In Praise of Climate Virtue Signaling

These changes are real, and very significant, so it’s no wonder that some of the MPs Westlake interviewed said they’re more interested in reducing emissions through technological progress than behavior change. But emissions from things like diet, aviation, and our homes are proving more stubborn—and these are areas where behavior change can play a much bigger role.

Westlake asked the MPs what they thought about advocating for low-carbon behaviors. Two MPs told him that they felt it’d be seen as “virtue signaling,” and when they were asked about cutting their own emissions, some seemed concerned that they’d be seen as environmental radicals. “I think to try to set some sort of example but not be too saintly” is how one MP put it.

That anonymous MP is articulating something I think a lot of people feel on an intuitive level. We compare our behavior to people around us—or people in public life—and feel judged if our own behavior doesn’t match up. If my neighbor has solar panels and I don’t, well, they must think that I just don’t care enough about the environment, right? Faced with these awkward moral questions, it’s easier for MPs—and all kinds of leaders—to preach about the things we can do to reduce emissions that don’t require any moral calculations about our behavior.

But this misses something really major. Decisions around climate change and our individual behavior do have a moral component. It’s not to say that if someone takes an extra flight each year it makes them a bad person, but our moral obligations to other people, and to future people, should be at least part of the decisionmaking calculus. Westlake says this serves an important purpose—not to chastise people for going on holiday, but to direct attention to people whose lifestyles really do have an exceptionally high carbon impact.

I think about this dynamic a lot when it comes to food, and particularly alternatives to beef, which has an outsized carbon footprint compared with almost any other foodstuff. A lot of people hope that making plant-based burgers cheap and tasty will be enough to switch vast numbers of meat-eaters over to the plant-based side. When I hang out at alternative protein conferences, no one wants to talk about the morals of eating meat, although I suspect that is a major motivator for many of the people there. They assume that argument won’t win over any converts to pea protein burgers or whatever.

Maybe they’re right. But I suspect that if we ignore the moral component of climate decisions, we drastically limit the whole scope of our climate ambition. It’s not that morals should make up the whole or even a significant part of our decisionmaking, and we shouldn’t expect people to be morally consistent either. Morality isn’t the whole part of the climate story, but it’s not exactly a footnote either.

“The decisionmaking process of ‘Are you going to take that flight?’ needs to be normalized,” says Westlake. “It doesn’t mean you stop doing everything, but it does mean you make decisions on a consideration of the climate impacts.” And that is part of the reason why leaders—in Westlake’s estimation—really do matter. It matters when Taylor Swift endorses Kamala Harris, and it matters when Taylor Swift takes a short hop in a private jet. If you accept that we should all be thinking about behavior in terms of climate change, then it follows that some people should be paying much more attention than others.

And this gets back to MPs’ wariness about encouraging behavior change. One of the MPs Westlake spoke to was reluctant to discourage flying, saying that it wasn’t fair to stop families from having one foreign holiday per year. When behavior change comes up in the press it’s often framed in absolute terms—stop eating meat, stop flying, stop driving—and so on. But by dismissing behavior change altogether we lose the ability to focus on the wealthy outliers who shoulder what Westlake calls a “differential responsibility” for addressing climate change. Rather than cringing at the prospect of behavior change, perhaps those in charge should focus their attention on their fellow leaders.