Rachel Kyte is the UK Government’s new Special Representative for Climate. Before taking the job in October 2024, she shared with Thinking the Unthinkable her frustrations. Communicating ways to overcome the climate crisis need to be popularized and radicalized, she told TTU in our Thinking the Unthinkable Podcast.
Inside government has her view changed? On 5 February 2025 she delivered the Pete Betts memorial lecture at the LSE, for the Grantham Institute. With her “boss”, the Energy Secretary Ed Miliband sitting in the front row, she chose to highlight how the need to recalibrate the communications and narrative challenge remains huge.
Here are Rachel’s lightly edited remarks.
“In an era of implementation, we need to do three things better.
- We must shift the narrative.
- We must organize ourselves differently for implementation.
- And we must reward leadership in real time.”
First, the narrative. We can see from the weaponization of Net Zero around the world that we have much to do to win back a narrative, especially for young people. A narrative of growth, jobs and wellness that comes from a shift to clean energy and more resilience. A narrative that embraces Nature.
Core message must relate to people’s needs.
What people want is clean air, clean communities, clean energy, affordable bills -, but clean energy – flood defenses and to protect our family members from extreme heat. That’s a world that’s envisaging the Paris Agreement.
But we can bury that lead. We don’t need to lead with climate.
Paris said that we should leave no one behind.
The living rooms of the working class, whether in Britain or elsewhere, or the modest houses on the edges of fast growing cities in Africa, are not the places for the battle over choices of energy transition. They will be the beneficiaries of the policy choices we make.
The battle is with incumbency and inertia. With shifts in tax codes and financial regulation and with making polluters pay.
Poorly constructed notions of growth have bedeviled moves towards sustainable development since the very beginning of the story in 1972 in Stockholm. It’s not new.
Chose a new battleground
We need to both shift the narrative to sustainable economic growth and force the narrative battle onto our chosen battlegrounds.
The climate movement must reflect on young Germans who switched their votes last summer, straight from the Greens to the AfD because they thought Green was elite.
We must reflect on the loss of votes of young men across all racial groups and identities in the United States to an anti climate change ticket in many cases. The climate movement must look to itself as we recognize that you cannot turn the switch off on dirty energy until you can switch it on to clean power.
So as we help Brazil manage an extremely complex COP30 we must – together with them – put the focus firmly on sustainable economic development that puts a value on standard tropical forests, which secures clean energy affordably and allows people at all income levels to put a plate of affordable, healthy food grown sustainably in front of their children.
Create understandable ambitions and targets
Yes, each country is accountable for its commitments. But how many plans can we ask any government to prepare any given year? We need to perhaps cut back on all the names of the plans and start building things.
Which brings me to my second point. How do we organize ourselves better and differently for action and implementation in a different world?
Let me take a little detour to make my point. At the heart of the Paris Agreement was the commitment to leave no one behind. But who are we leaving behind ten years on?
By 2100 40% of the world’s population will be African. Today it’s just over 12%. The median age in Africa today is just over 19. Of the 20 countries with the fastest population growth rates all 20 are African nations. 40% of young Africans today are living in extreme poverty, and more than 20% are outside of the labor force.
The opportunities for labor force participation of this incredible wealth of human ingenuity is, and will be, the result of the growth of renewable energy and clean energy across the continent. But then the skills that need to be developed, the training and education have to be fit for purpose.
Think differently. Respond at scale
It is one of those ultimate tests of partnership. The private sector, African governments, the international community and young people themselves. It’s just one of the ways that we have to step back, think about the problem differently, and organize ourselves to respond at scale.
To run a business anywhere in the world, but including Africa, we need reliable and affordable energy. That reliability and that affordability will come from clean energy, especially for the many hundreds of thousands who don’t have any access to energy today.
Yes, there’s gas infrastructure in some countries, which is important to build out and make efficient. And yes, we can invest more in hydro with the right hydrological analysis. And geothermal will become increasingly important for some parts of the continent when it is to solve and win with the continent books.
The global Clean Power Alliance is one way to organize ourselves differently to achieve the speed of impact. Rewriting legislation, governing utility structures. performance is hard.
Taking on entrenched interests
Walking uphill against entrenched interests, weak capacity in government and managing a multitude of development partners and acronyms, balancing a grid and negotiate regulating it so it makes smart economic decisions within the parameters of decarbonisation is hard for the same reasons.
As countries learn from the experiences of recent attempts to reorganize ourselves with just energy transition partnerships and other forms of country led partnerships so the international community is beginning to be focused on country platforms. Basically, development or economic development done well! The country is in the lead. It knows what it wants. And partners don’t undermine each other [so they] come to the table in an organized way.
We bring with us a capital stack appropriate for the task in hand on the back of forward momentum of reform in the country. We sequence our interventions to support the country’s plans, from fiscal policy regulation of capital markets to utility and transmission reform to policies for distribution and at the heart guard rails on the protection of nature, and an agenda which means that we not leave women’s needs to the end.
Nothing in that previous list of things that we can do – nothing in that previous paragraph – is new. It can all be found in the Paris Agreement on sustainable development goals or in the Financing for Development of the Addis Ababa agenda.
Join forces to radicalize thinking
What hasn’t kept up with our imagination of what we need to do to bring forward this world, what we haven’t kept up with, is the way in which governments are organized; the way that development finance is organized, and the way we work with the private sector.
Fragmentation is our enemy. Fragmentation of funds, fragmentation of efforts, fragmentation of organizations. Stand in the shoes of the finance minister of any emerging market developing economy, and you will hear that cry.
So maybe we can stop talking about it and start to do it in 2025.
At the same time. I think the UK, with the launch of a new Soft Power Council, understands that the technical assistance that could come from the National Grid or from any of the other pieces of our own energy revolution is needed as a blood asset in the way in which we go through other countries. And so we can double down on our soft power, alongside the mobilization of our finance from the City or the stock exchange through to the use of our own public funds in very imaginative ways increasingly, but to be increased in the future.
Organize ourselves better
So my third point is that while we get better at organizing ourselves as an international community in order to be able to be responsive and supportive to countries in their plans for sustained economic growth within the context of the Paris agreement, we also have to get better at recognizing and rewarding in real time those who are making the first move, who take the initiative, who drive forward for change, whether at the national or the local level.
The international climate circuit celebrates leadership. So then we move on, and the international system struggles to make big bets to come in behind those who have visionary agendas. We find it hard to organize our international support, differentiating between those who are really deserving and those who we have to stay engaged with.
Question from TTU’s Nik Gowing
Nik Gowing, from the Thinking the Unthinkable project. Can I just pick up on that particular point on narrative? Because actually, Rachel and I have talked about this several times before you entered government. But much more broadly, it came out time and time again in Davos two weeks ago: the need for a new narrative. And now you put it as number one out of three. How is this achievable? Because I would suggest to you that many governments, most governments, including this government, simply have not really engaged on the potential for actually convincing the public by having a much better narrative, not least one that is understandable and is not overwhelmed by [technical jargon that few understand] like net zero sustainability and so on. [How to make this] accessible for them?.
Rachel
So I don’t think we can ignore what people want. People want to feel safe, and people want to feel free. And people can only feel safe and free when a process of economic development is going on around and with them. And what helps you feel that you can afford the basics, that you can that you have a clean community, that you can breathe clean air.
I think we have to recognize that a lot of the narrative began to feel very elite as people started to feel less well off.
There are things that we need to do so that they are not less well off, and that they don’t feel less well off. And we need to keep that narrative.
And I think the other point of this is nature. All of the evidence shows that wherever you are on the physical spectrum actually, and wherever you are in any age category and any income category, nature is intrinsically important to you. It is increasingly recognized as so by social. And if you look at the election results in July last year, you have blue voters voting green, have red voters voting green. Voters voting, yeah. Anyway, everybody was getting quite fanatical in some different effects. But the theme of nature was definitely there in almost every part of the country.
To view the full lecture please click here.
