Since the first Earth Day 50 years ago, it has become clear that it is easier to generate scientific insight into the ways human systems are altering the planet than it is to redirect those human systems to lessen their planetary impact. At the heart of this conundrum are divergent human values. Since the first Earth Day 50 years ago, it has become clear that it is easier to generate scientific insight into the ways human systems are altering the planet than it is to redirect those human systems to lessen their planetary impact. At the heart of this conundrum are divergent human values. Fifty years ago this month, 20 million Americans gathered in high streets, malls, and parks across America to demonstrate their concern about the state of the planet. The first Earth Day rode the tide of late 1960s radicalism and protest in the Western democracies and sought to “force the environmental issue into the political dialogue of the nation.”1Lewis J. The spirit of the first Earth Day.EPA J. 1990; 16: 8-12Google Scholar Although it succeeded in doing so and continues to do so more widely today in a very different world, it is questionable whether the larger ambitions of the 1970 Earth Day to bring about a more sustainable civilization have been met, not least with respect to a changing climate. There is a paradox here. In the half century since 1970, it has been relatively easy for science to bring forward knowledge about the dynamics of the Earth system and identify the dangers of unmitigated climate change—knowledge that has now gained widespread public and political attention. And yet it has been manifestly harder to use such knowledge to orchestrate and deliver systematic change in the human sphere to mitigate future climatic risks. In this Commentary I seek to analyze what is sometimes referred to as the “knowledge-action gap” in three steps. First, I explain why facts alone can never be sufficient to drive policy. Second, I show that the facts of climate change can be consistent with different stories—sometimes radically different stories—that embody people’s beliefs about the past, present, and future. Third, this then explains why what I call “climate solutionism” is the wrong framework within which to operate. I conclude by suggesting a focus less on the destination—i.e., stopping climate change—and more on enhancing the political conditions of the journeying. As recently argued in the pages of One Earth, “listening to the science” would appear to be the sine qua non of the new wave of climate protest movements.2Schenko T. Overcoming political climate-change apathy in the era of #FridaysForFuture.One Earth. 2020; 2: 20-23Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (8) Google Scholar Making sure that “objective facts are laid on the table” will put “pressure on obstructionist states” to deliver political change. Or as the late Rajendra Pachauri asserted back in November 2014 at the launch of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, “All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by … an understanding of the science of climate change.” This “science-first” argument guides the consensus messaging campaign that seeks to emphasize above all else the “97% of scientists” who agree that human actions are changing the world’s climate. It also leads cognitive psychologists, such as Stephan Lewandowsky, to develop climate science communication strategies based on “inoculation theory.”3Cook J. Lewandowsky S. Ecker U.K.H. Neutralizing misinformation through inoculation: exposing misleading argumentation techniques reduces their influence.PLoS ONE. 2017; 12: e0175799Crossref PubMed Scopus (341) Google Scholar This theory asserts that people can be made immune to falsehoods by being exposed, ahead of time, to those falsehoods that they are most likely to encounter on social media and elsewhere. But facts are never enough. With regard to climate change, merely seeking to “hit the numbers”—whichever one you choose: 2°C, 1.5°C, 350 ppm, net zero—is not enough. It fuels what I have elsewhere called climate reductionism4Hulme M. Reducing the future to climate: a story of climate determinism and reductionism.Osiris. 2011; 26: 245-266Crossref Scopus (264) Google Scholar and climate deadline-ism5Asayama S. Bellamy R. Geden O. Pearce W. Hulme M. Why setting a climate deadline is dangerous.Nat. Clim. Chang. 2019; 9: 570-572Crossref Scopus (43) Google Scholar and encourages the type of climate solutionism of which I am critical (see below). “Closed” timetables and emergency imperatives fail to respect the diverse moral horizons that characterize—and complicate—the difficult politics of climate change. Mere technique and technology crowd out wider explorations of human meaning and ethical purpose. Dan Sarewitz explains the flaw in this position: “… our expectations for Enlightenment ideals of applied rationality are themselves irrational. We are asking science to do the impossible: to arrive at scientifically coherent and politically unifying understandings of problems that are inherently open, indeterminate and contested.”6Sarewitz D. Stop treating science denial like a disease.The Guardian. 2017; (August 21, 2017. https://www.theguardian.com/science/political-science/2017/aug/21/stop-treating-science-denial-like-a-disease)Google Scholar Establishing scientific facts about climate change (or offering scientific projections of future change) does not on its own drive political change. Consensus messaging, for example, fails to work because risk is socially constructed and value driven. So if, as Sarewitz says, climate change is “inherently open, indeterminate and contested” and if in fact there is a surfeit of competing narratives each with different solutions to climate change, what should be our strategy? What are the wider resources beyond science—the motivational moral commitments that Jürgen Habermas refers to as “missing” in secularist societies7Habermas J. Reder M. Brieskorn N. Ricken F. Schmidt J. An Awareness of What Is Missing: Faith and Reason in a Post-secular Age. Polity, 2010Google Scholar—that can enact and guide change? To illustrate what might be missing, I suggest below four different meta-narratives (guiding myths, if you will, or ideologies) that are advocated by different voices to guide action in response to climate change. They differ from each other in various ways, sometimes profoundly. These future visions are rooted in different cultural values and often are antagonistic to each other. But they are similar insofar as they each require science and technology to be placed in a role subservient to their normative vision of how the world should be. The first of these I group loosely under the label of eco-modernism. The argument here is that modernity can, so to speak, both have its cake and eat it. Yes, climate change is an outcome of rapid and penetrating technological expansion and economic and population growth. But it is through adjusting and redirecting these very great achievements of modernity toward more just and ecologically sensitive ends that climate change can be arrested. Thus, for example, An Ecomodernist Manifesto claims that humans need to use all their “growing social, economic, and technological powers to make life better for people, stabilize the climate, and protect the natural world.”8Asafu-Adjaye J. Blomqvist L. Brand S. Brook B. DeFries R. Ellis E. Foreman C. Keith D. Lewis M. Lynas M. et al.An Ecomodernist Manifesto.2015http://www.ecomodernism.org/Google Scholar A second ideology—or motivational discourse—is that of ecological civilization. In essence, ecological civilization is seen as the final goal of social, cultural, and environmental reform within a given society. It argues that the changes to be wrought by climate change in the future can be headed off only through an entirely new form of civilization based centrally on ecological principles. There are radically different techno and romantic versions of this envisioned future. The techno version of ecological civilization has been embedded since 2012 in China’s Communist Party’s constitution. But it is very different from the romantic version espoused by deep ecologists and new cultural movements such as the Dark Mountain Project, which seeks an unweaving of the core tenets of Western civilisation.9Kingsnorth P. Hine D. Uncivilisation: The Dark Mountain Manifesto. The Dark Mountain Project, 2014https://dark-mountain.net/product/uncivilisation-the-dark-mountain-manifesto/Google Scholar A third narrative guiding political action in response to the challenges of climate change is the radical eco-socialist critique of capitalism. After Naomi Klein’s 2014 book Climate versus Capitalism, this has been articulated even more decisively by the new social movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) and in some versions of the Green New Deal.10Pettifor A. The Case for the Green New Deal. Verso, 2019Google Scholar XR has a clear belief that the only adequate response to climate change is the overturning of the social order and the capitalist economic system. The real enemy of a stable and benign climate is “racialized capitalism” and its fetishizing of economic growth and the centralization of wealth and power that capitalism fuels. XR is rooted in the political extremism of anarchism, eco-socialism, and radical anti-capitalist environmentalism. The “civil resistance model” espoused by XR is intended to achieve mass protest accompanied by law breaking, leading eventually to the breakdown of democracy and the state. A fourth guiding myth was given new focus in 2015 through the publication of Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home.11Pope FrancisLaudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican Press, 2015Google Scholar Here, the facts of climate change “reveal” an emaciation of the human spirit, which is having adverse repercussions for the material world. Pope Francis is concerned first and foremost with offering a vision of human dignity, responsibility, and purpose. He draws upon the rich traditions of Catholic theology and ethics, notably the idea of virtue ethics, which is valorized above utilitarian and deontological modes of ethical reasoning. On Care for Our Common Home offers a powerful story in an inspirational account of divine goodness and healthy human living. It escapes the confines of a narrowly drawn science and economics and shows the power, vitality, and inspiration of a Christian worldview. Pope Francis draws attention to the centrality for the Christian faith of the idea of transformation by claiming “the ecological crisis is also a summons to profound interior conversion.”11Pope FrancisLaudato Si’: On Care for Our Common Home. Vatican Press, 2015Google Scholar These ideologies offer different motivational commitments to tackling climate change and guide political action and public policy in different ways. For example, securing “green growth” through a reformed capitalism is incommensurable with the ecosocialist ambition to dismantle the fetishism of growth upon which capitalism relies. Tackling climate change through inner spiritual transformation sits uneasily with the techno-modern vision of an ecological civilization espoused by China’s Communist Party. The Dark Mountain Project wants less modernity; ecomodernists wants more. These meta-narratives illustrate why providing a coordinated global roadmap for climate action to deliver the 2°C target, in which all the pieces dovetail neatly into a single jigsaw, is not achievable. The belief that climate change can be solved can be traced back to its emergence in public life after the 1970 Earth Day as the latest in a series of environmental challenges facing the modern world. These challenges grew in scale from the merely local to the regional and then to the global. Climate change was in a line that can be traced back to Rachel Carson’s intervention in the early 1960s about DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) and chemical pesticides and that then progressed through concerns about river and ocean pollution, smog, acid rain, and the ozone hole to the fully developed awareness of the challenge of global climate change in the late 1980s. Although climate change inherited this problem-solution framing, what “solving” climate change actually means has always been harder to establish. It is not as simple as eradicating DDT, installing sulfur scrubbers on power stations, or eliminating chloroflourocarbons. Uniting behind science, putting “objective facts on the table,” and thinking that solutions will flow naturally from them—what I mean by “climate solutionism”—will not do. Science on its own offers no moral vision, no ethical stance, and no political architecture for delivering the sort of world people desire. As Alexander Ruser and Amanda Machin have recently argued, “… emblematic numbers and the production of political thresholds, targets, and truths will not smooth out or settle down the political disputes over climate change. The reliance upon emblematic numbers could ignite a sense of urgency, but it could also fuel the suspicion of politicians, scientists, and climate change policy.”12Ruser A. Machin A. Against Political Compromise: Sustaining Democratic Debate. Taylor & Francis, 2019Google Scholar My examples above of different meta-narratives that give meaning to climate change show that the solutions to climate change are under-determined by the facts. In other words, climate change is a wicked problem13Hulme M. Why We Disagree about Climate Change: Understanding Controversy, Inaction and Opportunity. Cambridge University Press, 2009Crossref Google Scholar—a problem that has no definitive formulation and no imaginable solution. Wicked problems are unsolvable in the sense that solutions to one aspect of the problem reveal or create other, even more complex problems, which in turn demand further solutions. Proposed solutions to climate change can only ever be partial; they set in motion secondary and tertiary consequences that always exceed what can be anticipated. This is the condition pointed to by the nomenclature of the Anthropocene: namely, the modernist instinct for mastery, planning, optimization, and control is no longer an appropriate paradigm for living in the world of the 21st century. Climate solutionism, driven by metrics, masks the contested politics and value diversity that lie behind different personal and collective choices—who wins, who loses, and whose values count. It is a form of moral attenuation. Metrics are alluring because they simplify complex realities into “objective” numbers and because they appear to short circuit the need for difficult moral judgement. Metrification “… may make a troubling situation more salient, without making it more soluble.”14Muller J.Z. The Tyranny of Metrics. Princeton University Press, 2018Crossref Google Scholar The circulation of ubiquitous carbon metrics operates as a facilitative and immanent mode of power. Morality by numbers also marginalizes other modes of moral reasoning that cannot be reduced to calculation. These other modes offer richer narrative contexts that enable the wisdom of different choices to be deliberated, interpreted, and judged. Wise governance of climate—as indeed in the application of wisdom in everyday life—emerges best when rooted in larger and thicker stories about human purpose, identity, duty, and responsibility. We have reached beyond a stage (if there ever was one) when steering the planet toward some long-term commonly agreed normative goal or benign state would have been feasible. At best, consensus messaging and inoculation theory could yield a thin veneer of agreement about the reality of human-caused climate change. But there is no trick that will force a convergence of human values. The stories people tell about themselves, their past, their futures, and their place on the planet will continue to divide. Mobilizing some new “solution science”15Doubleday Z.A. Connell S.D. Shining a bright light on solution science in ecology.One Earth. 2020; 2: 16-19Abstract Full Text Full Text PDF Scopus (7) Google Scholar resting on a putative cultural authority of science will not eradicate political conflict. We live on one Earth, but we imagine many futures and hence are not susceptible to alignment of our actions toward securing a common single destination. Rather, we have to abandon the dream that a sustainable ecological equilibrium that works for everyone can be designed, implemented, and reached. Securing a pre-determined agreed-upon destination such as the 2°C target is an illusion; delivering “Earth system management” is a chimera. What should be aimed for are less ambitious, more incremental, and multi-scalar projects that emerge from a humbler disposition toward the future and that anticipate perverse outcomes. These interventions should be driven from the bottom up rather than by a top-down narrative of securing a singular global target. For example, there are many different local, culturally sensitive policies that can be designed to progress toward securing one or more of the 169 sustainable development targets. These interventions do not rely upon globally coordinated action or a commitment to one shared ideology, nor do they measure success according to just one index. The corollary of this disposition is that investing in new participatory and agonistic forms of democracy—where value conflicts and political disagreements are acknowledged, voiced, and worked with—is as important (perhaps more important) than investing in new scientific or technical knowledge.