The crisis in climate leadership and how we can learn our way out

In 2015, the global community – Britain included – signed up to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 140-plus targets, on critical development areas ranging from climate change and poverty reduction to health and education and lifelong learning, which countries committed to achieving by 2030.

As we pass the midpoint on the road to 2030, it is clear that progress on most fronts is woefully insufficient. The UN’s preliminary assessment found that only 12 per cent of the goals and targets were on track, with close to half ‘moderately or severely off track’ and 20 per cent either regressing or showing no progress at all. On current trends, the UN estimates, 575 million people (almost 7 per cent of the world’s population) will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, while 670 million people will still be facing hunger in 2030, some 8 per cent of the world’s population, the same as in 2015. Worst of all, action to address the climate crisis remains wholly inadequate, with the 1.5 °C target ‘at risk’ and the world ‘on the brink of a climate catastrophe’.

There is little chance now that global warming will be kept to 1.5 °C and I suspect most leaders in the wealthy West privately accept this and are, in different ways, planning for it. The opportunity to keep to the target has likely been squandered, and the worst predictions of climate scientists are beginning to play out in real time before our eyes. Parts of the world are already well on the way to becoming uninhabitable for humans. Amid the warmest month on record in July, the UN Secretary General warned that ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived’. It is here and it is going to get worse. Countries’ current commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions put the world on course for at least 2.5 °C of warming by the end of the century, a level consistent with catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every bit of fossil fuel burned contributes to global heating and exacerbates these risks.

Yet, as the world heats and 50 °C temperatures become the devastating norm in many places, the fossil fuel industry is increasing oil and gas production and making record profits in the process, aided and abetted by politicians, many of whom are on its payroll. In fact, rather than upping their game at this crucial moment and shutting down oil and gas production, leaders are loosening their commitments, often in the name of ‘energy security’, and reconciling themselves to failure. Some, such as Lord Frost, are even waking up to the benefits of global warming (a new and really remarkably stupid form of climate denial). The UK, which once positioned itself as a leader in tackling climate change, now leads the world only in the audacity and insincerity of its rhetoric. While the government’s decision to grant more than 100 of new oil and gas extraction licences in the North Sea has been condemned by environmental groups as sending a ‘wrecking ball’ through its green pledges, it continues, straight-faced, to describe itself as a ‘world leader on net zero’.

The truth, though, is that rather than listen to environmental groups and climate scientists (including its own), the UK government has little interest in honouring its climate commitments, only in appearing to do so. While it ‘maxes out’ Britain’s North Sea oil and gas reserves, it is confident that it can manage the public’s perceptions, as it has quite successfully over a decade or so of austerity politics and economic stagnation. And if that fails, it is in the process of introducing new laws to curb dissent and criminalise protestors who disrupt ‘everyday life’. Whether they believe it or not, politicians still talk as though an accommodation can be found between extractivist economics and environmental protection. Continued fossil fuel extraction will bring more jobs and boost energy security, they say. It will even reduce our reliance on oil and gas in the longer term. The Prime Minister meanwhile eschews sustainable forms of transport in favour of private jets and helicopters, justifying this as the most efficient use of his time. Such supposed trade-offs are, of course, false and unjustifiable. Every private jet journey contributes to making the planet uninhabitable. Every oil and gas licence issued brings us closer to environmental collapse. To talk as though such risks could be counter-balanced by increased efficiency or greater economic or environmental security is, to be frank, risible, as is Mr Sunak’s Orwellian claim that increasing oil and gas production is ‘entirely consistent’ with net zero goals.

None of this though should surprise us, demoralizing though it is. Generations of politicians have been ideologically captured or else co-opted by the fossil fuel industry. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, for example, received £3.5 million from individuals and entities linked to climate denial, fossil fuels and high-pollution industries in 2022 (a lot of money in Britain’s eminently biddable and reassuringly affordable political landscape). Many senior politicians have stakes in oil and gas companies or accept donations or gifts from them. And these are just the interests that are publicly declared. They tell the story of a party that is simply too close and too dependent on an industry to effectively regulate it, still less to close it down or even limit its production. Instead, Britain now finds itself a leader in the group of countries prepared to increase fossil fuel production, ‘truly dangerous radicals’ pursuing ‘moral and economic madness’, as the UN Secretary General put it (a group that also includes the United States).

We are facing a crisis in climate leadership, globally and in the UK, which is symptomatic of a more general failure of political leadership over the past few decades, itself emblematic of a wider crisis in democracy. Politicians in Western democracies now operate in a kind of post-truth environment in which slogans have supplanted argument and rhetoric outflanks reality. Pledges – on climate or anything else – matter only in the moment they are made. They are a cheap way of generating some positive news. Achieving them matters rather less.  It is a problem to be dealt with through the careful management of public expectations. And for a government that convinced a large proportion of the British electorate that the global financial crisis was caused by reckless domestic spending and that austerity was a necessity rather than a political choice, no lie can really be considered too big.

Politics – real politics, that is, in which real decisions about things that really matter are made – has to a large extent become about personal enrichment and private collusion. The access given to Big Oil and to oligarchs of various stamps, including the media barons to whom senior UK politicians of all stamps bend the knee, gives them a direct say over policy, while public debate, such as it is, takes place largely within parameters already set behind closed doors. Policy debate has become mean and small, with politicians stoking culture wars and fabricating outrage, particularly through policies on asylum and immigration, which they know will divide people and frequently have no greater purpose. There is no serious attempt to resolve the underlying issues or to make people’s lives better. We are all now used to the dissembling of politicians. Johnson and Trump were the apogee of this, openly lying to the public while selling this, quite effectively, to their supporters as a facet of their charismatic leadership. Meanwhile, a demoralized, under-informed electorate veers between infantile sentimentality about the past and a fear of otherness, both enthusiastically nourished by their leaders, though neither does us any good.

I think the implications of all of this for education and learning are quite profound and pose an important moral choice for educators and advocates. Can we carry on with business as usual when business, to put it mildly, is anything but usual? Is it the job of education lobby groups to contract to support government policy and make it work? Should education aim narrowly to supply the economy with the skills it needs and be blind to the industrial uses to which these skills will be put? When I worked for the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), the institute aimed to act as a ‘critical friend’ to government, supporting policy it felt was progressive and looking to improve policy that was not. There was a presumption in this that there was broad alignment between the values of the organization and the ministers and civil servants it worked with, as well as a joint understanding of the challenges faced and the areas of policy intervention to be prioritized. I no longer think this presumption holds. Some would say it never did (while NIACE’s achievements are now widely recognised and the institute fondly remembered, its decision to work more closely with government met with bitter resistance from many of its supporters). It is no longer clear quite what the government means to do, what its true priorities are and why it does what it does. Its commitments cannot be ascertained simply by listening to what they say they will do. In such circumstances, it becomes important to take a critical approach to engagement with ministers, and to reflect thoughtfully on the dangers of co-option and what this might mean more broadly, across different areas of public policy. There is a responsibility for all involved in public advocacy to think between and beyond their silos, and to not talk only to their members and stakeholders. We cannot afford to be in it only for the money.

Of course, it is important that education, and adult education, in particular, provides people with the skills required for the much-vaunted ‘green transition’. There is a clear role for lifelong learning in the retraining and reskilling of adults to work in new and changed industries, should this become a reality (though training alone won’t deliver this). But the crisis in leadership and democracy described above suggests another, still more important role for adult education, one that points to a reassertion of is past values and objectives. The ‘deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ demanded by the IPCC won’t be delivered by politics as it is currently construed. It requires mass public engagement, cooperation with environmental groups and a redirection of political will, driven by an informed, committed and politically savvy population. Lifelong learning has a critical role to play not only in generating informed, critical public support for climate action but also in encouraging political action and fostering shared agency for change.

One of the interesting, more positive outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis was people’s willingness to act with agency and joint purpose in responding to the pandemic, demonstrating the moral clarity, solidarity and willingness to make sacrifices Britain’s  political leadership so plainly lacked – Dame Ruth Silver coined the term ‘leaderhood’ to describe it and we write about it here (behind a paywall but please get in touch with me directly if you would like to read it). Leaderhood, as we frame it, can characterize leadership but goes beyond it: ‘Where leadership concerns an occupation or activity—managing a school or college, for example—leaderhood is more a state of being, recognizable not only in formal leadership situations but in every part of life, emerging not from policy and regulation but from a sense of fellowship and an awareness of our responsibilities to others and our community. These qualities are at the heart of good leadership—are, indeed, indispensable to it—but can be exercised anywhere, by anyone’. We see this as an antidote to the sort of closed, introverted, conservative leadership that is focused on retaining what we have rather than building for the future. Leaderhood, by contrast, is ‘about how we position ourselves and our sector in relation both to our values and to the wider context’. It is leading that ‘transcends institutional settings and exists powerfully at the interface of different contexts … that builds bridges to the future and embodies an ethic of care and public service, rather than holding on to the past and refusing to do better or different’.

It is this sort of shared agency that education is in a unique position to promote. The early twentieth-century adult education movement saw its purpose in broadly these terms. It recognised its social purpose in giving working people the means to be active citizens and thus change the world, ‘without a revolution’ as historian John Harrison put it. Adult education can give people hope that another world is possible, and it can give them the means to be the change they want to see in society, a platform for joint action and activism. Lifelong learning should be the enemy of quietism and the friend of creativity, courage and critical thinking. It should grow people’s collective agency and empower them to become active citizens who believe the world can be different and that they can contribute to that transformation. To transform society and our relationship with the planet we must transform education too, recognizing both its limitations and its largely dormant potential. Of course, education concerns skills and employability. We need skilled people in key roles at every level of society, and that is important. But by focusing only on skills and training, we are starving democracy of the oxygen of active citizenship, dissent and critical thinking it needs to survive and thrive, as well as stifling human development in its fuller sense.

The planet is crying out for a different kind of leadership. But it will not come from politicians. Change of this sort can only come from the ground up, and it will not happen without dissent, disruption and civil disobedience. As educators and advocates we can make a difference, strengthening the links between education and social movements, promoting critical thinking, and fostering shared agency among learners and joint propose with others in their communities. Only through the distribution of leadership can we begin to make collective sense of the world and start to change it. We need to think of leadership as an ensemble undertaking in which everyone can play a part. As I write elsewhere, the austerity fundamentalists have persuaded people that while another world may very well be possible, it is simply not affordable. But the situation is really the reverse. Unless we transform our world, our relationships with each other and with nature, in a truly profound way, against the entrenched interests of many powerful and wealthy people, we will remain on the road to climate catastrophe. This, it seems to me, is unarguable. More of the same means more extreme heat, more depleted oceans, more uninhabitable zones, more death and morbidity. It is in all our interests to change course. This should form part of a new common sense about climate change and planetary sustainability. We are in an emergency after all, even if, for the most part, everything feels the same. The real ‘climate radicals’ are the politicians who are ditching their commitments and stepping up oil and gas production in full knowledge of the terrible consequences their actions will have.

Permacrisis? What permacrisis?

‘Permacrisis’ – meaning ‘an extended period of instability and insecurity’ – was this week named the Collins English Dictionary Word of the Year for 2022. It is one of 10 new words included in the dictionary for the first time, alongside ‘partygate’, ‘sportswashing’, ‘lawfare’ (the use of legal proceedings to intimidate or hinder) and ‘warm bank’ (a heated building to which people who cannot afford to heat their homes can go). Such additions can be useful indicators of change in society and, seen from this perspective, this year’s crop is especially interesting. They are a glass held up to a society in which crisis follows crisis with unrelenting, hope-sapping regularity, always hurting the poorest the most; a society marked by growing inequality where poverty is deepening at the bottom and privilege amassing at the top. The currency of ‘permacrisis’ could be said to reflect the sheer awfulness of the past few years: the Covid-19 pandemic, the war in Ukraine and now escalating energy prices and the cost-of-living crisis. People are tired of volatility and upheaval and long, understandably enough, for a return to normality. But I suspect that, more profoundly, it speaks too to the feeling that such crises represent the new normal, the reality of life for most people in a world characterized by obscene levels of poverty and inequality, climate despair and political indifference and corruption (now so common in our politics that we have ceased, by and large, to remark on it). Increasingly, we are caught between the realization that change is desperately needed and our seeming incapacity to do or be anything different.

So much for the ‘end of history’, but perhaps this, in the end, is what it looks like. The world is at an impasse. We need a new story, new ways of making meaning. We need change, of a radical sort, if we are to survive the worsening climate crisis and save our overheating world. The source of much of our current hopelessness is our failure to see how this could possibly happen. Despite the dire warnings of climate scientists, activists, and international actors such as the United Nations, state-level politics remains in thrall to a neo-liberal, market-driven extractivist narrative. The privatisation of the global commons continues apace (though the election of Lula in Brazil represents a glimmer of hope, albeit it a faint one). Inequalities continue to grow, both within and between countries, sentencing hundreds of millions of people to desperate, inescapable poverty, most of them in parts of the world worst affected by climate change. And while COP27, the latest UN climate conference (taking place in Egypt from 6–18 November), offers a fleeting opportunity to change direction, the kind of change we need is almost certain to be thwarted by the fossil fuel lobby, narrow state interests among wealthy countries and climate denialists. For all the good intentions – and, I know, there are many sincere, good-hearted people who contribute and press hard for change – the conference resembles one of those streaming-service series, endlessly prolonged by its producers even though it should have finished year ago.

In the UK, the new Prime Minister Rishi Sunak gave an indication of the importance he attaches to the issue by withdrawing from the conference (though he later changed his mind, apparently remembering that ‘long-term prosperity depends on climate action’ – an odd thing to have forgotten!). Nevertheless, his initial willingness to ignore the issue and focus instead on the UK (as his team briefed) is an unhappy sign, not only because it suggests a half-hearted commitment to climate action but also because Mr Sunak evidently does not expect any positive headlines to come of it. This is not surprising, I suppose, given the UK’s recent record – as chancellor, Sunak provided tax relief for investment in oil and gas extraction at the cost of £1.9 billion a year to the taxpayer – and the increasingly urgent calls for action from the UN. But it is also, I would suggest, indicative of who the new PM really represents: the tax-avoiding, polluting, billionaire elite of which he is a mid-ranking but assuredly loyal member. It is simply not possible to square support for the fossil fuel industry with a commitment to a green future. It’s silly to suggest otherwise. In fact, it is harmful, perhaps, in the end, more harmful than the brutal climate isolationism of Trump and his supporters.

Britain ceased to be a proper democracy some time ago. Perhaps it never was one. Its politics have been taken over by the super-rich and the country is run, by and large, for their benefit, at substantial cost to everyone else. Money buys access to politicians, including the PM, and there is a revolving door between government and capital, including the fossil fuel industry. Favoured chums are rewarded with knighthoods or seats in the Lords or lucrative contracts against which delivery is optional (the main point being to get public money into private hands). There is also a revolving door between the national parliamentary press lobby and 10 Downing Street, which helps ensure the rich can continue to punish the poor for their own mistakes without anyone really noticing. In fact, the real story of the past decade has not been the story the papers tell, that of ‘tough decisions’ made to plug the gap in the national finances. It is the story of the massive redistribution of wealth from the poor to the rich, all sustained by the bad-faith rhetoric of austerity and the friendly compliance of client journalists (those constant advocates of growth and markets). Meanwhile, the country’s health service continues to fall apart, schools are starved of funding, wages decline, and local authorities struggle to provide the most basic of basic services. Worst of all, business goes on as usual, while the climate crisis worsens, and politicians ramp up the rhetoric about climate activists and refugees and legislate to make protest a criminal offence. It’s almost as if the country they are preparing for is not the greener, sustainable one of ministerial rhetoric, but a darker, scarier future, in which the poor and stateless pay the price of climate catastrophe, trade unionism is all but outlawed and protest is illegal. Welcome to Fortress Britain. You’re not welcome.

The truth, I suspect, is that most politicians no longer believe that a fairer, more equal world geared to human flourishing, planetary sustainability and wellbeing is possible or worth trying for. Perhaps they believe that a compromise between fossil fuel extraction and a sustainable future really is possible. I don’t know. It is certainly a lucrative thing to believe, if you have the stomach for it. Maybe they believe climate change is, as one prominent pundit put it last week, ‘just weather’. More likely though, they believe that they will be safe. They think they have an exemption. There is a lifeboat but it’s not for everyone. They simply cannot imagine that their lives of comfort and privilege will ever end. Surely, when the time comes they will not be left on the shore? However you try to explain it – whether through indifference, complacency, greed or venality – it is clear that the inaction of our leaders will prove fatal for communities in the South. It will create mass movements of people in search of habitable land. They will come to our door and, most likely, we will turn them away, or try to. Then, one day, and much sooner than we expect, the chill winds of the climate emergency will come to our shores. People will want to get out. But there will be nowhere to go. No one will open their doors to us. They have nothing to give us. Such is the fruit of indifference.

While I was writing this post, a representative of the Kogi people, an Indigenous group from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta mountains in northern Colombia, appeared on a news programme I was casually watching. It was strange because I had only recently come across them and had been reading about their beliefs. It was an odd, awkward televisual encounter, but nonetheless pleasingly authentic. This man, whose words were repeated by an interpreter, had a warning for the non-Indigenous people of the world: that unless we changed our relationship with the planet, we risked losing it altogether. Although traditionally reluctant to engage with strangers, the Kogi wanted to help us – their job, as they saw it, was to guard the world, and the world was dying, through our actions and indifference. It was not the first time they had communicated this message, but it was perhaps the first time they had offered to work and share their knowledge with us.

I found this very moving. For the Kogi, the Earth is like a living body, on which everything is connected. We are intimately related to each other, and to the land. To damage one part is to damage the whole. Yet we have become so disconnected, both from each other and from the natural world of which we are a part, that we harm both without compunction or thought. We live thoughtlessly, distractedly. But it is not our fault. We have lost so much, forgotten so much. The great question of our time, to my mind, is how we foster these connections, how we reinvest them with life and meaning, in a world which is deeply inimical to them; a privatised, commodified world in which we relate to one another not as sisters and brothers, friends and lovers, but as subjects and consumers, bosses and workers. How, in such a world, do we make a space for connection? How do we begin to live differently? How do we join forces and defend ourselves and the planet? How do we practise hope, so it doesn’t turn into despair? It is easy, as climate accords collapse and countries retreat into isolationism, to feel that there is no chance. Well, perhaps there isn’t. The world is sick, and we are too. But we cannot give up. We have at least to try to enlarge the space in which we can come together with joint purpose. We have to claim those spaces or make them ourselves. We have to push at the limits of the commons. We have to listen and connect, bringing our environmental concerns together with our learning and our activism and our knowledge and our truth to make something that wasn’t there before. We have to start something, and just see. Because trying and failing is better than simply failing. And because there is nothing else, nowhere else to go, no other source of love and light. There is just us.

Meditations on an emergency

The devastation caused by floods and fire this summer is a wake-up call with regard not only to climate change, but to lifelong learning too.

The floods that devastated parts of Asia and central Europe and the wildfires that reshaped the landscape in Greece and North America this summer supplied what are sure to become some of the defining images of our time. This year will be remembered as the one in which wealthy nations came face to face with the reality of climate change. As Malu Dreyer, the Minister-President of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany, noted of the floods in her state, climate change is ‘not abstract any more. We are experiencing it up close and painfully’. There are no longer any safe places, no exemptions for the privileged.

This sobering picture was confirmed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s new report on the climate emergency, which was published on 9 August 2021. The IPCC Report – the definitive and uniquely authoritative word on the physical causes of global warming – found it ‘unequivocal’ that human activity was the cause of climate change, making extreme climate events, including heatwaves, heavy rainfall, and drought both more frequent and more severe.  Already, every region in the world was experiencing some combination of rising temperatures, forest fires, flood or drought, the Report said. Only ‘strong, rapid, and sustained’ reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, and attaining net zero CO2 emissions in this decade, will prevent further climate breakdown and limit global warming to 1.5 °C. Without it, larger scale, extreme weather events such as floods and heatwaves would become more common, and human life on the planet would become more precarious.

However, the IPCC report is not a counsel of despair. Although we are uncomfortably late in acting, and many of the changes we are seeing are ‘irreversible’, it is not yet too late, and there is still much we can do, and much we can save. As Inger Andersen, Executive Director of the United Nations Environment Programme, noted at the report’s launch, ‘the power is in our hands at this point’, and there is an onus on every business leader, politician and policymaker ‘to consider how to be a contributor’.  The problems caused by climate change can be mitigated, if not solved, but only through concerted, intersectoral action everywhere, on every front, in every community, wherever we live in the world. The IPCC report represents an unchallengeable mandate for far-reaching change in every aspect of the way in which we live, including, quite crucially, in education.

This is what makes the challenge so daunting. We are used to experiencing the world as unsolvable. As Fredric Jameson observed, it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. While systems of power are more nebulous and harder to challenge than before, it is also the case that we have forgotten that change can and does happen; and that collective action can make other worlds possible. It is important that we believe this. The old, dying orthodoxy of endless economic growth and limitless consumption will take all of us with it, unless we can find a new language of hope, founded on planetary sustainability, collective action, and a commitment to equitable and inclusive futures.

Education has an important role to play in this, not just in response to change, but as a driver of it. This is a challenge to the global education community, at every level. We cannot wait for change to arrive, but must, instead, in all of our practice, strive to embody the sort of change we recognize as essential in wider society. Among other things, this means reframing our understanding of lifelong learning, and reviving some old, now unorthodox and unfashionable, understandings of the term, making them meaningful to a new generation of people facing new, unprecedented challenges.

Gert Biesta wrote some 15 years ago that lifelong learning had come to be understood ‘in terms of the formation of human capital and as an investment in economic development’, a transformation felt at both the level of policy and the level of the learner and learning provider. If anything, in the years since, this trend has become more established, more seemingly permanent. Learning for purposes other than work is, by comparison, more marginalized than ever. It is under pressure everywhere. Yet, despite the predominance of what Biesta terms the ‘learning economy’, it is increasingly evident that we need something else: lifelong learning that prepares us to be not only good and efficient workers, but also thoughtful, active citizens, adaptable and resilient, yet creative, cooperative, and imaginative enough to shape new futures based on collective thought and action and a desire for social and environmental justice.

Biesta’s call for us to reclaim ‘those forms of collective learning – learning with others and from otherness and difference – which are linked to empowerment, collective action and social change, and to the translation of our private troubles into collective and shared concerns’, is more pertinent and urgent than ever. The horrific images from China, Germany, Greece, Austria and other places, and the astonishing heatwaves in North America, which saw new record temperatures four or five degrees higher than the previous ones, are a wake-up call, with regard not only to climate change and the prevailing economic model driving it, but to education too. They tell us that business as usual is no longer an option. We need to create a new normal based around the idea of sustainable living, and to realize the potential of lifelong learning to empower people to make the change we need.

While we all have an obligation to be mindful of our environment and ethical in our behaviour in the different aspects of our lives, there is, I believe, a special obligation on those of us who work and learn in education to highlight the wider value of lifelong learning and foster its democratic function. Education that empowers and enables, that connects and inspires, and, in the best traditions of adult education, foregrounds dialogue and co-production of knowledge, is more necessary than ever.

What might this mean in practice? At the level of the learner, it might mean becoming a learner-activist, championing environmental concerns at school or college, and taking what you learn into your community. For teachers, it could mean embodying democratic practice and the principle of co-production of knowledge in your teaching; and building networks of mutual support. At the level of local and national government, it may mean rebalancing the dimensions of education and lifelong learning and recognizing that, in some key respects, the system is broken, its resistance to change indicative not of health or robustness but of dysfunction. At the level of the international education community, so critical in all of this, it must mean renewing the education discourse in a way that makes change thinkable and hope possible.

Of course, the kind of cooperation that is required to respond to the climate crisis is unprecedented, but so too is the emergency. It is on an entirely different scale to every other challenge we face, the pandemic included. We cannot know if we will be successful or anticipate what will emerge from our response to the crisis. But by acting as though another world is possible, we optimize our chances of getting there. There is no chance at all if we don’t.

The post is an updated version of a blog post first published on Only Connect, UIL’s blog, and also draws on my introduction to the August 2021 issue of IRE. It was first published in this form in the PIMA Bulletin No. 38 (Sept. 2021). It is reproduced here with permission.