Changemakers: Liam Kavanagh

Liam Kavanagh is Co-Director of the Climate Majority Project, which looks to mainstream serious climate action and create the conditions for a mass climate movement. A cognitive and social scientist, he uses his understanding of human motivation, ideology, and economics to aid more effective responses to the climate crisis. He has worked on three continents over 20 years, doing applied social research.

He co-founded Life Itself, a community for responding to the poly-crisis, and in 2024 published (with Rupert Read) The Climate Majority Project: Setting the Stage for a Mainstream, Urgent Climate Movement.

Liam Kavanagh (LK) was interviewed by Jonathan Essex (JE) and Jakob Abekhon (JA).

JE: The green movement is good at discussing what a green future is, but less good at making plans for how we can actually get there from the starting point where we find ourselves. Would you agree?

LK: I call that the ‘Unger gap’. Roberto Unger talks about how we talk about either boring changes at the margin, or utopias – but not about a series of changes that can take us from where we are to somewhere much more interesting.

For me, and I think for the Climate Majority Project [CMP], if we're not talking about the Unger gap, we're not really talking about reality. That means looking at why environmental and systems change issues haven't gone mainstream, despite mainstream sentiment being in favour. Organisation has lagged behind.

To further that we tend to look for existing leverage points in the system that move us forward a step, rather than trying to get the whole way in one go. Our commitment is to take a long-term perspective; to look at it as like a marathon, not a sprint.

And that's discouraging. But if we'd had that mindset 10 years ago, we'd be a lot farther along than we are today. There's basically a panic mentality in the climate movement. To use a sports analogy – it's a bit like in football, you're down by several goals. And one response is just kick the ball as far as you possibly can towards the goal. But that's not how you win football games. It's not how you come from behind. You pass up, in a focused, disciplined manner; you make passes forward and you look for a good opportunity, and you try to play better football, right?

The climate movement is like a disorganised side that hasn't played together very much. It has a lot more resources and talent than the other side, but it's down by several goals and panicked. You need to think about what we have available and how we get some type of win that convinces people that a green movement could be serious and achieve something. Then you have forward motion. The problem is mostly psychological: people don't feel part of a collective effort capable of doing something.

So CMP looks to do that. We're focused on the UK in terms of action and conversation, mainly, but inherently it's a global issue. We have an audience in both the US and Europe. We support on-the-ground action and organising in the UK.

 JA: What are the main changes we need to see to transition to a more sustainable future?

LK: As we set out in our recent paper, ‘Action for the Majority’, the idea is to move the focus towards Unger gap, to say: how do we, as environmentalists, react to the sort of messaging Zack Polanski is putting out, if the goal is to be part of an overall meta-crisis movement? Recognising that a majority of people realise that they're in a failing system.

Recent polls that have looked at sentiment or concerns about systemic collapse have shown that 56% of those polled in the UK – this was in 2020 – think that their way of life may go away within their lifetime. Similar polls done internationally about the possibility of collapse are mostly above 50% – in Italy and France, for instance, and in Australia. Germany was ‘just’ in the high thirties.

Across the industrial world, it's not just that people are concerned about climate, that a majority of people think their system doesn't work. They also think it doesn't reflect their values. They think it's excessively consumerist.

But they also think that they can't do anything about it. So, how do we think about and how do we actually organise a majority movement? What we're really concerned about is the meta-structure of how you build a movement, and then the first steps.

How do you actually grow the numbers of people engaged in something organised and that deepens sentiment? What appeals to people to join? What types of actions will increase people’s concern and engagement? So you can build your numbers of people and get forward momentum.

We are now seeing Zack Polanski and Zohran Mamdani doing well politically. One of them is a mayor of a city; the other's getting 17% in polls. This is making the news and exciting people internationally – and justifiably so. Because people are looking for something concrete to actually believe in. And this is widely under-appreciated: how much a single concrete achievement can lend reality. We have to reify the possibility of a real movement.

You don't do that just by writing policy papers, or talking about how great the future could be. When people actually see something happen, then possibilities get more real. There’s way too little attention on what we can achieve now, and that can make the possibility of movement feel real.

One thing which is really obvious, in terms of first steps, is adaptation. We’re very strong believers in adaptation, because right now the amount of environmental damage that’s already been done and that is in the pipeline is so great that we're obviously going to live through a chaotic future. Adaptation needs to be undertaken already, not just out of environmental concerns but because of wider global instability. World trade could break down. We have no idea what the end of the so-called Pax Americana is going to mean geopolitically.

Increased emphasis on stability, rather than growth, is already appealing to people. We're switching into an era when a loss framing is going to start to take over, where people start to worry more about protecting what they have than on gaining more. Being worried about protecting what we have, rather than getting more, is a powerful tipping point in collective mindsets.

Adaptation is part of that, and something we should focus on. When you are adapting, knowledge about climate change or environmental breakdown becomes a private good. Part of the reason why neoliberalised societies are failing right now is because neoliberals have essentially done a wonderful job of convincing society at large that knowledge is a private good, such as paying for university.

Of course, being a good voter is exactly like your emissions. You're not going to improve your own future very much by being a good voter. Having a public education is similar: reading lots of books about government and history is most helpful if everybody else is doing it as well. There's a heavy public good version of that.

However, from an adaptation perspective, when we start thinking about local action for adaptation, a lot of that becomes a private good. Because once we say that, okay, breakdown is inevitable, we have to understand exactly how this is going to happen. When knowledge is seen as more of a private good, there's much more incentive to invest in it.

Switching emphasis onto adaptation doesn't mean de-emphasising decarbonisation. It also means using adaptation as a way to increase the importance of the environment as a whole.

People who oppose adaptation tend to think in terms of a fixed pie slice – a certain amount of attention that's going to be paid to environmental issues. Well, if that's true, we're fucked, right? If you're happy to accept that assumption, then we're going to make a chaotic ecological and societal collapse. So we can all just get try to make money now and ride out our surviving years (and chaotic societal collapse) as well as we can if we're happy to assume that we’ll just never pay more attention to ecology.    

CMP argue instead that we should view adaptation as a way of increasing the share of public attention that’s paid to environmental issues. So that we can keep attention on decarbonisation, but increase the overall salience of the issue.

Adaptation tends to get people organised around things where they feel they can be part of something large enough to make a difference to their own future. Everybody can adapt enough to change their own future while nobody can reduce their carbon emissions enough to change the future.

The difference between public and private goods is stark. We tend to be in denial of the importance of this, especially on the left, because people on the left are quite idealistic and think, ‘You should do what's right, regardless of whether everybody else is doing it.’

But pragmatically, for organising, you can't think like that. You have to think in terms of how most people are going to behave reciprocally. And we have to think about how policies are going to win in a game-theoretical manner, with relatively ‘non utopian’ assumptions about the way people are.

So getting people into motion, learning about their futures through adaptation, is super-important, and can over overcome this idea that we're not large enough to make a difference. Because it makes the majority visible.

These are the main things that I think are important: how do you actually make people feel part of something large enough to make a difference? Adaptation does that immediately, at least on a local level. Worldwide adaptation efforts would make people feel that way on a world level. So we should embrace adaptation.

JE: Talking about Zohran and Zack, I read your book with Rupert Read, The Climate Majority Project, and it was unclear to me to what extent you saw this as a political project, or as a project more about, you know, creating community gardens. You could do adaptation by creating community gardens, but that doesn't in any way threaten politics or politicians. It might get people involved in a collective action, but not necessarily in a collective political challenge. How do you square the circle between those two things – the practical, which might be about adaptation, and the political?

LK: Well, I think there's two levels. We shouldn't get stuck in these false alternatives. It's a bit like reflection and action, or top-down and bottom-up. We should want a virtuous circle, right? So, in terms of catalysing national adaptation efforts, obviously a national adaptation policy that was serious would be really helpful. If councils had resources available, virtually everybody you speak to will say that producing a local adaptation plan would be money well spent. Such a political commitment would catalyse local adaptation efforts massively.

But at the same time, you can catalyse this national political process by foregrounding people who have already been organising. So our approach is to find the people who are already engaged, assemble them into a unit with a collective voice, and start lobbying politicians to support this type of effort.

Such an action could complement the National Emergency Briefing (NEB). After the NEB, the Your Brain on Climate podcast had an interview with [climate communications specialist] Adam Corner, who said it's a bit like Covid. When Johnson made his national emergency declaration during Covid, suddenly we all felt it like, okay, this is real – it felt like a real emergency.

The difference was that after he talked about Covid, he then talked about what we're doing. So, part of what we're talking about is that adaptation is not only helpful politically, but also something that you can sell to the electorate. Something that more conservative people would support. The kind of people who ask, what about China, what about India?

It's a way of engaging a lot of people who are not already engaged. So it's also a winning issue for politicians, potentially. We need actions that will help to build a majority, and build the number of environmental voters five years from now.

Getting more people engaged with adaptation as a political issue would probably increase engagement with the Green Party, with environmental issues, and lead to shifts in the voting public.

Education is similar. CMP have an education campaign. Serious education about not only the environmental problems and challenges, but also about what can you do about it adaptation-wise locally, with emotional support, in schools across the UK, would create a shift. Teachers, students and many inside the education establishment support it, because they get the feedback. And 400,000 people leave education every year. That's potentially quite a lot of devoted actors.

People tend to be particularly devoted actors in their early 20s, like actually do stuff. If you invested in 400,000 people who are probably a lot more turned on than they are right now that could feel like a victory.

And finally, the actual debate would be eye-catching, because it's a values issue that forces a public discussion. A core issue is how much you tell people. Are we going to tell people what we think they can handle? Or are we going to find a way to create environments where people can learn what they need to know? This is a conflict at the core of the climate movement right now. We're not talking about things, because we think we're going to overwhelm people.

We should have a public discussion which makes people aware that they're part of the majority that wants change. And then, if you have collective efficacy, then we can discuss anything, because you feel able to tackle it. That's how war mobilisations work. You have never seen a war mobilisation that succeeded by avoiding telling people what they needed to know. Like, ‘Don't talk about how scary Hitler is, or how scary Putin is, because people might get overwhelmed, and then they won't do anything.’

Roosevelt had this famous quote, ‘We have nothing to fear, but fear itself.’ [Yet] we are basically being told we should fear fear itself by people who are experts in climate communication, that we have to avoid panic in our climate messaging, because people are going to panic and freeze if we talk too clearly about what's at stake.

Instead, we should create the environment for people to feel like they can do something – adaptation –  and create the (true) sense that there's a large and growing political majority who support this.

JE: Your book has a whole chapter talking about theories of change and the difference between a climate majority action on the one hand, and a radical flank on the other. Can you tell us something about what or who you see as the main agents for change, and what the main barriers are that need to be overcome?

LK: There are four dimensions of mobilisation. People need to: i) know about a problem; ii) feel there is something that they can do; iii) feel part of something large enough to make a difference; and iv) have the emotional ability to deal with the overwhelm that can come when you don't have the first three. If we feel that there's an existential threat, but don't feel we can respond, that's overwhelming.

So it’s really important to recognise that the collective efficacy is gone, psychologically. That's what's missing. Because people don't feel they can respond. If you don't feel you're part of something large enough to make a difference, then you're going to be overwhelmed by discussion of a collective threat to which you cannot respond.

So you have to create the sense that people are part of something large enough to make a difference. The easiest way of doing that is an adaptation programme. There's going to be a few lesions in the people that we need to mobilise to start to create this, to work on these ‘stuck’ areas. So we have adaptation, education, then basically reaching the majority. Efforts include the 89% Project  to make the climate majority aware of itself.

Another thing is international outreach. For people to feel motivated [on an international issue], you need to have international effort. So, part of what the UK can do is use its voice to call attention to what's not working internationally, for example climate agreements. So those are several areas of action.

This will need both grassroots and top-down (or elite) efforts. So the CMP do events under Chatham House rules to engage, say, insurance executives.

Elites: you should not make things too simple. Elites tend to respond better to more unvarnished opinions. Elites can help to create change inside institutions and political processes. For a national adaptation plan, it would obviously be helpful to have supportive elites.

Grassroots: you need to reach the majority to win elections.

Efforts need to be top-down and bottom-up. Even the labour movement had some elite allies. The labour union movement was largely driven by highly skilled workers (not those most oppressed, but the ones who could resist scabs the most). Those were the early organising hubs. They essentially started the effective organisation of the labour movement. So it would be like the equivalent of today's software engineers – the organised people, innovative people in many ways nowadays, because they have the most leverage over their employers.

We're extraordinarily ineffective in left-leaning movements because we're so ideological. We have this idea that to be morally legitimate our movement must be composed of and led by the poorest of the poor, and appeal to everybody at the same time, rather than starting where it can and growing. This is part of the problem.

Majority movements are typically organised by relatively few people, because most people just don't have time. Many people are a few paychecks away from the street, yet you need your movement to be organised by the majority? We need realism in theories of change –you want some level of unity, some sense of coming together around a shared threat, but also realism.    

Marx's idea of a class in itself and not for itself is relevant here. We should approach Marx like any great thinker who had good and bad ideas. Marx was talking about workers, but now there is a class of people who are residents of a self-destructing economy. They don't see themselves as a class. It includes virtually everybody. There's not going to be anybody who's better off when the ecosphere collapses. Yet there's this rather poisonous meme where people say the system isn't failing. It's doing exactly what it's supposed to do.

Destroying life on earth isn't something anybody's really designing, right? It's not an optimal design outcome for everybody. And that's exactly where we're headed. A hothouse earth and maybe a nuclear war.

I think some of the old arguments between Marxists are relatively apt here. Marx, as I'm sure you know, thought that the workers would overthrow capitalism. But a lot of the people who tried organising change came to believe that insiders, not the people who owned everything, but all the people who ran it for them- were the most likely people to organise some alternative. That those people who understood how the system works, have free time to think about something besides their next meal, would be totally crucial for changing it.

I think we would be foolish not to try to enrol them in some type of effort. If you want interventions that are actually effective, you should get the people who are running a collapsing system, and know that it's collapsing, to be part of it. And you don't need all of them. You need enough to understand how it works.

The British empire was able to crush rebellions of huge numbers of Indians because they had an imperial policy that stopped Indian soldiers from learning much about how military tactics worked or delving into strategy. It’s very similar now: the majority of people don't actually know how the system works. That’s how empires work – by controlling information.

It's just not clearly true that people who are oppressed by systems always understand the systems better than the oppressors who build and run those systems. It is contested, to say the least.    

I used to work with former Marxist economists, or people who once did the second five-year plan of Tanzania, and were friends in their student years with the people who went on to organise the Weather Underground. When you talk to people who were 60s radicals and then compare what I hear from them to what I hear nowadays, it’s mind-blowing.

Look at what happened after colonialism. [Julius] Nyrere fired the British colonial administrators and then hired some of them back because he needed people who actually knew how the things ran. Obviously they transitioned to local rule as quickly as possible, but the expertise of insiders was needed.

JA: Could you touch a little bit more on what the barriers are – if there's anything structurally that needs to be overcome? And also, how do you reach those people currently running the system, maybe profiting from it in some way, so that they come on board and support the change?

LK: So on the second question, there's a chapter on the concerned business majority in our upcoming report, ‘Mobilising Silent Majorities’. The long story short there is that if you look at polls of business people, something like 80% of business executives realise we need massive change in the rules governing the economy to get anywhere near sustainability levels. Their views about what’s actually required – for example on degrowth – would probably not align with the radical left. But at the very least, a very high percentage of people are aware.

The thing to realise is that they're part of corporations, and it's less about finding people in business who realise this than reaching them. I’m thinking of the people that are part of our business campaign, or a friend of mine who's head of regulation advice at a major consultancy. They agree with much of this but don't feel they can do anything – and aren't quite aware that 80% of people see the same thing. Because nobody's really talking about it.

And businesses will never do anything, because businesses are largely corporations. It's like [Joel] Bakan’s point that corporations, if you looked at them as a person, would be like psychopaths. They mainly care about profits. They care about the single bottom line, they don't care about any other bottom line. And corporate resources are used to lobby for things that create profits for corporations.

They're not used to advancing the opinions that people who work in businesses hold. So no corporations ever used money to lobby for a 35-hour work week. Largely it's employees, creating their own organisations So what one needs is more outreach with unions, for example, some of the larger, newer unions, which organise information workers, and organisations for people in business which are not tied to the business. And more efforts to get business people to speak in groups independent of their employment.

A lot of these efforts, like We MeanBusiness, are in my opinion failures, because they try to get businesses to sign on to things. And why would you get a corporation to do that? Why would you make your standard whether corporations endorse it? Systematically, there's going to be a huge gap between what individuals who work in business think and what businesses will say, because those aren't the same thing. Being realistic about these gaps, and then getting people to speak in an organised fashion outside of their corporate capacity, is important.

A lot of it is about the timbre of debates. Barriers come up when people sense, culturally, that a certain way of thinking about things is assumed. So, for example, if listing your preferred pronouns on your Zoom name are assumed to be part of what it is to be a good person, then you're going to have difficulty organising local adaptation efforts. Being able to run coalitions despite cultural clashes is really important. Obviously, immigration is another issue where there are going to be differences for some time.    

We don't want to belabour that, but I think there's a way of discussing these things in a way that's not just a blame game, or woke-bashing, but pursuit of effective social justice. Conversations about what effective social justice looks like are really important, because I think most people want to see that.

One of the categories that More in Common uses is ‘progressive activists’. But if you screen out progressive activists from a group and have other people who are climate-concerned discuss things, and ask them ‘Would you ever join a climate movement?’, a lot of those people will say yes, they like what XR is about. But the thing that they'll focus on the most, is that they feel like they're going to get ‘shouted at by vegans’ – a literal quote. ‘That's what's going to happen if I come to this meeting, it's just going to be me getting shouted at by vegans.’ Another example would be the ‘What about China? What about India?’ stuff. I think the way that climate movements have responded to those concerns is really self-defeating. You can look at that [type of thinking] as avoiding the issue, or avoiding responsibility, but you can also look at it as wanting reciprocity.

Would you donate to a school? We don't have to do that, but we do because we have local governments, which levy taxes. But if we didn't have governments, people would ask that question – ‘Why should I donate to my local school if the Smiths aren’t doing the same?’ Similarly, is everybody else going to pay for this road? Or is it just going to be me? And if the answer is no, people are not going to pay.    

As good progressives, and this includes me, we'd love to see our countries being willing to just pay for emissions reduction without reassurances. To be like one of the West Coast cities, like Seattle or Portland, that reduced their emissions to those agreed at Kyoto, just to show it could be done. But most people don't want to do that. So instead of looking at unilateral decarbonisation as an issue you're necessarily going to win, we could approach it by showing that the majority of people in China and India want to do something. Climate concern in China is about 85%. They have the same worries we do, though. What we need is a global reciprocal agreement.

Those are just examples, but there's a lot of cultural issues and it’s a big part of coalition building. It doesn't mean anybody needs to change their opinion. It's more like thinking of yourself as being from a subculture.

For many people who fall into the progressive activist category, it's essentially a political subculture. Other people have their own cultures. And if you thought more about this, about dealing with people from other cultures that have their own ways of doing things, but you have to work with anyway, and less that people are supposed to agree with you, then we’d probably get farther

JE: Is there anything you’d say about the most effective way of communicating and generating support for the transformations needed, without assuming we're all progressive activists?

LK: It's also just picking issues. Focusing on adaptation is what mainstream climate action looks like, or something that reflects the preferences of the majority looks like. Because they'll be willing to sign up to adaptation unilaterally, and not total decarbonisation unilaterally. So if you lead with issues, that's a reflection of ideology. Progressives tend to want to go for the ideal outcome – we should do things because it's right. Well, decarbonisation unilaterally is right, but most people are not on board with that.

So what are they on board with? Well, they’re on board with adaptation unilaterally, and adaptation can spark a wider conversation. So that's why adaptation – it’s an issue that you can actually reach the public on.

You can also actually reach the public through discussion, for example if we lay out the international situation, much more starkly than it is right now. Like, the COP process is failing and we probably need large changes to that. Talk much more openly about how bad things are, rather than worrying about overwhelming people.

JE: You could pitch a greater role for us to lead internationally as a way of attracting different viewpoints, I guess, rather than allowing other people to do stuff?

LK: Yes. There’s a friend of mine, a guy that I worked with, who used to know the people in the Weather Underground. We had this mutual friend whose father was a leading barrister. This friend hated the Weathermen, but the guy who knew them said, well, you're kind of just like them, because they were basically these privileged kids who thought, well, I'm supposed to be listened to. When they weren't listened to, they got mad. Most people from working class backgrounds expected nobody to listen to them, so they didn't get angry. And there's something to realising that, as a country, Britain is used being listened to and used to having influence, like it should be able to change things internationally.

And it has power because of its history, still. And, you know, with great privileges come great responsibility, but how does Britain actually use that? Britain's got this outsized media voice. It could be platforming people in the Global South who see that international process failing. It could be using that to shed light on the situation internationally, the failures of global climate action. That's probably a way in which the UK could change the international situation, and also by talking about the need for adaptation.

If that happened tomorrow, a National Adaptation Plan – all around Britain, people are making a National Adaptation Plan, and it's on BBC, and the BBC starts talking about worldwide adaptation efforts… That would basically, in the next year, change the level of reality felt around environmental breakdown, globally, more so than virtually anything else that I can think of that's politically achievable.

But what can you actually announce with a national emergency? What are the things that politically could actually get passed that would go with the NAP? So there's this emergency, and therefore we should do what? Does unilateral decarbonisation sound like an answer to most people in Britain? So the logical response to what's in the NAP is unilateral decarbonisation, hoping the rest of the world follows suit? Probably not, but national adaptation, probably yes. You can actually pair those things together and potentially achieve something.

And that might actually change the world in a small way, but in a real way. That's a massive change.

 JE: What gives you hope?

I think there is a majority of people out there who realise that we're in a failing system. It hasn't been cool to be part of the system for a long time. You know, everybody wants to be a rebel. That's been true for a long time. People were listening to Smashing Pumpkins songs –  ‘Despite all my rage, I'm still a rat in the cage’ – in the 90s.

It's not gotten better since then, right? If you can actually tap into that sentiment, then you have the capacity for real change on your hands. And I think we're just not very good at doing it so far. But if you actually look at polls, it's like, yeah, people are there. They’re just not organised very well just yet. But you can't have a majority of people not believing the values of their society, thinking that it's about to collapse, and then also think change is impossible. It's definitely possible.

If the majority of people actually knew how many others are thinking the same way, then a lot more would be possible. I think that's actually inevitable in the next 10 years.