The European Green Deal aims for a climate-neutral future that is “economically sound and socially fair”, supported by a “just transition” for communities disrupted by the energy shift. Yet, despite high public concern about climate change, this liberal vision is a hard sell. Support for climate policies plummets when the conversation turns to costs, there is little willingness to voluntarily adopt low-carbon behaviours, and any climate measure that limits individual consumer choices is perceived as an unacceptable imposition.

This resistance cannot be overcome by better storytelling alone. Communication is not just verbal; it is relational and embodied in our infrastructure, public services, and built environment. Crumbling schools and decaying public spaces communicate a clear message that the people who depend on these services do not matter. Therefore, to generate the necessary political momentum, the climate movement must adopt a more expansive understanding of communication. This necessitates a temporary challenge to some of the green movement’s core liberal ideals – a period of what I call “political overshoot”.

A critical juncture

The climate community is already familiar with the idea of overshoot. There is a growing acceptance amongst scientists that the Earth’s atmosphere will warm beyond the internationally agreed limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius. Rather than seeing this as a reason to give up on the limit permanently, discussion has turned to viewing this breach as a temporary “overshoot”. This means humanity does not need to abandon its existing approach to climate policy. Instead, the application of various technologies to remove the excess greenhouse gases will bring warming back to 1.5 degrees Celsius.

However, it appears increasingly unlikely we will be able to build a sustainable and secure future without extending climate policy into areas of social and political life hitherto seen as beyond the bounds of liberal climate action. One such liberal principle we have to question is individualism, and the idea that equality of economic opportunity is enough, and thereafter everyone must sink or swim as best as their individual efforts will afford.

The idea that we might need to transform our economy and way of life in order to tackle climate change is hardly new. Though degrowth, the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, and the doughnut economy are popular among campaigners, policy remains unmoved because they represent too radical a break from liberal principles.

The concept of overshoot could provide a less threatening framework to address the growing sense amongst the public that climate policy is for the middle classes, not them. By temporarily breaching the liberal guardrail of individualism and the inequality it creates, we might have a chance to build the social and physical foundations for long-term ecological safety, creating the conditions for a future, reformed liberalism that serves both people and the planet.

Two degrees of separation

Liberalism is built on separation: the separation of powers, of individuals from their community, of humanity from nature. Problems are siloed into domains like economics or environment to be solved by separate experts. Consequently, climate change is reduced to a problem of excess carbon, leaving other aspects of liberal life untouched.

Climate communication, born from this mindset, treats messages as separate from people’s lived experience. It imagines words, unmoored from material reality, can float into lives and transform behaviour, culminating in a painless transition to a low-carbon liberal utopia.

The European Commission’s Just Transition Platform (JTP) provides a picture of the low-carbon liberal utopia policymakers have in mind. A recent analysis of the JTP concluded that the ultimate goal of European climate policy is the creation of “self-regulating citizens ready to conduct resource-efficient and sustainable lives” as part of a move to, in the European Commission’s own words, “a fair and prosperous society, with a modern, resource-efficient and competitive economy”. A European Commission report that could have been written yesterday (but was actually published in 2001) concluded that this is not a future the people of Europe want: “Our society is faced with the challenge of finding its proper place in a world shaken by economic and political turbulence…science, technology and innovation are indispensable to meet this challenge. However, there are indications that [their] immense potential is out of step with ordinary citizens.”

Campaigners, communicators, and politicians have to bridge this disconnect between technocracy and humanity, to help create a continent of self-regulating low-carbon citizens. The goal to which we are moving isn’t going to change; it is the human heart which must be transformed, so that the citizens of Europe will put their efforts into building a “resource-efficient and competitive economy”.

The value-action gap

Much as global climate policy targets aim to avoid the climate guardrails or boundaries separating safe from dangerous climate change, so climate policy language employs discursive guardrails to keep the narrative within safe (liberal) political limits. Those five guardrails include individualism (the idea that climate change is tackled through individual free choices); universalism (the Western vision of a climate future is universally true); ahistoricity (climate change is depoliticised); techno-optimism (technological innovation will solve climate change); and narrative salvation (new climate stories will align all of humanity with Western liberal norms).

Liberal approaches to climate communication have achieved considerable success, generating high levels of concern in Europe for climate change, and helping build consensus for significant cuts in greenhouse gas emissions across the continent. But the concern respondents express in surveys is not translating into electoral choices and climate action, and the low-hanging fruit of emission reductions have all been picked. So what next for climate communication?

Increased inequality lies at the heart of liberalism’s disintegration.

The irrational failure of people to act on their environmental concerns is a spectre that has long haunted the halls of liberal climate policy design and communication. A recent research programme exposed almost 60,000 participants from across 63 countries to climate messages, and then tested how people’s commitment to take environmental action was changed by reading the messages. The researchers found the interventions’ effectiveness was small, and largely limited to those already concerned about climate change.

This disconnect between the concern people express for the environment in surveys and their actions has been given a name; the value-action gap. The idea that your actions should be aligned with your values, and your values should be decided on the basis of information makes sense in a world of middle-class privilege and agency. It makes less sense to subaltern actors, who are acted upon by the world, rather than experiencing the world as the subject of their dreams and desires. The sense of disempowerment, injustice, resentment and anger that comes from a life lived at the bottom of the pile cannot be cured by including the words “just transition” in climate messaging. It requires the building of a more equal and inclusive society, rather than contenting ourselves with a world where we are all fighting our own individual  battles for survival using low-carbon energy.

A taste of iron and water

Increased inequality lies at the heart of liberalism’s disintegration. The 2008 crash and Covid-19 lockdowns accelerated regressive trends, eroding social and political trust. The climate movement failed to respond to people’s worsening economic circumstances partly because it treated decarbonisation as separate from political issues like inequality. The offer of curing people’s economic pain through a just transition is a transactional gesture of little appeal to the low-waged and economically insecure. After all, what does an Amazon driver stand to gain from a just transition to net zero? The same tedium and precarity as ever, but in an electric vehicle, rather than a diesel one.

The inequalities undermining climate action in Europe are being played out in our relationship to much of the world beyond Europe’s borders. All the talk of international solidarity and climate justice is undermined by the exportation of our waste to the Global South, even as we scour the globe for the materials needed for Europe’s Green Deal.

To think words alone can build a just transition is to separate language from reality. The world communicates its injustice in myriad ways. Research I have been carrying out with partners from the Yale Programme on Climate Communication and the University of Glasgow involved interviewing members of online groups protesting the Ultra Low Emission Zone in London. Interviewees noted that whilst they have to find alternative means to get around London, they see wealthy people driving their high-end petrol cars into London because they can afford to pay the emissions zone charge. That is a form of communication, a powerful and unanswerable statement that climate policies will be paid for by the poor, to profit the rich.

The climate movement has to be willing to repoliticise the climate conversation if we are to make progress. As philosopher Slavoj Žižek observed, the real climate struggle is not between left and right but between the political (the right) and the technocratic post-political. Trying to depoliticise the climate issue, or fighting on the same ground as the climate-sceptic far right, cannot move action forward. Climate sceptics and liberal climate campaigners have a shared focus on the need to prioritise economic growth. Climate sceptics argue net zero will be the death of growth, whilst campaigners argue economic growth will be stunted without action to reduce emissions. This leaves little for the disengaged bystander to choose between the two positions,¹ whilst grand vaulting abstractions about humanity’s net-zero future offer no clear and concrete responses to the problems people face today. All that latter vision offers is, in George Orwell’s words, “a future that tastes of iron and water”, when what people crave is the warm embrace of feeling at home in the world.

The case for political overshoot

“Political overshoot” is a call to reconnect what liberalism has separated. The Institute for Public Policy Research’s 2007 diagnosis of climate communication as “confused, chaotic and contradictory” remains true today. Climate messages are trying to square the policies needed to reduce climate change risk with the desire to reproduce liberal ideals. The promise of freedom of movement meets the need to curtail emissions from transport. The manufacture of electric cars to sustain freedom of movement in a carbon-constrained world means an ecologically and socially damaging extraction process in the Global South, undermining the universal respect for human rights.

There are strong climatic reasons for stepping back from today’s hyper-individualisation. More individualistic societies have higher emissions. Rising inequality accelerates climate change by driving high-carbon consumption, allowing wealthy elites to obstruct policy, undermining public support, and weakening collective action.

The European Commission’s 2050 vision articulated in its Green Deal holds little appeal for ordinary people; it feels like an attack on all cultures and identities outside the technocratic liberal bubble, and culture and identity are the things that people will actually fight for. The communications strategy designed to deliver the European Commission’s vision will not only fail – it will drive people into the arms of the Right, which offers messages of deliverance now, not vague co-benefits in a distant future.

There is no tackling climate change without repairing the social fabric torn by liberal separation. Liberals fear that any compromise on liberal ideals will inevitably lead to tyranny or eco-fascism, a fetishisation of liberal ideals akin to equating technology critique with a desire to send humanity back to living in caves. The overshoot principle can help frame this change less emotionally. If we believe we can overshoot and later correct atmospheric temperature, surely we can manage a temporary return to more communal principles to navigate these dangerous times. Liberalism will be under threat from the impacts of climate change anyway, and those will be changes outside of our control. A planned overshoot to rebuild the social ties and communities needed for effective climate action is a better alternative.

We should stop making transactional promises about 2050 and start delivering tangible benefits now.

A new framework

For a strategy of overshoot to succeed, our approach to climate communication must change in fundamental ways. First, we must centre the physical and lived experience of change. Our ideas are transformed through shared action in the physical world, not solely through the manipulation of symbols.

Second, we need to adopt the “political overshoot” frame to make clear that we seek profound change without permanently abandoning liberalism’s benefits. The goal is to temporarily move beyond its guardrails to rebuild a shared endeavour, returning to a reformed liberalism that marries freedom with ecological balance.

Third, we must create clear space from the populist right. A political overshoot strategy allows the passionate pursuit of the goals of justice and equality. People are often to the left of the policies they live under; we must close that gap.

Fourth, we need to tie community work to a broader political vision. Local action builds essential relationships, but it cannot succeed as a fragmented set of initiatives without a larger horizon beyond the quotidian.

Lastly, our communication should focus on delivering what people need today, sustainably. The priority is solving immediate problems – energy costs, transport, jobs, housing – in a way that also addresses the climate crisis. We should stop making transactional promises about 2050 and start delivering tangible benefits now.

This is not a top-down communication strategy. The suggestion is not that communicators start introducing the idea of political overshoot alongside terms such as “net zero” and “just transition”. Concepts such as these can help anchor policy debates in scientifically informed, shared visions of the direction of travel. But they are not frames that can build strong and sustained public support for climate action. Climate communication is about rebuilding together the social infrastructure (unions, youth clubs, a care economy, decent public spaces) while reducing economic inequality, and doing these things in the name of security, the natural environment, and dignity.

All this must be delivered in a manner that reduces emissions, but emission reduction is not the primary message. Respect is the central message. This, of course, is barely an overshoot at all, but a return to the core principle of liberalism: we share a common humanity, and our politics must respect that. It may be that, having built this world under the framework of overshoot, we decide that we don’t want to return to the politics that brought us to our current predicament. That doesn’t mean we will have lost our liberal ideals, but have instead discovered a liberalism that marries respect and dignity with ecological sanity.

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1. For the purposes of this essay, I put degrowth in the same basket as the other climate side hustles such as peak oil, eco-socialism, green anarchism, and in fact any proposal lacking public traction and a coherent strategy for gaining power. This is not to say I have no sympathy for the aspirations of these approaches. ↩︎