Every gripping tale must have a villain we love to hate. There are some very clear villains in literature: David has Goliath, Sherlock has Moriarty, Paradise Lost has Satan, Frodo has Sauron, and in India, Ram has Ravan. But in some cases, the villain isn’t who we think it is. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, the true nature of the dark presence pursuing the hero, Ged, comes as a huge surprise (no spoilers if you haven’t read this must-read). But, we’re rooting for Ged to catch and defeat it from the get-go.
Le Guin’s dark presence, the Shadow, is formless. Almost no one has seen it, and it can take on any shape. Telling stories about the climate crisis feels to me like chasing this shadow. We can only describe the trail of misery and destruction it leaves behind. The recent tragedy in Nepal, where a collapsing glacier unleashed a deadly flood, is precisely the kind of disaster a warming world makes more likely. Of course, there are obvious villains in this story too: the fossil fuel industry, the many actors behind deforestation and the tech overlords guzzling energy at an alarming rate. But, unlike Goliath or Moriarty, these are industries we rely on heavily to go about our daily lives. Most of us can’t get to work without the fossil fuel industry, we can’t make dinner without at least some of the fruits of deforestation, and I couldn’t have written and shared this without paying homage to the tech overlords. They’re simply too woven into the tapestry of our daily lives. In literature and lore, Ram only had to confront Ravan after Ravan abducted his wife, Sita. Ravan wasn’t also his milk and eggs supplier, and Frodo certainly didn’t rely on Sauron to get places.
So how do we name and hold to account the villains of climate change without also villainising ourselves for partaking in their services, without draining the will to act, and without sinking into apathy?
‘The man in the mirror’
The idea of the consumer as the villain was the brainchild of BP. In the mid-2000s, it ran a powerful advertising campaign that brought the ‘carbon footprint calculator’ to the forefront of climate communications. The campaign’s implicit message was that our use of their product – getting to work in a car, taking a flight for our holidays – was causing global warming. BP was simply giving us what we needed. In some twisted way, we’d become the villains in our own story. Since then, many of us who want to be the good guys, started looking in the mirror and at each other. But being an unwilling participant in a global system is not the same as building a web of systems that is nearly impossible to crawl out of. Buying a pack of chips with palm oil in it once in a while is not the same as razing a rainforest and destroying an orangutan’s home to make those chips.
Raising awareness of the impact of our daily lives also heightens guilt. It often offers no solution or villain, other than ourselves, at whom to direct our very appropriate outrage. One of the findings from my climate communication research was that the least communicated aspect of the climate crisis was the solutions – and there are quite a few solutions out there.
Hiding in the shadows 
In Earthsea, true power comes from knowing a thing’s true name – without it, a thing cannot be commanded. I think, the same is true of facing up to the climate crisis. The villain has taken on so many forms: the beef-eater, the frequent-flyer or the over-consumer. But behind each of these forms is something much larger than the individual (this is where the similarity to the Shadow ends). Behind them are the institutions, politicians and decision-makers who profit from the destruction of our planet and who will go to any lengths to protect their systems. They are not as formless as they’d like to seem: they have names, annual reports and headquarters.
So, for those of us trying to empower people to take climate action, the buck shouldn’t stop with us. That’s not to say we should stop doing what we can in our daily lives, and go out and buy a gas-guzzling SUV. We simply need to acknowledge that we’re not the villains. Naming the real villains in the climate-story also brings the solutions out of the shadows. For instance, in 2019, the Dutch foundation Urgenda won a landmark case in which the Dutch courts ordered the government to cut emissions by at least 25% from 1990 levels. Clearly, we can vote for, work for and support employers, decision-makers and campaigns that will protect our planet. The villains have a name. Knowing them, and confronting them head-on is how we can begin to defeat them.