Do Climate Activists Do More Harm Than Good?

Poll results

Yes, more harm than good	24%
No, they are doing it right	21%
Some do, others are OK	47%
Intelligent people, misguided	9%

The poll was run as part of the Clidemy Climate Poll series, designed by Narasimhan Santhanam, Co-founder of CliDemy – The Climate Academy & Director at Energy Alternatives India (EAI).

For this poll, 34 LinkedIn members voted in total.

So, what does the vox populi say?

The largest portion of voters seem to feel that climate activists are overall doing something positive, with some exceptions of course. And if we add this to about a quarter who feel climate activists are doing it right, we get almost 70% of the voters have an overall positive opinion about climate activists, compared to only about 30% who appear to have a negative opinion about them.

And what do I think?

So what do I think? It is quite a tough one for me to choose. Really. You see, I wear two hats. I’m a climate tech business guy and at the same time, my role also includes climate education & creating sustainability awareness.

As a business guy, I feel that one has to be realistic. We cannot change the world overnight, and we ought to give the incumbent businesses that are emitting CO2 and creating all sorts of pollution in general some time to migrate to a new, sustainable level. Trying to get changes done too fast can destabilise economies and societies. In my opinion, at least some climate activists ignore these ground realities and want polluting businesses to shut their polluting plants tomorrow and become clean within a week. Just cannot be done. By trying to be unrealistic and taking such a hard line, such activists will only make the large businesses completely ignore them.

At the same time, I know the reality of where we are and the results so far from global climate action – this is, after all, my day job! Unless I wish to ignore the warnings from a very large percentage of the scientific and expert community, we all have to realise that we are in a perilous state. It appears that we are almost sure to overshoot 1.5 degrees C by 2100. This is really dicey, I say. Desperate situations call for desperate measures. And well, if one looks at it from this perspective, one might even tend to agree with some of the extreme climate activists that all the powerful stakeholders need to get all their acts in order NOW.

I wish I did not have two hats to wear.