing neither charges and accusations he understands, nor how he can get out of his predicament. Kafka describes very well how many feel alienated, hopeless against a faceless bureaucracy, frustrated against the system and lost in an absurd reality. Many hark back to a golden lost era, which causes identity conflicts between race, religion and cultures.

Politicians on both sides of the spectrum, from democracies to autocracies, understand the power of mass movements. People have always been mobilised by powerful story-telling.  Either we unite fighting an outside enemy or an enemy within, or we strengthen the institutions and shared interests that bind us. No one seems to have found the right narrative that will unite us to confront a frightening future of climate catastrophes.

COP26 showed how the story of climate warming changed over the years. In 1972, the Club of Rome built a pioneering model warning about the limits of growth. Hardly anyone believed that story. In 1988, after the hottest year on record, NASA scientist James Hansen declared that global warming was upon us. The next year, the UN established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to determine the scientific basis of climate change and its political and economic impacts. For two decades, the scientists warned of climate disaster, whilst economists and businesses tried delaying action because they thought that markets alone and economic growth plus technology would solve everything. 

As more and more evidence arrived, the public became more concerned, but businesses still saw climate warming as a cost rather than opportunity. During this period, the US missed its global leadership when it flipped-flopped on climate warming. The Kyoto Protocol was the first global agreement to reduce greenhouse gases, but President GW Bush reversed it in 2001, claiming that it would hurt the US economy. President Obama signed onto the Paris Agreement in 2015, only for President Trump to withdraw. The UNIPCC Sixth Assessment this year has already warned that we may have moved beyond the two degree limit, with only the next two decades to work on adaptation and mitigation. 

This time around, with the public showing real concern about the hottest years on record, businesses and the financial community have finally accepted that they must act on climate change as a profit opportunity. Unfortunately, we are still unable to agree on carbon prices or taxes, let alone removing subsidies on fossil fuels. A lot of time in Glasgow was spent debating on whether the rich countries should put up USD 100 billion hard cash annually to help poor countries deal with climate change. India boldly asked for USD 1 trillion in aid to help it meet net zero by 2060. 

So what narrative can make people move from agreement to action? Writing books and articles no longer matter so much, because most people do not get their information through the printed media. Videos, tweets and social media matter far more. Most people no longer have the patience or interest to go through very complex and technical scientific evidence. They need simple stories with clear cut options. 

Greta Thunberg is very effective because she speaks the language of the young. To get the story right, four elements are required—clear identifiable characters—villains, victims and heroes; a political context that is believable (waiting for the winds of change); a moral theme that shows options and outcomes; and finally, a riveting plot that engages the audience. 

This week, I passed through the Spanish village of Guernica, which has a mural painted by Pablo Picasso of the horrendous bombing of the village destroyed by the Spanish civil war. In a single mural, Picasso evoked the emotion worldwide that the violence and suffering of war is futile.    

What we need post-COP26 is not more blah, blah, but evoking an emotional reaction from more people that climate change is everyone's responsibility, so that they will act. We do not as yet have that story, video or event, nor a hero or heroine. 

The war between Troy and Sparta was never really about the beauty of Helen, but about power and glory. The destruction of humanity by climate change is either too catastrophic or too remote to be believed. Perhaps human beings will only move like the murmuration of starlings when attacked by predator hawks. One will make the first move, and the others follow, and then the whole mass movement begins like a symphony. The hawk may kill a few starlings, but the mass survives. We should never doubt the power of imagination to spark change. 

Which is why stories are ingrained in the human DNA. We need that spark to set our imaginations free. And the leadership to make the mass move forward to save ourselves.

Andrew Sheng is adjunct professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing and University of Malaya. He was formerly the chairman of the Securities and Futures Commission, Hong Kong.

Copyright: Asia News Network