Hope without action is a damaging sedative to the reality of the climate crisis
Richard Smith
If you pay any attention to what is happening to the planet it’s hard not to be gloomy. Carbon emissions rise yearly, causing a surge in global temperatures and extreme weather events. We must not abandon hope we are told by many but hope without action will hasten catastrophe.
Droughts, floods, wildfires, and hurricanes are destroying communities and land, causing homelessness, forced migration, and food insecurity. The destruction is accelerating, as feedback loops kick in. We are heading to a global increase in temperature that has not been seen for tens of millions of years. Some of those studying the crisis talk of social collapse within a decade.1 Yet the annual UN meeting on climate change in October achieved almost nothing, causing some to wonder if we should give up on global meetings.2 How then could we respond to this global problem?
We must maintain hope, everybody tells me. How can I talk to my grandchildren about what’s happening if I can’t offer them hope. Friends who are climate activists talk of the importance of hope as do friends who have done little or nothing in response to the climate crisis. But what is hope, and are we sure that it’s beneficial?
Jonathan Watts, the Guardian’s environmental correspondent, has written an article asking “Would abandoning false hope help us to tackle the climate crisis?”3 I have written about the hazards of hope in people with terminal illnesses: how it leads them to greatly overestimate their length of survival, fall into the hands of quacks, and spend excessively on ineffective treatments.4 In a sense, the climate crisis is a terminal illness for all of humanity.
The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer took a negative view of hope: “Hope is to confuse the desire that something should occur with the probability that it will. Perhaps no man is free from this folly of the heart, which deranges the intellect’s correct estimation of probability to such a degree as to make him think the event quite possible, even if the chances are only a thousand to one.” Frederick Nietzsche took a similar view: “Zeus intended that man, notwithstanding the evils oppressing him, should continue to live and not rid himself of life, but keep on making himself miserable. For this purpose, he bestowed hope upon man: it is, in truth, the greatest of evils for it lengthens the ordeal of man.”
In his article, Watts postulates that hope may be keeping us comfortably numb rather than rousing us into action. He points out that Christian missionaries “weaponised hope . . . promising a better afterlife.” Colonialists offered “a supposedly superior civilisation,” and capitalists and politicians promise us a “better tomorrow.”3
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and other philosophers agree that hope seems to be part of the software of humans, but it deceives us and can become a dangerous sedative to reality. The widely used phrase “hope is not a strategy” may have come first from the American general Gordon R Sullivan: instead, he emphasised the need for planning and action. That seems to me the crucial point. “To hope, is to act as if you await the possibility of good,” said the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard.
To temper the severity of the climate crisis we need planning and action. There will have to be change at every level, from the personal to the global. Without dramatic political change we will not succeed, but nor will we succeed without substantial personal change in how we live, what we eat, and how we move.
Some people remain unaware of the severity and imminence of the harm from the climate and nature crisis, some deny it. Many in the UK and other rich countries recognise the coming harm but disavow it, and some take action from the minor to the major.
Just as hope distorts the judgment of the terminally ill, hope encourages disavowal of the climate crisis. People recognise that something serious is happening but take no action.5 Something will turn up. Politicians will finally take drastic action. Technology will save us. Hope can create seductive mirages. Meanwhile, we’ll continue to fly, drive, buy more than we need, eat meat, and consume far more carbon and resources than the planet can tolerate. We may even resort to blaming others.
In the “jog-trot life” that most of us live, where one day is much like another and we “get on with our lives,” it can be easy not to think about the serious predicament in which we find ourselves.
People will carry on with both passive, finger crossing hope, but hope without action is worse than nothing. I suggest that at a minimum we can all learn about the climate crisis; talk about it to friends and family; have the climate crisis at the front of our minds when voting; communicate our concerns to MPs and other authorities; sign petitions; raise the issue within our work or school; walk, cycle, use public transport, and avoid flying unless essential (and how often is flying truly “essential”); buy less or second hand; and switch to a diet that is largely plant based.
If you hope for a better future without making any changes then your hope is false. You are deceiving yourself and others.
BMJ 2026;392:s93
