Who should lead?

But the Hebrew word, the word timshel—‘Thou mayest’— that gives a choice. It might be the most important word in the world. — John Steinbeck, East of Eden

I finished my last post arguing that even among those who recognize the seriousness of climate change, the question of who should lead is complicated both by bad-faith actors seeking delay and good-faith actors seeking progress.

Within the climate community, we have a vocal subset focused on what we stand to lose and who’s responsible for it. They’re not factually wrong, but they’re not politically persuasive beyond their core constituency.

On the other side of the climate debate, we have fossil incumbents: defenders of the status quo who’ve argued for decades that investing in clean energy is a “bad deal” for the US, all while conveniently downplaying how they benefit from delay.

Fossil incumbents ground us in a backward-looking view of prosperity; those focused on loss and responsibility offer a faulty view of what motivates action. Both framings slow us down. We need a framework that widely distributes agency, invites us to imagine the future we want, and actually motivates us to pursue it.

Instead of asking ourselves who should lead, let’s ask ourselves who will lead. The circular but honest answer is those who choose to. In other words, those who have both the desire and capacity to shape outcomes are the ones who inevitably do.

Obligation and opportunity

Let’s be clear: there’s a reasonable case for obligation. Logic and fairness would dictate that those who’ve most contributed to (and benefited from) burning fossil fuels should lead the way.

Over half of all cumulative emissions were produced by just five countries: the US, China, Russia, Germany, and Japan. While China now leads in annual emissions, the US still leads in cumulative emissions and China may never overtake the US in this category. By contrast, the world’s 44 least-developed countries (home to about 14 percent of the global population) account for less than half a percent of cumulative CO₂ emissions.

Looking at emissions by household income rather than geopolitical boundaries, the disparities are even more stark: the richest ten percent of the world’s population accounts for half of global emissions, while the bottom half accounts for only ten percent of emissions (Oxfam). This is the cruel irony that I referred to in my first post: those least responsible for climate change are the ones most vulnerable to its effects.

In other words, these calls for fairness are valid—they’re just not politically productive, and I don’t think they’ll ever translate to durable political momentum. Fear of what we’ll lose and arguments about who owes whom may mobilize true believers, but they tend to trigger defensiveness and fatalism in everyone else.

Lasting political coalitions are built on positive visions that speak to our individual and collective ambitions, not on fear and obligation. Yes, climate change is a crisis to contain. But it’s also a race to a better way of powering everyday life—a race that will play out, with winners and losers, independent of climate politics. And opportunity framing—independent of moral claims—is quietly winning:

• Texas, hardly a bastion of climate do-gooderism, outproduces California in wind and solar generation and outpaces it in new renewable deployment.
• China—driven not by obligation or moral compass but by political and economic ambition—leads the world in clean energy investment and matches the US in carbon-free electricity generation (we’re both around 40% clean generation).

In the end, I don’t think the obligation/opportunity debate is an “either/or” proposition: we can recognize that an intrinsic opportunity framing is more likely to produce results without casting aside our sense of obligation. Moral obligation itself can be re-framed as an opportunity to do the right thing—a choice freely made rather than a duty imposed.

Don’t “should” yourself

To bring it back to where we started, real leadership is always chosen, never coerced. It’s sustained not by obligation, inheritance, or opportunity, but by will: opting in again and again to shape the future rather than be shaped by it.

The same willingness that propels nations forward exists in smaller, quieter forms—the choices made by people who refuse to wait for permission or ideal circumstances. If leadership is a choice rather than a rank, how much do individual actions matter? My view is that they matter far more than “every little bit helps.” This is what I hope to explore in my next post.