489820

2013
ORG20510.1177/1350508413489820OrganizationWright and Gilding

Interview

Organization
20(5) 757­–766
Imagining the climate crisis and the © The Author(s) 2013
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DOI: 10.1177/1350508413489820
Paul Gilding org.sagepub.com

Christopher Wright
The University of Sydney Business School, Australia

Paul Gilding
Independent author and climate change advocate

Abstract
Paul Gilding has had an extensive career in environmental activism and as a sustainability consultant to
major global companies. His recent book The Great Disruption (Gilding, 2011), argues that consumer
capitalism has reached it ecological and economic limits and we are entering a fundamental crisis.
The following edited interview was conducted with Paul in January 2013 and explores how he
imagines the future of a climate-shocked world.

Keywords
Activism, climate change, great disruption

Paul thanks for speaking with us.You’ve had a career spanning the worlds
of environmental activism as head of Greenpeace and more recently as a
strategy advisor to corporations and NGOs. Could you outline your career
and how your interest in the environment evolved?
I guess my career has consistently focused on activism. I’ve got a burning passion and interest
in the idea of making the world a better place and my contribution to that process was really
personally a very satisfying career path to take. While from the outside it appears to be jumping
around a lot, to me it was internally consistent because I was always focusing on public service and
doing so with passion and enthusiasm and a sense of––this was really what I wanted to do.

Corresponding author:
Christopher Wright, Discipline of Work and Organisational Studies, The University of Sydney, 2006 NSW, Australia.
Email: christopher.wright@sydney.edu.au
758 Organization 20(5)

That took me through traditional activism, organizations like Greenpeace, but many, many simi-
lar and much smaller NGOs of various types, across a range of human rights and environmental
issues. I started off on more social questions around anti-apartheid, Aboriginal land rights, various
liberation movements, East Timor and Chile and so on. Then I moved to Greenpeace and discov-
ered not just the environmentalist world but a global perspective because you’re looking at the
whole issue globally as opposed to being aware of what’s going on in specific places. That was I
think quite an important part of my development.
During that period at Greenpeace I really became acutely aware of the market and the impor-
tance of market forces as an agent for change as opposed to many of my colleagues who then saw
business as the enemy. I saw many particular businesses as being the enemy but not business as an
institution. The reality was that by the late 1980s and early 1990s, markets had become incredibly
powerful and therefore any kind of hope to change the system as a whole had to engage the market
in some form. That was misinterpreted by many people as being pro-business or anti-business,
whereas my position was always I’m not ‘pro’ anybody. As an institution, it’s all about the behav-
iour and the outcome, and recognizing that as an activist, you can be a bit more creative in how you
engage business if you think about them as a vehicle for change.
That then led to the second half of my career in a formal sense which was in business. In 1995
I set up Ecos, which was a consulting business providing strategy advice to large global companies.
The key focus there was seeing sustainability as a way of framing market trends as opposed to
focusing on environmental impacts or environmental performance per se. There were up to 20 or
so professionals working at Ecos at any given time over 15 years. We didn’t have anyone working
for us who was an environmental scientist or a technical engineering specialist. It was all people
who were focused on strategy, from a traditional business background or an environmental activist
perspective.
Towards the end of that time I’d become convinced that business was a very important player,
but it was rarely the initiator of change. The power of the corporate sector to initiate change is actu-
ally very low because the ones who exert the most power are the ones who have the most to lose
by the change. The ones with the most to gain are either smaller or less mature in their approach to
broader political transformation and lobbying and so on. Therefore in 2008 I moved into this cur-
rent role of being a kind of advocate, commentator, writer and still doing some strategy advising to
corporates and others. Being a free agent allows me to move across the system as a whole.

When did you first become aware of the issue of climate change as a key issue
for you?
I sort of learnt about it in the late 1980s when I became an environmentalist in various organiza-
tions and then in Greenpeace. Greenpeace had just gone through the whole ozone issue and I
remember clearly internally debating about whether we should have an ‘atmosphere’ campaign
rather than ‘ozone’ campaign, because climate change was then emerging as an issue.
I was a big supporter of Greenpeace moving into that area, because it was very clear that global
warming was going to be a major transformational issue across the whole system. Most of the
issues that Greenpeace had campaigned on up until then had been quite focused––whaling or
nuclear weapons or ozone depletion. These campaigns were about stopping something specific or
phasing out a particular chemical activity, whereas climate change was always going to be a mon-
strously complicated economic transformation. I don’t think I realized quite how complicated it
would be at the time. But it was clear to me around the early 1990s that this would be a key issue
over the coming decades.
Wright and Gilding 759

Your recent book The Great Disruption (Gilding, 2011) stresses how climate
change will result in an unparalleled crisis for human society. Could you outline
the central argument of your book?
The fundamental issue I’m arguing in the book is that climate change is a symptom not a problem,
and the problem is in fact the idea that we can have infinite material growth on our planet. Our
economy in theory doesn’t have to be materially based, but it is. The expansion of the economy
doesn’t have to be materially based, but it is. All the growth we’re seeing now in China, India,
across Asia, Africa and so on, is really a very physically intensive form of growth and there is
simply no capacity on the earth to cope with the level of growth that we’re forecasting. So climate
change is a symptom of this underlying dynamic rather than the cause. Now I argue in the book that
we won’t change those fundamental issues until we’re forced to change, when we have no choice.
That then becomes a crisis response. That is my argument about the Great Disruption, we’re not
going to respond until we’re absolutely forced to, and we recognize this is an existential crisis for
the Western economic model. Therefore for a global society––because the Western economic
model is the fundamental model of progress everyone in the world is now pursuing––that existen-
tial crisis actually doesn’t just threaten the model, it threatens the stability of civilization. The
acknowledgement of the scale of that crisis and the scale of the consequence if we get it wrong,
will lead to a crisis type response, which I think will be the prime driver of the end of growth.
We’re seeing growth grinding to a halt globally for a range of reasons including the resources
questions, but also the financial system is overloaded. We don’t yet recognize it for what it is,
which is the crisis of the economic model, the crisis of our civilization’s model of development.
But we will. When we do, that is what I call the Great Disruption, which I think we’re in now, but
don’t recognize it as such. I think the only adequate analogy for the Great Disruption will really be
a war-like mobilization response. That we are going to have to mobilize in an economic and politi-
cal sense as we do in war, and we’re going to face the transformation of the economy at a speed
and scale for which the only comparison really is World War II.

Could you talk a little bit about planetary boundaries and how that’s affected
your thinking?
There are many different pieces of work on this, the Global Footprint Network is one example
(Global Footprint Network, 2011), or the planetary boundaries work in the Stockholm Resilience
Centre (Rockström et al., 2009). The basic idea is that there are limits to the planet and its capacity–
–that there are boundaries that we can’t cross. Some of those boundaries are limits that we can’t
push past. But some of those boundaries also have system wide impacts. So when we run out of
water for example, that’s a boundary you can’t cross––when there’s not enough fresh water, then
agricultural production stops. When you hit a climate boundary, then the implications are system
wide because it results in the acceleration of other impacts. So climate change leads to water short-
age, leads to food crisis, leads to geopolitical instability, leads to lack of economic growth. There’s
all sorts of feedback but it’s in that kind of process.
The issue that we grapple with here and I think the reason it’s so important to put this in the
context of The Limits to Growth (Meadows et al., 1972), is that we clearly are in denial about two
contrasting beliefs. On the one hand, there is this belief that we are so small that we can’t possibly
impact something as big as the planet. There is this part of our mental state which sees the world is
big, we are small, we’ve always had to control some of nature around us, but the system is so big
it can always absorb what we do to it. The paradox is that we also have a parallel idea which is that
we are in control and we can always control things and that whatever happens we can manage it.
760 Organization 20(5)

That is the techno-optimist view, that we are so powerful, we are so smart, that nature can always
be dominated and controlled by us. Therefore limits don’t exist.
So there is quite a paradox here, but I think both these ideas exist in people at different times.
Obviously no one denies that physical limits exist, but people think we can always adapt to those
limits as they’re reached and we don’t have to act beforehand. I think that comes from a psycho-
logical place which is that we’re kind of scared of nature almost. We’re scared of our smallness.
We feel kind of insecure about that, we’ve got to pump ourselves up for this alternative view that
we are so strong and so powerful, that we’re going deal with anything that comes our way.
The work on planetary boundaries is a piece of scientific work that tries to articulate what those
limits are, but basically it is a psychological issue. The fundamental question we have to face up to,
is the fact that we have to co-exist with each other, within nature, that we are a part of nature. Not
that we should live in caves or we should live a kind of more alternative hippie lifestyle, but that
we have to have systems that are designed to coexist. We have systems that recognize that we’re
using a resource which has to be treated with respect in terms of its provision of the things that we
need. This is such a deep issue for society that I think we’re not going to respond until we’re forced
to by physical limits being breached.

In what specific ways do you see the Great Disruption manifesting itself?
I think that we’re in a rapidly accelerating disruption now. I don’t think we’ll continue denial much
more than this decade. I think we’re in a process of recognizing that this process is unfolding
around us––there are more and more people waking up to the scale of this. I first started arguing
this in 2005, with a paper I wrote called ‘Scream Crash Boom’ (Gilding, 2005) in which I argued
that a crisis was inevitable which would involve a massive economic response. Well that paper was
completely ridiculed, even by my colleagues in the environmental movements and certainly by
everyone I spoke to in the business community. I did a presentation on this in 2007 to the Cambridge
University Program for Sustainability Leadership that I teach on. There were 50 senior business
leaders in the room, and 49 of them thought I was wrong and one of them wasn’t sure, and the 49
who thought I was wrong, thought it was completely ridiculous!
This was pre the financial crisis. It was what I call the ‘masters of the universe’ phase of global
market capitalism, where we could conquer everything, the boom will go on forever, there are no
limits, there are no cycles, we’ve really cracked it––the American model is now rolling off around
the world. They weren’t arguing about the evidence, they were actually giving me a faith-based
response: ‘whatever you say about the evidence, we have faith our system is so powerful it will
overcome anything you put in its way’.
Now that changed dramatically after the financial crisis. That undermined the confidence in
the system. It showed the power of unexpected systemic risk. As a result, I think now we’re in a
situation where I get very, very little pushback about my core thesis that the crisis will come. I get
pushback about the timing, that it might be 20 or 30 years away rather than now. I get pushback
that it might be driven by other things than climate change. But I get very little push back about
the core thesis. That to me is a really powerful sign that denial is breaking down as we speak.
For me, 2008 was a really important year because that was when the financial crisis really
started to bite very hard. We had just gone through 12 months of record oil prices and record food
prices. That’s when I wrote the paper called ‘The Great Disruption’ (Gilding, 2008), which was the
precursor to the book. That said ‘look, it’s now on. We’ve now hit the limits to growth where the
complications of climate change, water supply, soil degradation, increasing demand and so on all
manifest in food prices’. The fact that we had these extraordinary food price spikes in dozens of
Wright and Gilding 761

countries and the fact that oil hit record highs just a few years after everyone argued that we would
have long term oil prices of around $30 a barrel was a shock to the system. It was an amazingly
sudden turnaround and the answer of course is that it’s because we were pushing at the physical
limits of the system.
I was always looking beyond the ecological evidence, because I’ve argued that this is funda-
mentally not going to be a response to an ecological problem. It’s going to be a response to the
economic consequences of the ecological problems. A key economic indicator of this was the
dramatic rise in the food price index.

One passage in your book that really shook me in terms of the scale of the
coming crisis is where you state, ‘… the geopolitical, economic, and climate
chaos involved I expect will tragically lose a few billion people’.That’s quite a
bombshell. How have people reacted to that future imagining?
Surprisingly I think people skip over that as a very unpleasant reality. Because most people’s
response to the book is that it’s sobering but optimistic. I mean this is about two billion people
dying. It’s inherently unempirical in terms of a forecast, but people read the book and often come
out inspired and optimistic. I wondered why that was so I’ve given it a lot of thought.
I think it’s primarily coming from people who had actually given up on there being an out-
come where civilization stayed largely together. Those people who are optimistic in response to
the book say ‘okay so there is a path through this which is not the end of everything’. Their
general response I think is ‘okay, so yep it’s as bad as I felt it might have been but didn’t under-
stand the detail. But now I do and it’s not insurmountable. It’s not the end. It’s just a really bad
period, a tragic period for many, many billions of people. But it’s not the end of civilisation or
humanity’.
For other people they accept that it could be that bad––a global famine leading to that level of
general instability and mortality on a large scale. However, they don’t think it will affect them. So
they think ‘that’s terrible, it’s going to happen to poor people in poor countries and it won’t affect
me. It will create war and conflict, but it won’t fundamentally affect my lifestyle’. It’s a complete
misreading of how the global economy works and it’s a dangerous denial about what the scale of
the crisis looks like.
I think that’s important because we still believe that we can be isolated from those things. I think
the end of growth in particular is a very significant shift for people in Western society in particular
who just come to assume that we’re always better off. Our kids are always better off than we are.
Their kids are better off than they are and so it will carry on. They see no fundamental risk to that
being undone by any kind of global trend.
What I’m saying is that that is completely finished as an idea! We are going to face severe eco-
nomic times in Western countries as well. I don’t think we’re going to starve, but we are going to
face a very, very different economic environment. That to me is a really important difference to
what most people are forecasting.

So how do you react to current proposals to dealing with climate change

through the pricing of carbon emissions, improving efficiency and technological
innovation?
I think it’s what I call a ‘training exercise’. It’s like doing push ups as you prepare for a war. It
doesn’t hurt to be fit and you’ll be better off if you are fit, but it’s not sufficient to deal with the
762 Organization 20(5)

scale of the challenge we face. So worth doing and I don’t dismiss it at all because the more we
think about pricing carbon and the more we experiment with different mechanisms, the better off
we’re going to be. But let me just give an example of what I mean by this.
Everyone with expertise in this area agrees that 2 degrees is all we can afford to go to in terms
of global temperature increase, and most people would argue that’s actually very risky and that 1
degree is sort of safe-ish and 1.5 is possibly okay and 2 degrees is actually very risky. But let’s
assume 2 degrees is right, noting I recognize that it’s far too dangerous. Now to have an 80%
chance of not going past 2 degrees, you have to actually eliminate the coal, oil and gas industries
from the economy in about 20 years from today. Nobody in the current economy can comprehend
that in their imagination let alone the practical steps you need to take to do that!
Yet we have to eliminate all of the coal, all of the gas and all of the oil, (particularly important
to recognize it includes gas, because gas is supposedly a transition fuel). There are investments
being made in those industries which assume a 30–40 year life. Most of our economies have been
built on the assumption that those fuels are what will power most productive activities. Every
major oil company in the world is assuming that. Every government is assuming that. I mean peo-
ple are starting to question coal’s future, but in terms of what we have to do, we’re talking about
all fossil fuel gone in 20 years!
There’s such a contradiction between what is needed and what has to happen. But the good news
is we can eliminate those industries in 20 years. It’s not actually very difficult. It is disruptive. I
mean it is like World War II in terms of the economic consequences of having to mobilize at that
scale. But the technologies to do it are completely available, they’re growing at 40, 50% a year in
most cases today in the real market. There’s hundreds of billions of dollars going into it every year.
So this is not pie in the sky technology, this is actually just putting solar cells on every roof top in
the world, it’s putting wind farms everywhere, it’s getting the storage technology rolled out.
All these things are possible and all these things are actually incredibly realistic and just
slightly––when I say slightly, I do so with tongue in cheek––but ‘slightly’ inconvenient in terms of
the current economy, because what it means is we’re going to destroy large numbers of today’s
global companies. But the good news is we’re going to replace them with tomorrow’s global com-
panies who will be a similar size, who will be bigger employers and we can actually carry on. Now
that’s really annoying for those people who got rich on growth and fossil fuels because they’re
going to lose out and therefore they’re fighting. But it still has to happen.

What for me was quite optimistic in your book was that you argued that the
current era of climate change denial is rapidly passing and will inevitably end.
But have you reconsidered that at all, given the way the politics and the denial
just seems to keep reinventing itself?
It is the central question: are we going to respond? People who say to me ‘I can’t imagine that level
of change’, my response is ‘okay therefore you have to imagine the alternative’, which is a steadily
collapsing global economy; massive global conflict over resources; an accelerating out of control
climate which is what it’s currently doing; the science being absolutely universally accepted and
then, in response, us doing nothing about it. That to me is much more unimaginable than delivering
on the level of response that we need. The global financial crisis is a good example. We didn’t do
anything until we had to, then suddenly we spent something like $10 trillion to bail ourselves out
of that even though that’s a temporary solution.
So we do do dramatic things when we choose to act and we do do them late. But then we do
them dramatically. The problem we have in terms of analysing this is there are very few existential
Wright and Gilding 763

threats that affect society as a whole. So there’s actually not a lot of evidence because there’s not a
lot of examples. You have to draw on existential threats at the personal health level, at company
and country level and so on. Then you see the sort of trends I’m talking about happening.
Sure, I also have days where I think we are just going to head towards the apocalypse and it will
all be over. But when I analyse that in the cold light of day, I think that’s not supported by the evi-
dence of history.

In your book you talk about how rather than a single catastrophic event
which triggers popular engagement with climate change, there are likely to be
a series of rolling climate catastrophes that will eventually crystallize public
awareness of this issue. Could you talk about that?
If you look at the US for example and hurricane Sandy, we saw this incredible Bloomberg
Businessweek cover, ‘It’s Global Warming, Stupid’ (Barrett, 2012). We saw the statements from
Bloomberg himself as Mayor of New York city about how this is so obvious and that we should
respond to it. We are seeing the polls change in terms of the importance of climate change as a
public concern. We are seeing spectacular growth in the US on the technology side of solar in par-
ticular. We’re seeing incredible things happening in China around renewables and we’re seeing I
think a steady decline in climate denial amongst governments. Now that’s different from what
we’re seeing in the public discourse, in much of the media there’s quite strong climate denial going
on and people will always attach themselves to that.
But I think it’s important to recognize how denial works in that regard and you need to under-
stand this is the normal process for denial. If you look at an alcoholic or a drug addict they go
through a phase of denial ending. That phase usually manifests in absurdity before denial ends. We
saw that in World War II, with the famous Chamberlain ‘peace in our time’ declaration. Looking
back on that, it appears so idiotic at that point in time given the scale of the threat and the eventual
response. Yet we go to denial consistently and then of course circumstances change. Then once
they change we all suddenly change.
I think that’s where we are today. For example, climate scientists today are much more vocal than
they were two years ago about the threat of climate change because of the Arctic Sea ice melt. There’s
a profound thing happening in the system they didn’t predict. It means that the models are consist-
ently underestimating the scale of change. I wouldn’t say they’re panicking, but they’re getting a lot
more vocal and a lot more direct about the need to communicate this in more stark terms. Just this
week we saw Nicholas Stern saying ‘I got it quite wrong by underestimating how bad this was’ and
how this is an existential threat to billions of people in the world (Stewart and Elliott, 2013).

In terms of getting beyond the Great Disruption, how do you see the future of
human society and the world economy changing?
This is future forecasting with a bit of hope really, because you can’t by definition know what’s
going to happen. I think you can imagine scenarios which are much darker than mine and I cer-
tainly paint those in the book. But I find it very hard to, based on any evidence of history, paint a
scenario of the complete breakdown of civilization. I can imagine long periods of conflict and war.
I can imagine societies collapsing within countries. I find it very hard to imagine the kind of The
Road or Mad Max kind of apocalyptic view of the world actually happening.
I can, however, imagine a much more positive view than any of that, which is that post the crisis
we come out of this and actually learn the lesson and take the great leap forward in consciousness
764 Organization 20(5)

that we need to take, to recognize that we have reached the limits and that we need a profoundly
different model of progress. I think that’s a realistic view not because I’d like it to happen, but
because the physical limits suggest that it’s really the most sensible option for us to take and you
can’t have an infinitely growing physical economy with seven billion people on the planet. You
can’t have a materially focused economic model which requires us to use resources unsustainably.
Not because it’s not nice or because it’s not ethical, but because you physically can’t do it. That is
actually the physical foundation of a consciousness shift. I do think that we have historically tended
to have these big shifts when we’re forced to change, not just by some sort of intellectual enlighten-
ment. We tend to have it not because we have no choice, because we still have choices here, but
this will be a better outcome for all of us.

So what would such an economy and society look like?

The more I discuss this with people in business and economists, the less I’m convinced that it’s that
big a change. Clearly at some point we’re going to have a no growth economy in a physical sense
and effectively in a financial sense as well. People say ‘I can’t imagine that’, and I say ‘Well why
not? What can’t you imagine?’. Companies will be competing for market share rather than for
overall growth in the economy. They’ll be innovating to produce new products because they’ll
want more market share and they’ll want to grow their individual businesses. We can’t grow for
ever anyway, so at some point we have to face up to this at some point anyway.
Of critical importance is that we don’t actually need all this stuff anyway. Having more stuff
doesn’t work for us anymore anyway in Western countries––we don’t have better lives. The data is
very clear that our lives haven’t on average improved despite massive increases in material wealth
across Western societies. It’s actually not very hard to imagine a steady state economy which has
innovation, which has growth inside companies, in which people are differentially rewarded for
their efforts in innovation and entrepreneurship for education and so on.
I’m not expecting a utopian society where there is complete equality and everyone sings
‘Kumbaya’! We are still talking about a market. We’re talking about a society which has leaders
and is not completely equal. But it’s just not as extreme and out of kilter with the system that it lives
within, as we are today. I don’t think it’s that hard to imagine. Now what is hard to imagine is the
transition from here to there happening intelligently, smoothly and voluntarily. This is why I think
the disruption is going to force the change. At that point as you can imagine there’s going to be a
big push from the rich world and from the rich within the rich world to protect their self-interest.
But I don’t think it’s impossible to imagine moving to such a new approach. Again I go back to the
example of World War II where if you had to paint that world response beforehand you couldn’t have
done it. You would have been laughed at, the idea of putting women to work in factories, of that level
of transition of the auto industry into producing armaments for the military rather than cars, the
rationing of fuel and tyres and food, the incredible amounts of GDP focused on the effort and so on.
These were unimaginable ideas. You can argue that it is difficult to make these changes in a democ-
racy, but democracies won World War II. Big change actually is often best done through a democracy.
So the path through this is not clear, but it’s absolutely imaginable and completely realistic.

I was interested in your argument about the political importance of hope as an

emotional response to crisis. Could you outline your thinking here?
Having immersed myself in the evidence of the magnitude of the change, getting myself into a
position of hope at that point even though I intellectually got it, was actually quite challenging
Wright and Gilding 765

emotionally. I really struggled in writing about hope, however my conclusion at the end was that
there’s a whole range of reasons that hope is the right response.
First of all it’s a choice. We can’t know the future, we can’t predict how it’s going to turn out.
Therefore we have a choice as to what stance we take towards this issue. I think the idea that hope
is a position you take in the face of something as opposed to an analytical conclusion about the data
is really important because we do choose how to respond to this. I have days of no hope. I have
days of despair, but I always come back to hope. In the end primarily because I choose to live in
that place because I think it’s more effective. It’s a lot more pleasant place to live with hope and
you can’t argue there’s no point. There is no evidence based conclusion that says our situation is
hopeless.
My second point is that as well as being a stance and a right response because it’s more effective
and it feels better, it’s actually quite empirical, the data says we can do this. This is not difficult
technologically. This is not difficult economically. This is not something we can’t afford. The con-
sequences of failing are catastrophic. So acting to fix it has got everything going for it. It’s just a
decision we have to make. The only thing in the way is a decision by humans. Then you’ve got to
ask ‘okay so who doesn’t have hope and what is their fundamental view about humanity?’. Many
people who have the view that this is hopeless, actually don’t have faith in humans.
The third conclusion I come to on hope, which is a little more Machiavellian, is that it works.
Despair is amazingly ineffective as a motivator of action. It creates a belief that there’s no point. In
despair, whatever you say or do is underpinned by this belief that you’re wrong and you are not
going to succeed. You can’t imagine Ghandi saying that the situation was hopeless. You can’t
imagine Mandela saying the situation was hopeless. They had political movements that in the
ANC’s case said ‘freedom in our lifetime’. It was a very direct, immediate offer of victory and suc-
cess and that’s what works in politics.
So this is a very profound issue for the environmental movement, if we don’t believe in the pos-
sibility of success, if we don’t believe that we can actually eliminate the coal, oil and gas industries
in 20 years and we know how to do that, then the people who are opposing it will win. They’ll win
because they’ll have momentum of the present approach and we won’t have an alternative belief in
the possibility of transformation. If you don’t believe in victory you will not get victory––that’s
why talking up the enemy’s prospects in war is seen as treason.

What for you is the purpose of talking about the future? Is it to affect change?
Is it to imagine other possibilities?
It’s the defining idea or process by which we create change. I don’t believe that change just hap-
pens to us. I don’t believe it’s determined by luck or technology or leadership. I believe it’s a series
of choices that we make collectively. That is an idea that you can therefore influence by painting a
future which is negative if we don’t change, but also importantly painting a picture of a positive
future, of possibility, of belief. That’s so important because there are many forces arraigned against
us in this particular fight.
The reason companies like Shell for example argue that it’s not realistic to achieve 2 degrees
anymore, is because they don’t want us to. They want us to give up. Their view of the world is the
‘treasonous’ one in the context of a war. They’re painting a picture of failure and that we should
give up because they’re going to benefit from us giving up. They paint the future in a fancy, intel-
lectual, engineering kind of analysis of what’s possible. But it’s basically not true and it’s driven by
their self-interest in us giving up. The more we go to despair as a political view, the more likely we
are to fail.
766 Organization 20(5)

But it’s very important I think to recognize that this is an economic transition. The danger of
painting it as a war against evil is that you are saying to people on the other side, ‘if I win, you have
lost’. The people who run coal companies aren’t necessarily evil, but they’re doing evil things. We
should be very harsh on them, because what they’re doing is wrong and it must be stopped. But if
you’re saying to them, ‘sorry guys, you’re just in the wrong industry, you’re in the wrong job, and
this industry is going to cease to exist and you’re kind of in the horse and cart industry or you’re
producing LP records and there ain’t anybody doing that anymore. Therefore if you want to have a
good future, don’t stay in that industry. Don’t invest in that industry. Don’t work for that industry’.
That’s where Bill McKibben’s campaign is very important and very effective because they start to
paint that moral choice. But the actual change won’t happen morally. The actual change will hap-
pen economically. We can do this sort of peacefully if you like, by just recognizing that we need to
get enough of the economy on side for the transition, that it becomes an economic question.
Because we don’t actually need oil, coal and gas to prosper. We need energy to prosper and energy
is increasingly available from renewable sources at the right price.
But that transition is going to be complicated and it is going to be messy. It is going to be faster
than most people are expecting. Therefore we need to actually have the tools in place to manage
that as effectively as possible.

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