The Climate Zeitgeist
Climate has reached a cultural tipping point. In the past few weeks, millions of people have been marching for the future of our planet all over the world. Greta Thunberg sailed across the Atlantic, shook the UN and continued her rise as the activist icon of millennials and Gen Z. Anyone wants to take bets for the TIME Person of the Year? As my friend Jackie said: “these teens are in activism mode in a way they haven’t been since the 60s”. The Climate Zeitgeist is here.
In its recent Climate issue, The Economist, with one of its best covers in recent years, argued that “decarbonizing our economy will require a complete overhaul” and that so far “the market economy has done very little to help”. Tech entrepreneurs and startups have an opportunity to tap into the cultural moment that climate is having to come up with new solutions that could help accelerate the shift to sustainability. Until now, the pressure has been mostly on governments and corporations to act on reversing climate change. As a society, we’ve tended to look towards philanthropic and scientific efforts to find the solutions. Yes it will require some drastic measures and a large coordinated effort but we should not ignore our individual responsibility. It’s great we’re marching and going on strike but what should we expect from ourselves? What are the choices we need to make? The planet is bearing the cost of our modern and urban consumer lifestyle. Carbon footprints are concentrated into a small number of dense, high-income cities and affluent suburbs. Our sustainable future will primarily come from a shift in consumer behaviour and spending in the most developed parts of the world.
Technology observers like to describe the impact of the Internet as an economic shift from scarcity to abundance. We’ve gone from the prudence of our parents and grandparents post war years to the gluttony of today. For those who can afford it, a majority of products and services (books, food, rides, movies, music, etc) are now, same day delivery, available as an « all you can eat buffet ». Every day, social media feeds us with new things to buy, new places to go to. We live in an age of consumption abundance but in parallel we are quickly creating environmental scarcity. But if consumer tech has demonstrated its ability to drive new forms of behaviours and spending, how could we use that to contribute to reversing climate change? What about using the power of consumer technology to create environmental abundance?
Consumer behaviour: It has been increasingly well documented over the years but we still need to do a lot more efforts to live more sustainably. We have to change how we live, how we move, what we eat, etc. It’s hard and most of us are not doing enough. I’m certainly not doing enough. Part of my motivation to write publicly about this topic is to keep myself accountable. I’ve been thinking about a relevant analogy and I think that changing our lifestyle could share a lot of similarities with people who have tried to quit smoking. I’ve never smoked so I never had to quit… but I have had a lot of people around me who went through this process. As we know, it’s hard and requires a lot of commitment. Behavioural science teaches us that there are a number of human biases that are difficult to overcome. The Behavioural Insight’s team set up a couple of years ago by David Cameron’s government applied the nudge theory to health (among other policy topics) and came up with a framework to help people quit smoking: Easy, Attractive, Social and Timely. A similar framework could potentially be applied to encourage a more sustainable lifestyle. For example, it’s not enough to talk about global catastrophe and end of the world scenarios. As humans we tend to suffer from an overconfidence bias and we think it won’t apply to us. Another human bias is the present one that makes us value disproportionately the costs and benefits with immediate effects vs those delivered later. A good solution could include making the present effects of climate change (ideally at a local level) more visible and highlight them. We should also emphasise the change required in consumer behaviour and lifestyle using social proof bias. As social creatures, we’re strongly influenced by what others do, especially the people we relate to. That’s why climate having a cultural and generational moment represents a great opportunity. Now, as always, this theory would need a great execution. That’s where our modern communication tools and digital products could make a real difference. We need to make the impact of climate change more real, more visible. Stories have become the dominant communication medium on Instagram, Snap, etc and we stream them all day long. How can we use that to make the effects of climate change more present and tangible? Our smartphones and watches are already giving us more and more health-related data based on our lifestyle, activity, sleep, etc. What about the same level of insights about our environmental footprint? How can I become more aware of what my friends, neighbours or even influencers are doing to live more sustainably? What could a Strava for a sustainable lifestyle look like?
Consumer spending: Despite our best efforts, our footprint will remain. We should also put our money where our mouth is to finance the cost of our lifestyle on the planet but also repair the damages done. One solution is taxes. They help incorporate the costs of a more sustainable supply chain into the prices of goods and services. However, I think that we’re also going to need more direct ways to funnel consumer capital into climate initiatives. Climate becoming a cultural topic makes it a prime candidate to become a category where people are more likely to spend their money. We’re increasingly paying everything through a subscription. Should we pay our environmental footprint as a subscription as well? We’re paying our utility bills in this way and it seems perfectly normal. In the UK, a brand like Bulb has done a great job at offering sustainable energy as a a service. Why not go further and finance the broader environmental impact of our lifestyle? We like to say we live in an attention economy because we feel this is our scarcest resource and we are increasingly paying productivity tools as a service (e.g Superhuman). What if we actually live in a planet economy? The earth is quickly becoming our scarcest resource. Shouldn’t the people who consume the most pay for it? Offsetting at scale could be a good start. The danger is that it just serves as a guilt-free service and we continue to avoid the environmental externalities of our lifestyle. Should we aim at using technology to create “environmental abundance”? What if as a consumer we could effectively spend money to decarbonise our economy? The biggest Internet platforms of the last 10 years have powered and financed new brands, small retailers, mini hoteliers, artists and startups. What about normalising sustainable behaviours, powering the most exciting climate projects, supporting climate activists or funding the “greenest” products?
Climate change and the solutions to reverse it are a complex topic. I avoided addressing the complexity in this post. You could say that broken markets forces have gotten us into the climate mess and since startups are subject to market forces, it is a real question whether entrepreneurs and startups can be the answer. As The Economist argued in its Climate issue: “Concluding that climate change should mean shackling capitalism would be wrong-headed and damaging. There is immense value in the vigour, innovation and adaptability that free markets bring to the economies that took shape over the past century. Competitive markets properly incentivised, and politicians serving a genuine popular thirst for action, can do more than any other system. Market economies are the wells that produce the response climate change requires”. I would tend to agree with this view but I need to educate myself a lot more on the whole topic. The ideas I have suggested in this post are very preliminary. I’m planning to spend more time thinking about what great consumer tech products and services to normalise a sustainable lifestyle and “create environmental abundance” could look like. As my colleague Michelle pointed out, the notion of environmental abundance might be the wrong objective: “we need to build in the very real planetary boundaries and actual scarcities of our resources into whatever new economy we create to figure this out.”
I wrote this post to better structure my thoughts on this topic and start a discussion around me. At this point, my excitement and optimism come from the simple belief that climate has become a cultural topic. Culture moves people and those we understand how to marry culture with the market economy create the most powerful companies. The Internet has the potential to help scale a more sustainable lifestyle and make it go viral. Let’s do it.
Thank you to Jackie Annesley, my sister Rosalie, my wife Isabelle, my brother Lance and my colleagues Michelle, Mish and Saul for their valuable feedback and their suggestions.
Some interesting projects to watch: