Originally published on Radical on 2024-09-04.
Whether you’re investing your time or your money (or someone else’s money) in impact work designed to address, mitigate, or reverse climate change there are really only two criteria that matter in terms of making a meaningful impact:
- Reducing the absolute consumption and demand for fossil fuels and materials (mostly in the Global North), and
- Directly regenerating natural habitats, human wellbeing, and biodiversity (mostly in the Global South).
Everything else is largely greenwashing, a red herring, or mere incrementalism.
The biggest causes of climate change and of the associated crises of biodiversity loss, ocean acidification, and social inequality are primarily the ever increasing burning of fossil fuels, the loss and degradation of land and oceans to industrial farming and heavy industry, and the ever increasing demand for ores, minerals, and other natural resources.
The majority of this, and the majority of associated waste, is demanded by the Global North and tends to disproportionately affect the Global South in terms of natural resource exploitation as well as human exploitation.
If what you are working on is not directly aimed at reducing, in absolute terms, the overconsumption and extraction of natural and human resources the your impact is negligible at best. Most likely you are building a business (perhaps a profitable one sure) that is simply “less bad”.
If what you are building is “improving efficiency” of something without reducing overall use, then you are most likely increasing overall consumption (and emissions and waste) via the rebound effect.
If what you are building is replacing a dirty part of an exploitative industry without changing that industry at its core then you are simply enabling that industry to keep growing with its associated negative impacts, outweighing whatever advantage you might otherwise provide.
If you electrify some process or device only to require increasing use of water, mining, and industrial processing then you have merely shifted the problem. Externalised it to a land, far far away. (But still not far enough.)
Here are some examples of things you should invest in if you are aiming for real, authentic, lasting impact: