How AI will reshape the political opportunity for climate
September 2026
Simon Glynn and Mariia Shakh (2026), How AI will reshape the political opportunity for climate, Zero Ideas, https://doi.org/10.70272/fjtq
Executive summary
Download the research paper here
Climate change is systemic: both the risks we face and the responses required operate at the scale of economies, institutions and societies. But despite decades of trying, we have not made those systemic issues sufficiently or consistently politically salient.
Instead, climate policy has adopted the practical approach of piggybacking on whatever is most politically salient. Today, in many rich countries, that is overwhelmingly the immediate pressure of the cost of living. Piggybacking on the cost of living can unlock substantial climate action, as clean technologies offer lower prices and greater security. But it confines the political case for climate to those immediate material benefits, leaving the deeper questions of governance, collective purpose and long-term responsibility untouched. What it makes possible is useful but is not enough to stop the devastation of climate change. That is the hole we are in.
But politics is not always so immediate. ‘It’s the economy, stupid’ is usually right, but there have been moments when systemic questions—how society is led, who it works for, what it values and what kind of future it is trying to create—have come to the fore. This has usually happened in response to a widely felt sense of loss, failure or brokenness.
Today there are signs that artificial intelligence may create such a moment. AI threatens losses across people’s livelihoods, relationships and communities; our collective agency and institutional capacity; and ultimately human dignity, purpose and value. Those losses could raise the political salience of systemic concerns that are central to climate change but are struggling to get attention today.
AI has what climate has lacked: it is experienced by people directly in their lives, while simultaneously raising systemic questions about power, governance and purpose. Its speed, scale and immediacy may therefore provide the paths that climate has been been missing from personal experience to societal concern.
The figure below summarizes our argument:
Looking at what has become politically salient in the past, we group concerns along two dimensions: how people experience the effects—immediately in their own lives or systemically across society—and how they judge those effects—by what works functionally or by what matters in terms of values and meaning.
In each quadrant of the resulting ‘salience map’, we trace a potential causal path:
- The AI developments emerging in that territory;
- The losses that people may experience or anticipate as a result;
- The broader concerns the sense of loss may make politically salient;
- The opportunities for climate action to piggyback on that new salience.
This is not a forecast of the future. Not every social or cultural concern becomes politically salient. It is a way to look beyond the immediacy of the cost of living, to monitor how the political landscape is changing, and to look out for opportunities for future salience as they emerge.
Where AI does create new salience, it could be good news for climate action, opening up political territory that climate needs but has not been able to reach. Or it could be bad news, with AI dominating that territory as fast as it opens it.
The practical task is to monitor which AI issues are moving from private concerns to cultural and elite discourse and from there into electoral politics; explore policies that build on the opportunities in each territory; and watch where AI closes political opportunities as carefully as where it opens them.
However it evolves, it is the public reaction to AI, rather than climate change, that is likely to shape our perspectives and define what’s possible. Tracking and building on what AI makes salient may unlock the most promising and previously elusive opportunities for climate.
