It was late afternoon, and I’d barely moved all day. I’d planned to sail over the lush, livid tundra of New Zealand, to run far and fast without a pack. But it’d been a long month of stress, and a long week of travel, and a long day just before, hiking up from the lowlands. My friend Kate had felt the same need for rest, and we’d agreed to spend the first day in the alpine doing…nothing. We’d sat on the tundra most the morning, and then walked 30 seconds to a hut to escape the sun. Inside, the day had drifted and ebbed, like the soft swirl of a river nearly still. I had painted. I had talked. And now, lying in the shade, I simply enjoyed the laziness in my body. It was a deep, subterranean tranquility, an ease so profound that the very cells in my legs felt loose.
After a while I found a magazine from a local mountain club. I was more drowsing than reading, letting information drift over my brain like mist that was too weak to settle as dew. But then I saw an article about climate, and my attention sharpened. The author was trying to reconcile his love of nature with the emissions needed to access it. He spoke of guilt, and listed ways to do less harm. Travel locally. Explore your own mountains, not the peaks on another continent. Carpool.
The writer was earnest, but I felt frustrated. His tips completely ignored the one thing that would actually matter. I wanted to cross out his entire list and write “Stop Voting National.” The National Party had just taken power in New Zealand, and scrapped some climate policies. And the author hadn’t even mentioned that. He’d focused on what a few-thousand outdoorsy people could do, and ignored the politicians raising emissions in a five million person economy.
Suddenly I remembered how Kate had spoken of flying less, for the climate. Kate was one of the smartest people I knew—and if she was emphasizing flying, there was a problem. And then I remembered all the conversations with my friends, and how the discussions focused on personal emissions. It hit me, again, that even environmentally conscious people were completely confused. They thought way too much about lifestyle, and not enough about politics.
Consider the typical recommendations of “what you can do.” They’re something like this: stop eating meat; stop flying; stop having kids. I call this the have less fun solution, and I think it’s not just ineffective but harmful. First of all, most people won’t do it. Most people like meat; they’re not going to give up their favorite food. Most people like vacations; they’re not going to stop flying. Most people want a family; they’re not going to stop having kids. Having less fun is basically a tax on being nice that most people aren’t going to pay. And it’s also unfair, because it concentrates mitigation costs on the most altruistic citizens.
‘Have less fun’ might even breed inaction, because it suggests that the only solution is poverty. That might have been true 40 years ago, when renewables were unreliable and expensive. Today it’s simply wrong. Technology we already have is good enough that we could be about as rich with low emissions. We could get our electricity from renewables, and then use it for heat, industry, and transportation. And if we spent more on technology in the pipeline, like lab-grown meat and alternative jet fuel, we could reduce emissions even more.
Why isn’t this happening now? Because governments are deciding not to do it. That means climate change is a political problem—and that’s why fossil fuel companies desperately want the discussion to be about having less fun. They know that most people won’t do it, and that the focus on personal emissions distracts from policy changes. It was actually an oil company—BP—that popularized the term ‘carbon footprint.’
We need to stop playing their game. Instead of eating less meat, we should push governments to subsidize lab-grown meat. Instead of flying less, we should push governments to research better carbon capture and jet fuel. Instead of putting up with shitty transit, we should push governments to build good transit. And instead of having less kids, we should push for a better world for our kids to grow up in.
In practice that would mean donating money to political groups, or donating time being politically active. Donating is a privilege, of course—but it’s also a privilege to have the money for a lifestyle that makes you guilty, and to have the time for a reading binge that makes you depressed. If you can afford a flight that makes you guilty, you can afford to donate. If you have time to doom-scroll, you have time to protest.
In fairness, it might seem like being political doesn’t work. In Canada, the government just finished an enormous pipeline despite a decade of protest. But opposition succeeded in making the private sector abandon the project. The government had to nationalize Trans Mountain, and then give huge credit guarantees to get it built. Opposition also helped make the project finish years behind schedule and tens of billions over budget. Finally, Trans Mountains cost the prime minister a lot of support.
All this makes future pipelines less likely. Leaders will know they’re politically dangerous. And investors will hesitate. Pipelines cost an enormous fortune upfront; they’re only worth building if they’ll operate for decades. When investors finance a project, they’re making a 40-year bet on the policies of future governments. That’s why protesters make investors nervous. They don’t control the government today, but they might control it eventually, and then shut down the project. At the very least, they’ll make it cost more and take longer.
When evaluating protests, we see the pipelines that get built despite opposition. We rarely hear about the pipelines that don’t get built because of expected opposition. But that’s undoubtedly happening. Investors saw the way protests slowed down Trans Mountain and made it more expensive. They saw the way many politicians were pushed to oppose it—and they’ll wonder if next time, opposition might succeed. In investor’s cold, clinical assessment, pipelines have become less profitable and more risky than before. Some projects will be shelved at inception, or never even proposed.
Opposition is also good at delaying projects—and even delaying can be enough. Renewables are rapidly getting cheaper, and energy storage is rapidly getting better. In a lot of the world, the combination of solar and batteries is just…better now, even without subsidies. And it shows: countries that are way too poor to sacrifice growth are installing huge amounts of solar. And renewables will improve more. They’re still a newish technology, so there’s still a process of “learning by doing” where the very act of producing makes engineers better. Every year a fossil fuel project is delayed, renewables will be more competitive. If we can slow down a pipeline a few years, it may stop being viable even financially.
Delaying pipelines—or making governments move faster on renewables—matters infinitely more than whatever emissions you create in your own life. It’s true, of course, that you could cut your emissions and get political. And yes—if you’re going to do the absolute best thing for the climate, you’d do both. And if you’re a famous activist, you’ll lose credibility if your own emissions are high. But if you’re an ordinary citizen who’s not going to be a martyr—if you’re willing to make a modest sacrifice but still want to enjoy your life—then you’re best off doing whatever you want with your own emissions and then being even moderately more political. I expect that if ten percent of the people who feel guilty about flying donated one percent of their money to changing climate policy, it would help more than if no-one ever flew again. So if there’s a behavior we should normalize, it isn’t giving up flying, it’s donating to climate advocacy.
You could even practice some kind of political carbon offset: when you do something that feels hard to justify, donate some money or spend some time politically. That’s what actually helps—and it’s empowering to realize. It means climate action is about what you do to change policy, not what you don’t do to enjoy your life. It’s about what you give, not what you give up. So don’t give up your fun. Have your fun, and then make a world where having fun doesn’t hurt the climate. That world is out there, we have to make governments build it.
