Fifty years of climate science convinced one of its pioneers that knowledge cannot save us. He may be wrong about what can
A renowned advocate now preaches spiritual transformation. The evidence points to something more practical—and possibly faster
Gus Speth has been fighting environmental destruction since before most climate activists were born. He co-founded the Natural Resources Defense Council in 1970, advised Presidents Carter and Clinton, ran the United Nations Development Programme, and led Yale's School of Forestry. He has won the Blue Planet Prize, often called the Nobel of environmental science. For five decades, he believed that rigorous research, communicated clearly, would eventually produce sensible policy.
Then he stopped believing.
"I used to think the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change," Speth told an interviewer in 2013. "I thought that with 30 years of good science we could address those problems. But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy... and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation—and we scientists don't know how to do that."
This confession has become a rallying cry. Speth now argues that we need "preachers, poets, psychologists, writers, artists" to "strike the chords of our shared humanity." More data is not the answer. Only a transformation of consciousness can save us.
It is a stirring argument. It resonates emotionally in ways that carbon budgets never can. But is it correct?
The evidence from behavioural science, historical precedent, and environmental success stories suggests that Speth has accurately diagnosed a real problem—but misidentified its cause and, consequently, its cure.
The knowledge that changed nothing
Speth is right about one thing: knowing has not produced doing.
This is not a failure of communication. The climate science has never been clearer, the IPCC reports never more confident, the evidence never more visible in floods, fires, and shattered temperature records. Awareness has risen dramatically. Concern has risen with it. And global emissions keep climbing.
Environmental psychologists have studied this "knowledge-action gap" since the 1970s, and their findings are consistent: information rarely changes behaviour. Early models assumed a simple chain—more knowledge leads to changed values leads to changed action—but these proved naively wrong. The chain breaks at every link.
What blocks the path from knowing to doing? Researchers have catalogued a gallery of psychological barriers that operate even among people who genuinely care. Psychological distance: threats that feel remote in time and space fail to trigger urgent response. Conflicting goals: people want to act on climate but also want to fly, drive, and eat freely. Tokenism: substituting easy, low-impact actions for harder, high-impact ones. Lack of efficacy: the crushing sense that individual actions cannot possibly matter. And simple overwhelm: when problems feel hopeless, people disengage.
Yale's climate communication research has found that over one hundred million Americans say they would "definitely" take political action on climate. Most do not. They feel helpless, uncertain what to do, doubtful their efforts would matter.
This is not selfishness. It is ordinary human psychology confronting an extraordinarily difficult problem.
Here a comparison from another field becomes illuminating. Addiction researchers have long grappled with a remarkably similar phenomenon: the gap between knowing something is harmful and stopping. One treatment review noted that "a cardinal characteristic of addiction is the failure to engage in change despite knowledge that recovery is indeed feasible and, furthermore, that changing the pattern of the addictive behaviour is in the best interest of the individual."
We do not say that smokers who cannot quit despite knowing the consequences suffer from moral failure requiring spiritual remedy. We understand they face cognitive and structural barriers that willpower alone rarely overcomes: environmental triggers, social contexts that normalise the behaviour, the gap between immediate rewards and distant harms, neurological patterns resistant to conscious override. We have developed interventions that help people change without requiring them to first become better human beings.
The parallel is instructive. The barriers to climate action are cognitive and structural, not primarily moral. Telling people they need spiritual transformation before they can act may be less useful than making sustainable choices easier, default rather than heroic, and socially reinforced rather than individually virtuous.
The treaty that worked without transformation
If humans were truly too selfish to protect the environment without collective spiritual renewal, the most successful environmental agreement in history should not exist.
The Montreal Protocol, signed in 1987, has achieved what decades of climate negotiations have not: universal ratification by every country, near-total phase-out of the targeted substances, and measurable healing. The ozone layer is on track to recover by mid-century. The United Nations calls it "one of multilateralism's great success stories."
This was accomplished without spiritual transformation. It was accomplished through regulation, economic incentives, industry cooperation, and technological substitution. Companies found alternatives and adapted. Costs fell on identifiable industries that could absorb them. Crucially, no political identity became attached to defending CFCs—there was no culture war over refrigerant chemistry.
Climate is harder than ozone, but not because humans became more selfish between 1987 and today. Fossil fuels are woven into economic life in ways CFCs never were. Until recently, alternatives cost more. Powerful industries have invested heavily in sowing doubt. And climate has become entangled with political tribalism, such that accepting the science would, for some, require abandoning their identity.
These are structural, political, and cognitive problems. Not spiritual ones. The ozone precedent suggests that when regulation is designed well, when alternatives exist, and when issues remain technical rather than tribal, humans act on environmental science without moral renovation.
"Our success in phasing out ozone-eating chemicals shows us what can and must be done—as a matter of urgency—to transition away from fossil fuels," said Petteri Taalas, Secretary-General of the World Meteorological Organization. He did not mention awakening.
What abolition actually teaches
Speth's argument implicitly invokes the great example of moral transformation: abolition. Slavery was woven into economic life for millennia, defended by the powerful, justified by elaborate ideology. Yet within a relatively brief span, it went from natural and inevitable to monstrous and unthinkable. If such profound change could happen once, why not again?
The precedent is instructive but more complicated than it appears.
Abolition did involve what historians call "moral capital": new emotional frameworks, religious revivals emphasising equality, campaigns to make invisible suffering visible. The strategy of "moral suasion"—appealing to conscience—was central to early abolitionism.
But abolition also took a very long time. From organised opposition in Britain to emancipation in America spanned more than a century. In America, it required the bloodiest war in national history. Cultural transformation, even when successful, moves slowly. Climate does not afford us a century.
Moreover, recent research has complicated the purely moral story. A 2023 study in the Centre for Economic Policy Research found that support for abolition in Britain correlated strongly with structural economic transformation during the Industrial Revolution. Parliamentarians from industrialising areas were significantly more likely to support abolition than those from regions dependent on slavery. Economic interests and moral values shaped the outcome together.
The lesson is not that we need spiritual transformation instead of structural change. Cultural and structural change work together; each success makes the next easier. Those waiting for moral evolution to precede policy may have the causality partly backwards.
Conversations, not conversions
There is a third path between Speth's call for spiritual transformation and the structuralist dismissal of individual agency. It comes from people who have spent years figuring out how to actually move hearts and minds.
Katharine Hayhoe is a climate scientist, chief scientist at The Nature Conservancy, and an evangelical Christian married to a pastor in Texas. She has spent decades having difficult conversations across political and cultural divides. Her conclusion challenges both doom messaging and moral reformation.
"When it comes to changing hearts and minds, facts are only one part of the equation," Hayhoe writes. "We need to find shared values in order to connect our unique identities to collective action."
But crucially, she does not believe most people's values need to change. "Nearly everyone already has the values that they need to care about climate change: they just haven't connected the dots."
This is different from Speth's diagnosis. The problem is not that people are selfish or lack spiritual resources. The problem is that they feel helpless, see no personal relevance, and have never been invited to act by someone they trust. Fear paralyses. Shame backfires. What works is hope grounded in concrete action—and conversations that start with what people already care about.
Only about ten per cent of Americans are what researchers call "dismissives"—people whose rejection of climate science is fused with their identity and essentially unreachable. The vast majority are worried but disengaged. They do not need conversion. They need connection.
This does not mean individual behaviour change will solve climate change. It will not. Structural transformation remains essential. But political will for structural change emerges from cultural consensus, which emerges from millions of conversations and commitments. The individual and the structural are not alternatives. They are reciprocal.
What we actually need
Speth has earned his pessimism. He has watched the political system fail to respond to science for fifty years, watched emissions rise as evidence accumulated, watched his own optimism proven wrong. His conclusion—that the problem is human nature rather than human systems—is understandable.
But the evidence suggests a different frame.
The knowledge-action gap is real, but it is better understood as cognitive and structural than moral. Humans have succeeded at environmental protection when conditions aligned—as with ozone—without becoming better people. Historical moral transformations like abolition involved cultural and structural change reinforcing each other, and still took longer than climate allows. Practical approaches that work with existing values show more promise than waiting for collective awakening.
Perhaps what Speth calls "spiritual transformation" is better understood as a cascade of practical changes: policies that make sustainable choices the default, communication that connects climate to existing concerns, technologies that make alternatives cheap and convenient, movements that shift what counts as normal. Less romantic than a call to moral arms. More honest about how change happens. And faster.
The scientists may not know how to produce spiritual transformation. But they do not need to. What is needed is already within reach: better policy, clearer communication, continued technological progress, and the patient work of expanding, conversation by conversation, who sees climate as their concern.
This is not a transformation of human nature. It is an alignment of human systems with human interests.
It may lack the stirring quality of a prophet's call. It has the singular advantage of being achievable.