Who is "We"?

On the abuse of an annoying pronoun

Credit: Grzegorz Rogiński

Literary scholar Hollis Robbins recently noted a rhetorical tic that I’ve also grown allergic to: the commentariat’s habit of using “we” when issuing normative directives about the future of public policy.

This trope is especially grating in energy and climate discussions. People who believe that climate change is a major crisis and want “society” to take action to mitigate its catastrophic effects love to use the word “we” when discussing the future of the global energy system. As an example:

“If we are to meet our net-zero goals, we need to incentivize the rapid deployment of solar and battery storage to fully decarbonize our electric system.”

This kind of sentence appears everywhere in climate commentary. The unanswered question is who this ‘we’ is. Is it the talking heads personally? Their home state of Massachusetts? Just Democrats in that state? Every citizen of the United States? The entire world?

Most uses of the word “we” in such contexts assume that the “we” in question is the whole of humanity. The logic runs like this: since climate change is a global commons problem that could render the whole planet uninhabitable, all of humanity must make whatever sacrifices are deemed necessary to stop this future from coming into being.

But is this true? Clearly the entire human race does not agree on the magnitude and relative importance of the climate problem. But even among those who do, there is wide disagreement about how best to address it.

This rhetorical sleight of hand cuts deeper than just policy. Even within the scientific consensus that anthropogenic greenhouse gases increase the overall surface temperature of the Earth, there is genuine disagreement about the timeline and severity of its resulting impacts.

When someone says “we must act now to save the planet,” they are not merely summarizing the consensus view on the subject. They are selecting one scenario from within that consensus and speaking as though that selection were not a choice. The pronoun conscripts you into a political coalition and an empirical worldview at the same time, without asking permission to do either.

The most dramatic example of this appears in the differing priorities between the Global North and the Global South with respect to the evolution of the global energy system. The North is rich enough to have the luxury of worrying about the environmental externalities of its energy system. The South, by contrast, lives in such a state of acute energy poverty that its people simply want energy, and they want it now.

The immediate question for the Global South is not “fossil or renewable,” but how best to dramatically improve the quality of life of billions of people. For someone who has never had reliable air conditioning, “we must cut consumption” sounds less like a shared responsibility and more like the rich world pulling up the ladder behind them.

So, when Western talking heads make sweeping claims about what “we” must do to address climate change, I shake my head and ask who this “we” is supposed to be. “We” becomes a cop-out to avoid hard questions about trade-offs and conflicting interests. We are not all on the same team when it comes to climate, and there are good reasons for that. If you insist on speaking in the name of a “we,” have the honesty to say who you are speaking for and who, exactly, you are asking to pay the price.