Alex Flint is executive director of the Alliance for Market Solutions.
The global climate movement recently experienced its biggest setbacks to date. The United States withdrew from the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change — which America helped design — and relaxed emissions standards for cars and power plants. Meanwhile, Canada eliminated its consumer carbon tax, and the European Union is scaling back its emissions reductions goals.
The fact that Earth is on track to warm 3.3 degrees Celsius by 2100 fails to motivate adequate action to curb emissions. Unsuccessful messaging is often blamed, but the widely supported methods to address climate change deserve more scrutiny.
Environmentalism has historically been shaped by what it has challenged: dams, highways, pipelines, mines and power plants. Those efforts to block development once served a vital purpose. They helped protect air and water, preserve wilderness, and ensure that industry accounted for costs it had long overlooked.
But when it comes to climate change, that legacy must be reconsidered.
The climate movement inherited many of the instincts of the broader environmental movement, including a deep skepticism of development itself. As a result, it finds itself at odds with one of humanity’s most powerful and enduring forces: the desire to improve living standards. When climate advocacy runs counter to that aspiration, it fails to gain durable support.
If the climate movement is to succeed, it must reorganize around a different premise. Its measure of success should not be how much development it prevents but how much development it helps enable — while minimizing climate impact.
Today, roughly 8 billion people worldwide consume about 620 exajoules of energy each year. By the end of this century, the global population is expected to reach 10 billion. If those 10 billion people have access to energy at roughly France’s current per capita level — about half of the United States’ per capita consumption and twice the world average — global energy demand will rise to roughly 1,300 exajoules annually. That is double today’s total energy production.
Any credible climate strategy must acknowledge that this demand is likely to materialize. Billions of people are still climbing the energy ladder. They want refrigerators, air conditioning, clean water, mobility and modern health care — and those desires are both understandable and legitimate.
Therefore, the climate movement’s task cannot be to suppress demand. It must be to meet that demand in ways that do the least harm to the climate.
This reframing carries important implications.
First, climate advocacy will be most effective when it is grounded in demand and economics rather than moral appeals alone. People rarely respond to calls for sacrifice when the alternative is a better life. They do respond to technologies and systems that are cheaper, cleaner and more reliable than what they replace.
Second, the movement must stop reflexively opposing development through lawsuits and protest. Those tools have played an important role historically, but on their own they are not structurally capable of delivering energy at the scale the climate challenge demands. When cleaner options are easier and cheaper to deploy, they will displace higher-emitting alternatives.
We have seen this approach before.
Between 2005 and 2023, U.S. net greenhouse gas emissions fell by roughly 17 percent. Nearly all that reduction came from the power sector, where emissions dropped by more than 40 percent. Transportation emissions barely changed, and industrial emissions declined by just over 1 percent.
The primary reason was straightforward: Coal was displaced by natural gas.
Coal did not fade because it was protested out of existence. It declined because something cheaper, cleaner and easier to deploy became widely available. That shift would not have occurred at that scale without a boom in domestic natural gas production that was enabled, in part, by provisions in the 2005 Energy Policy Act that reduced regulatory barriers to hydraulic fracturing.
Those provisions were controversial, and for understandable reasons. Many leading environmental organizations opposed them outright. In hindsight, however, they may represent one of the most consequential climate policies of the past 25 years.
Third, a forward-looking climate movement must seek alignment rather than conflict with developers. It would view builders of transmission lines, power plants, nuclear reactors, geothermal wells, carbon capture facilities and synthetic fuel plants as allies, not adversaries.
Fourth, a movement that is serious about climate results cannot be organized around NIMBYism. It must be prepared to say yes to infrastructure, even when that infrastructure is visible, disruptive and imperfect.
Finally, such a movement would remain open to every tool that meaningfully reduces climate risk — mitigation, adaptation and even geoengineering — evaluated primarily through economic and physical constraints rather than ideological ones.
None of this requires abandoning environmental values. But it does require updating them for a world in which success depends on scale, speed and alignment with human aspirations.
Climate change will not be addressed by asking people to want less. It will be addressed by helping them get more — more cleanly.
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