How to see the climate crisis as an opportunity

Opportunity is not the first word that will spring to mind for most people when they think about the climate crisis. But when viewed only with despair there is a real danger too many will switch off or become paralysed by fear when it comes to tackling the world’s biggest challenge.

A manifesto that turns the greatest threat we face into the greatest opportunity.”

Mark Blyth, Professor of International Economics, Brown University, on Supercharge Me

Add to this a lack of real clarity among populations about the specific actions they and their governments should be prioritising in this fight and you have a recipe for confusion, in the very moment when everyone needs to know what it will take to overcome this existential threat.

That’s where people like Corinne Sawers, a sustainability and climate advisor and investor, and Eric Lonergan, a leading policy economist and author of the bestselling Angrynomics, my guests today on Inside Ideas come in.

In their new book: Supercharge Me – Net Zero Faster, a Financial Times Best New Books on Climate title in March, the pair have penned a fast-paced gem packed with policy hacks that can help move the dial in the corridors of power.

“We have people on the streets, we have Extinction Rebellion, we have lots of protests going on but we still don’t have clarity about what we need to do and that’s mission number one in terms of the book’s objective,” Lonergan says.

The book taps into the things that are working right now around the world to offer a new framework for how power can be used to accelerate the global response to the climate crisis.

“In some ways our book is actually about the low hanging fruit,” adds Sawers. “We’ve got ten years to halve emissions, and actually there is a big chunk of emissions we have the technology to deal with. We actually know the social, institutional, legislative change needed to do it, so let’s do it because there’s absolutely no excuse not to.”

This is what we all want to hear, that this is winnable, that there really is low hanging fruit – and that it is not a case of mission impossible.

So it is with great delight that I welcome the authors of Supercharge Me on to the show, to find out more about a book it is being said will ’embolden activists, reinvigorate the disheartened, and reframe the climate crisis as an opportunity’.