"Climate hushing"—the quiet trend undermining global climate actionhttps://www.talkingclimate.ca/p/climate-hushingthe-quiet-trend-undermining?As political winds have shifted in the United States and elsewhere over the past year, “climate hushing” has become a real thing: and that’s bad news. “When leaders don’t talk about something, enthusiasm falls among voters,” Senator Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island writes here. “In politics, you can often make your own wind, or you can make your own doldrums.”
Unfortunately, climate hushing is going global. This year, when world leaders spoke at the World Economic Forum’s meeting in January, nearly every single one of them avoided the topic—even Prime Minister Mark Carney, a former UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance. Why is this? “In today’s deeply polarizing U.S. political stance, climate discussion has come to feel so radioactive that many leaders would rather avoid it,” sustainable business professor Anjali Chaudhry writes.
The only major leader to break the silence was Chinese Vice Premier He Lifeng, who used his speech to press for collaborative climate action. ”We invite enterprises from all over the world to embrace the opportunities from the green and low-carbon transition, and work closely with China in such areas as green infrastructure, green energy, green minerals and green finance,” he said.
The organization We Don’t Have Time hosted an alternative WEF speech, held on a pile of snow and featuring several of my colleagues and leading systems thinkers, including Dr. Johan Rockström, Sandrine Dixson-Declève, and former Unilever CEO Paul Polman, who said,
“We know what needs to be done [about climate change]. It is not a failure of resources. Global capital has never been more abundant. It is a failure of collaboration and collective action. A failure of governments to align around shared interests rather than narrow advantage; of businesses to act as system-shapers rather than short-term competitors; and of leaders across sectors to share risk, and act in service of a common good.”