What Jonah knew that the climate movement doesn’t

Warnings only work when the fix is cheap, or the moral argument has been won.

It’s an odd thing to read on the holiest day of the year. Yom Kippur afternoon, the flattest hour, everyone tired and hungry and the small children long since taken home, and we open a short book about a city that was warned and listened.

Jonah is the only prophet in the Tanakh whose warning actually works. Five words in the Hebrew: forty days, and Nineveh is overturned. No policy, no programme, no list of demands. The city hears him, changes, and is spared. Every other prophet in the Tanakh speaks at length, and is ignored.

I’ve spent my working life in and around the climate world, and listening to Jonah last week, I found myself wondering whether his story has a lesson we too easily miss.

Look at the warnings humanity has actually acted on, and they fall into two types.

The first is where a substitute exists. Take ozone. In 1974, two chemists at the University of California, Mario Molina and Sherwood Rowland, published a paper showing that gases used in fridges and aerosols were destroying the ozone layer. They spent years being dismissed as alarmists. Then the hole was found over Antarctica in 1985, the Montreal Protocol was signed in 1987, and the ozone layer is now expected to recover by the middle of this century. Acid rain, leaded petrol and the clean air laws that followed London’s Great Smog of 1952 offer similar stories. The alarm was raised in the language of science and answered in the language of engineering. There was a substitute. It was affordable. Nobody had to change what they believed about themselves.

But some warnings ask more of us. There is another type of example where no substitute makes the underlying problem disappear. Acting on the warning means confronting interests, habits and systems from which most people feel they benefit. That is where moral arguments have historically mattered. Britain abolished the slave trade in 1807 and slavery across most of its empire in 1833; the United States after a civil war. Abolitionists had to persuade a society economically entangled in slavery that the system was wrong, even when many people stood to lose from changing it. Drink-driving moved, within a generation, from misfortune to crime: nothing was invented, but its moral status changed. Tobacco companies faced a similar shift when evidence of harm was joined by evidence that they had known what they were doing. In each case, facts mattered, but facts alone did not settle the question of what people ought to do.

When the fix is relatively easy, evidence can be enough. When the change is costly or disruptive, people need to believe not merely that it is wise, but that it is right.

The climate movement has spent much of the last thirty years mostly forgetting this fundamental point.

There are of course exceptions. Al Gore called climate a moral rather than a political issue. James Hansen called it the moral question of the century. Pope Francis devoted an encyclical to it. But the moral claim has usually been the grace note, the sentence after the graph, the thing said at the end for emphasis. The argument carrying the weight has been the science, the economics, the risk, the health cost, the return on investment.

And there is another problem. It is not only that we have often failed to make the moral argument; when we have do so, we have often pointed it in the wrong direction. Rather than point to questions of responsibility and the other, the moral argument leads to claims on each other’s flights and shopping baskets, as though the wrong were a personal failing to be audited rather than a system to be changed.

That is not how moral arguments have ever worked. Nobody in eighteenth-century Britain had clean hands. Slavery was not a sector of that economy; it was woven through it: the sugar in the tea, the cotton in the shirt, the banks, the ports, the insurance, whole cities built on the proceeds. The abolitionists lived inside the society they were trying to change, just as we live inside the carbon economy.

What they did was say plainly that the system was wrong while still living inside it, and then set about changing it.

A moral claim is a statement about how things ought to be, not a certificate of how anyone has lived. Insist on the second and you turn the argument into a purity test, which narrows it to the very few entitled to make it, and in practice means nobody makes it at all.

Avoiding the moral argument was an option while many of the fixes were cheap. But the cheap ones have largely happened, and they were a smaller share of the problem than we like to admit. Electricity is decarbonising, coal is falling away from grid after grid, electric vehicles are winning on cost.

What remains is harder: cement, steel, fertiliser, shipping, aviation, farming, waste, and the fact that oil is not only a fuel but a feedstock, sitting inside the packaging, the paint, the fabric and the road outside. We could all really improve our recycling at home and electrify every car on earth and still have a very long way to go.

Science and engineering carried us this far. They cannot carry us the rest of the way unaided, because what is being asked for now is not simply a substitute. It is a change in what we are prepared to do.

So who makes that argument, and in what language?

We have very few public languages left for saying that something is simply wrong. There is the language of risk, which says it is unwise. The language of cost, which says it is expensive. The language of rights, which is adversarial and tends to end up in court not in action.

But religious traditions have never stopped speaking of responsibility and obligation: of duty owed whether or not it suits us. They have kept that language alive through centuries when nobody much wanted it.

That turns out to be exactly what this moment needs.

Our own tradition has something particular to offer. Judaism has a language of responsibility and obligation rather than preference, and a tradition in which moral claims are argued, tested against the strongest objection and held up over time. Avraham is called ha’Ivri, the one on the other side, with the whole world standing on one bank and him on the other.

And we know how to argue. Three thousand years of Jewish disagreement have given us a tradition in which neither side has to disappear, and minority opinions are preserved in the text rather than erased from it. That is slow work. It is not always comfortable. But moral claims rarely win without it.

We are beginning to see this across the Jewish world and with interfaith partners. Across the UK, Israel, North America, Australia and beyond, communities are beginning to frame climate action as a matter of responsibility and obligation rather than preference: synagogues and schools making commitments they can be held to, and professionals bringing the issue into the work they do.

It is still small, and nowhere near the scale of the task. We need more Jewish voices, and particularly religious leaders, to back up that work with a clear and resounding moral argument grounded in our tradition.

A useful moral case is also a pragmatic one. The Quakers condemned slavery for the better part of two centuries before much moved. Historians argue that abolition eventually became achievable once the economics shifted underneath it. But the moral case was necessary for that shift to occur.

Expensive change needs both: the practical alternative and the moral conviction to demand it. The alternatives mostly exist now. The moral claim is what is missing.

Which brings me back to last Monday afternoon, and a book with advice that is there, if we want it. Five words, and nothing in them to argue with: forty days, and Nineveh is overturned.

I read that brevity as a clarion call: this cannot go on, and you know it. The data matters. The science matters. The engineering matters. But the call comes first.

What we need now is the courage Jonah eventually found. He ran from it at first, but he went back. He stood in the middle of the city and said out loud and without hedging, that this is wrong and it has to change.