Marcy Franck, author of The Climate Optimist
The headlines we ingest every day too often create a sad, circular cycle of despair, despondency and inaction. Which then worsens the trends. Nowhere is this more true than on the existential issue of climate change. Yet there is good news on climate, including this weekend’s G7 agreement “to accelerate the phase out of unabated fossil fuels so as to achieve net zero in energy systems by 2050.” It didn’t make the front page.
A handful of determined optimists have been working hard to offer an alternative to the steady diet of doom about the climate. Will they help turn the tide? They include Steven Pinker, the late Hans Rosling (and son), a new podcast from Harvard ALI Fellow Bill Burke of the Optimism Institute called Blue Sky, and a brave team of women at Harvard’s Chan School of Public Health. These outliers stand counter-culturally against the onslaught of bad news by putting ‘climate’ and ‘optimism’ together. One of them is Marcy Franck. She is on a mission to balance the narrative on our climate future.
It isn’t clickbait perhaps, but it may be something more powerful: a precondition of survival. Adapting to the climate challenge facing us requires us believing we can. As Henry Ford succinctly summarised, “whether you think you can or you can’t, you’re usually right.” Marcy Franck, through her 4-year-old newsletter The Climate Optimist, shares three messages:
- We can do this, in fact we are.
- It isn’t a sacrifice. It will be cleaner, cheaper, and healthier for all.
- If you are hearing different, ask who profits.
Franck notes that when her team at Chan School’s Center for Climate, Health, and the Global Environment launched the newsletter in 2019, the context was darker: The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) - and science itself - was under attack, the government was rolling back climate policies at blistering speed, and America had just pulled out of the Paris Agreement (temporarily, as it turned out). Now, she says, the case for optimism grows ever stronger. Here is her case for why the news is better than you think, and why hope is the essential fuel for the transition times we are in.
1. We Can Save The Planet. In Fact We Already Are.
“The story of humanity rising to meet the challenge of climate change is full of things that looked impossible until they became reality,” Franck reminds me. “We need to move faster but we also need to celebrate how far we've come and use each milestone as motivation to stay engaged.”
The energy transition is taking off. Last year worldwide spending on carbon-free energy passed $1 trillion. That means, for the first time ever, we spent as much on clean energy as we did on fossil fuels. Renewables’ share of the global power generation mix is now forecast to rise from 29% in 2022 to 35% in 2025.
Emissions are edging in the right direction. Last year global carbon emissions related to energy rose by under 1%, less than originally feared thanks to the swifter-than-expected adoption of renewables, EVs, and efficiency efforts.
The US signed 3 new climate laws allocating $514 billion to cutting American greenhouse gas emissions. On the surface, none of them appear to be about climate, but “a climate law by any other name can still save the planet,” Franck says. “In our newsletter, we’ve called them a turning point and we’ve called them sexy. We could butter their butts and call them biscuits, but they remain America’s biggest-ever investment in climate action.”
The EU has launched its own plan to become a leader in the green transition, partly in response to these new American climate laws. The UK is now arguing that it needs to do the same to keep up with the US and the EU - or it will fall behind. Such competition may yet save the planet, as long as trade policies keep fairness to emerging economies in mind.
2. Climate Action Doesn’t Mean Sacrifice. It Means Better.
Both climate doomers and deniers want to convince us that climate action is too expensive or requires too much sacrifice (as though the alternative won’t). But the data suggests it’s the opposite: cleaner, cheaper and healthier for all. While many clamor that it is too big, too hard, or too late, the reality is that the narrative needs flipping. Here are five things we can improve through climate action:
Lower energy costs. The cost of renewable energy has fallen far faster than expected. Now, it’s cheaper for countries to transition directly from coal to renewables without using methane gas as a “bridge” fuel. In the US, it’s now cheaper to build new wind and solar operations than it is to keep existing coal plants running.
Build energy security. Homegrown energy not only lowers costs, it also makes countries less dependent on others and less vulnerable to geopolitical turbulence. Something the Europeans – and especially the Germans - have quickly learned during a year of war in Ukraine.
Clean the air, improve health. When you take a fossil fuel power plant offline, the pollution it produced disappears with it. You immediately see declines in everything from the number of asthma flare ups, heart attacks and strokes to low birth weights and premature births, , even miles downwind. [3]
Advance equity. Racist land and housing policies often expose minority and marginalised communities to disproportionately more pollution by building highways and fossil fuel infrastructures near residential areas. Climate justice will bring solutions that simultaneously clean the air, lower energy bills, and grow jobs for local economies.
Create jobs. If countries stick to their climate pledges, clean energy is expected to add 14 million jobs worldwide this decade.
3. Question the Naysayers, Hear the Optimists
If you can’t pair ‘optimism’ and ‘climate’ in the same sentence, be aware of these three things about how the media, our brains, and disinformation campaigns shape our perception.
The Fossil fuel industry is funding a false playbook. Both climate doom and climate denial are narratives funded by large oil and gas companies aiming to protect profits. “Their goal is to prevent us from taking action by convincing us that climate change isn’t a problem, or that it’s a problem too big to solve,” suggests Franck.
Don’t believe it? Here’s a small excerpt of stories showing the kind of messaging that the industry is financing and propagating:
- How the fossil fuel industry seeds doomism to protect continued extraction (Drilled).
- Oil companies have invested $700 million dollars in American universities – and bought a presence on campus in the process. (Guardian)
- “Fighting climate change is a losing battle.” Leaked document details industry’s secret plan to defeat the Clean Fuel Standard. (Greenpeace)
- Old school climate denial is back (Drilled)
“The industry tries to shift responsibility for climate change away from itself onto consumers,” wrote Franck in Letting Go of Climate Guilt in 5 Easy Steps. This adds another roadblock to taking action.
If it bleeds, it leads. Bad news sells media. News outlets produce more negative stories because they capture our attention, get clicks and advertising dollars. The trouble is it leaves us believing the world is worse than it is. And that the battle to make it better is already lost, leading people towards inaction – at precisely the time escalation and urgency are most needed.
Our brains are hardwired to fixate on bad news. This gets dangerous when all the news is bad. Our brains play into the doom cycle. Resisting this, requires an intentional decision to read more broadly about climate progress. Including the good news.
Climate Optimists in Action
Marcy Franck points to two powerful climate optimists who have paved the path to the global climate actions underway today. “Together, their work tells a love story about persistent climate action,” she says. One is Gina McCarthy, the former director of Harvard Chan C-CHANGE. “If Gaia and Athena had a baby, we’d get Gina McCarthy,” says Franck. To understand how we got from a climate future that looked bleak in 2020 to today, check out “What I saw as the Country’s First National Climate Advisor” McCarthy’s op-ed in the NYTimes. “Over the past 20 months as America’s first-ever national climate adviser,” she writes, “I have witnessed a paradigm shift: The private sector no longer sees climate action as a source of job losses, but rather as an opportunity for job creation and economic revitalisation.”
After discussions totally, devastatingly collapsed at the UN's annual climate conference in 2009, Costa Rican diplomat Christiana Figueres picked up the pieces and led the international climate negotiations back from oblivion. Back then, no one - not even herself - thought an agreement was possible. But a paradigm-shifting six years later, at the very same conference, 196 countries signed the Paris Agreement, committing to limit global warming to 1.5°C. What changed? Figueres realized that “Impossible isn’t a fact, it’s an attitude” and that she needed to change the world’s attitude, too.
If you are feeling, like so many, that the world is going to hell in a hand basket, know that your attitude may be contributing to our collective future. Get to know some of these climate optimists. It may just change your attitude - and your impact.
