A film, The Age of Stupid, set in 2055, shows a world devastated by the effects of climate change. Looking back at the early 2000s — our time — it asks: why didn’t we stop global warming when we had the chance? For the evidence by that date that climate change was occurring, and would be cataclysmic in its consequences, was already clear. The movie doesn’t answer its own question; it doesn’t try to, because it is essentially a wake-up call for today, a cautionary tale.

However, it demands to be responded to. The answer lies in what I call “Giddens’s paradox” of climate change. Global warming is a problem unlike any other which, as collective humanity, we have had to face before, both because of its scale and because it is mainly about the future. Many have said that to cope with it we will need to mobilise on a level comparable to fighting a war, but in this case there are no enemies to confront.

Giddens’s paradox states that, since the dangers posed by climate change aren’t tangible, immediate or visible in everyday life, most people will sit on their hands and do very little of a concrete nature. Yet waiting until the dangers become visible and acute before we are stirred to serious action will, by definition, be too late — we will already be in the territory described in the film.

Giddens’s paradox affects almost every aspect of current reactions to climate change. It is the reason why, for people in most countries, global warming is a back-of-the-mind issue rather than a front-of-the-mind one. Political leaders have woken up to its dangers, but rhetoric runs a long way ahead of reality. Politicians are happy talking of what they will achieve in the long run — let’s say by 2055. They are much less persuasive when speaking of what they will do in the immediate present, which is when it really counts, since this is what actually determines the future.

Representatives of many nations will meet in Copenhagen in December to try to reach global agreements on curbing greenhouse gas emissions. In truth, though, efforts to limit climate change — certainly for the next decade or two — will depend mostly upon what happens in the industrial countries. It is these countries that pumped most of the emissions into the atmosphere in the first place. They must take the lead in cutting back on them and moving toward a low-carbon economy. If they can’t do these things, no one else will.

Here I believe we need a radical shake-up in our thinking about how to confront climate change. Because of Giddens’s paradox, basing policy simply on trying to scare people is unlikely to work. Most citizens, most of the time, will simply tune out. Laudable though its intentions may be, The Age of Stupid is likely to have little impact — it is simply more of the same. Climate change policy at the moment is relentlessly negative, geared to the need to avoid future cataclysm. In their work The Death of Environmentalism, the American authors Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger quite rightly point out that Martin Luther King didn’t stir people to action by proclaiming, “I have a nightmare!”

In combating climate change, we should look to make a Gestalt switch from negative to positive, creating a vision of the future that has a compelling appeal. Rather than focussing on costs, we should identify benefits; rather than talking only about problems, we should also speak the language of opportunities; instead of concentrating only upon emissions-reductions targets, (such as the EU carbon trading scheme, whose complexities even specialists struggle to understand), the focus should be on goals, and means of reaching them, that citizens can readily understand and accept.

The positive ambition should be a clean energy revolution, an aim with which research shows the public have a broad sympathy. If set out in an accessible way, it can be an inspiring aspiration. It has the great advantage of overlapping with energy security. Most citizens have no trouble seeing the danger in the world’s reliance upon oil and natural gas, or grasping that they are finite resources. We can’t be sure when the point will have been passed when the world will have used up at least half of recoverable oil reserves, but it may be imminent.

Countering climate change will cost money, no doubt about it. Yet it is a fundamental mistake always to be emphasising the costs. Breaking our reliance upon oil will bring major benefits, not least for many businesses. We can anticipate, and should do our best to encourage, a surge of technological innovation in response both to climate change and problems of energy security.

Even in the short term, being in the vanguard of such innovation, and anticipating the lifestyle changes it will help stimulate, will confer competitive advantage upon businesses. The fate of the American car industry is salutary in this respect: it fell well behind the curve in grasping emerging trends.

If it can be shown that a progressive environmental policy also produces competitive advantage, we will be able to break one of the biggest log jams standing in the way of effective climate change policy globally: the reluctance of the big developing economies, like China and India, to adopt policies that will reduce their emissions. “We have the right to industrialise!” they say, “just like the developed world has done”.

Rescuing millions from poverty has to come first. Yet the more that economic success comes to depend upon being at the environmental cutting-edge, the less this theorem will hold.

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