Why you should be thinking about power, not impact
“We don’t need people thinking about climate footprints. We need people thinking about power.” — Dr Katherine Wilkinson
At Earthrise School I coach people who want to shift their careers and lives towards climate solutions. Students often ask, “how can I have the most impact?”
It’s the wrong question.
There has been a global failure to act on climate over the past 30 years. It’s not because people don’t care about their impact, it’s because there is an imbalance of power. It’s Team Earth vs. corporate titans who profit from the oil and gas extractive economy. This imbalance has largely been about financial power, which corporate titans have effectively converted into political power and control over the climate narrative.
Fossil fuel executives have done two things very well:
First, they created massive misinformation campaigns to cast doubt over climate science and solutions, creating an army of what we call climate deniers. (If this is news to you I recommend listening to Drilled – a true-crime style podcast investigating the last 30 years of fossil fuel propaganda. It’s riveting.)
Second, and perhaps more insidiously, they created campaigns to push environmental responsibility onto the consumer. Ever thought about your carbon footprint? Calculating it and personally reducing it was BP’s idea.
For those of us who have cared about climate change and wanted to do something about it, the extractive economy suggested individual solutions (changing light bulbs and recycling) and consumer-based solutions (buy more stuff, just make it greener).
But we’re citizens and communities first, not consumers. Our power to create the future we want to exist is in our collective numbers and our collective imagination. The first step in being a force for Team Earth is to stop thinking about our individual impact and start thinking about our collective power.
Talking about power can feel uncomfortable. Perhaps you don’t want to be powerful. Perhaps it’s daunting. Perhaps in a world where power is concentrated in the hands of a few, it feels too far away for you. Build it anyway. The antidote to helplessness and climate anxiety is creating the power to change outcomes, not by switching your light bulbs to LED.
And creating the power to change outcomes works.
Over the past two years the Sunrise Movement, a national youth climate organization, has become a force to be reckoned with. Sunrise has built enough political power to get Green New Deal champions elected into congress and a seat at Biden’s climate table. The result is the most progressive climate plan ever put forward by a presidential candidate, and one that puts frontline communities first.
Over the past decade, Tesla has amassed the technological and financial power to transform the car industry and accelerated the adoption of electric vehicles across the world. It’s now the most valuable car maker in the US and has caused others to invest heavily in competitive EVs.
So how do you start thinking about how to build power? There are three spheres in which you have influence and can take action. Each of these spheres has a different type of power as the goal:
Political power
Resource power
Personal power
This framework is not a choice between spheres; rather, taking bold climate action probably means being active in all of them. I've listed them in order of importance, and here importance is directly correlated with scale.
1. Political power:
Political power is the power you command as a citizen. The 2018 Special Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change explained that "All pathways [to remain below 1.5 degrees] begin now and involve rapid and unprecedented societal transformation” and recommended that emissions be halved by 2030. To put a finer point on it, this graph shows what we need to do:
Simplified emission pathways for Climate Targets (link)
Pretty scary. And without large-scale government action we’ll never get there. To build political power you can:
Vote for climate progressives
Join a climate political organization
Hold your representatives accountable
Take part in direct action
Fund progressive community organizers
2. Resource power:
If we need large-scale government action to solve climate change, we also need scientific, technological, and financial resources to be able to create planet-saving policies and enact them over the next decade. Different types of resource power look like:
Knowledge: Scientific and policy research that enables smart policy and discovers new climate solutions
Technology: Scalable technological innovations for climate solutions and climate resilience (e.g. carbon capture, marine permaculture, and drone reforestation).
Money: Financial resources are of enormous importance to rapid decarbonization. This resource can be wielded to finance clean technologies, shift funds out of the extractive economy, and to fund carbon removal. Most importantly, it can also be used to support the work, and often legal needs, of frontline communities working to shift policy to a regenerative economy.
If you’re not professionally in politics (and don’t want to go into politics), building resource power is likely where you’ll focus your professional career.
3. Personal power:
Personal power is the power you wield over things that are directly within your control.
First things first: It’s only worth spending your efforts here if you’re already in the top 5-10% of people by wealth globally. The top 1% in the world has created 15% of emissions, the bottom 50% has created only 7.5%. Those of us with wealth typically have a higher carbon footprint and are most likely to have the resources to reduce it. If this is you (as a rough guide, household annual income above $150k puts you in the top 10% in the US), read this document by Erica Reinhardt which gives you a step-by-step guide on what to do.
If you’re not in the top 5-10%, you may want to change what is in your personal control anyway. Go ahead if you have the resources, by which I mean that it would not be financially burdensome to make these changes. There is incredible power in aligning your lifestyle with your values (and a whole lot of other benefits — low carbon lifestyles are cheaper and healthier, for example), but focus on building political and resource power first, it’s more effective.
Got questions or comments? Email me at lyndall@earthrise.school