What separates a good leader from the merely adequate? The question stalks the business section of bookshops and motivates no end of teeth-grindingly-awful podcasts. In the latest addition to this canon, Tony Blair’s new book draws some lessons on leadership from his decade as prime minister of the UK. His message—at least according to a review from former chancellor George Osborne—is that great leaders focus on delivery, embrace tech, and seek respect rather than love. A great Leader—capital L—gets shit done.
Other politicians are a little more squeamish about seeing themselves as leaders. That is one finding from a paper by Steve Westlake, a research fellow at Cardiff University’s School of Psychology. Westlake is intrigued by how leaders—politicians, celebrities, billionaires—shape our actions on climate change. Behavior change is often talked about as an amorphous blob. We all have to change eventually. But who should change first? And how? Westlake is interested in how these changes ripple out through society—or don’t.
To that end, Westlake interviewed 19 members of the British parliament. He wanted to know how they thought about climate leadership, their own climate behaviors, and the response of the people who elected them. The paper makes for slightly uneasy reading. The MPs fretted about virtue signaling, being seen as overly radical, and alienating their voters. “I’m not going to turn into a vegan, [a] person who wears linen and goes around in a teepee or wherever,” one MP told Westlake. “I’m going to still be of this world.”
Before we unpack the politics of linen clothing—an appropriately airy choice in a warming world, but I digress—there are some things you should know about Westlake’s study. The MPs were interviewed in 2019, and they were a self-selecting bunch of politicians who agreed to speak with him. We can’t take this study as representative of MPs’ stances on climate issues today, but it does tell us a great deal about the constrained way in which so many people—leaders among them—think about how individuals impact climate change.
The dominant message from recent politicians is that our tackling climate change should not—must not—require significant behavior change. “For years, going green was inextricably bound up with a sense that we have to sacrifice the things we love. But this strategy shows how we can build back greener, without so much as a hair shirt in sight,” former PM Boris Johnson wrote in the introduction to the UK’s 2021 net-zero strategy. Switching to a lower-carbon economy should feel seamless from the perspective of the individual—they’d live the same life, but with fewer emissions.
To a large extent, in the UK at least, this has proven true. Per capita emissions in the UK are down 61 percent from their peak in 1971. The majority of this has been driven by changes in how electricity is produced—mostly by switching away from coal-fired electricity generation, and vastly increasing the supply of renewables. Just by flicking on the light switch, people are living considerably greener lives than their parents. No hair shirts required. (A terrible choice for keeping cool, incidentally. Linen really is better).