The recent poll showing that the British public has ‘green fatigue’ has caused much alarm amongst environmentalists, with the government’s ‘contradictory’ policies on the environment being blamed.

But to me, the problem is much more straightforward and fundamental – it’s about the story we have been telling and the solutions we’re offering. Why are we surprised that people feel disempowered to act, if we’ve spent decades telling them that the actions of previous generations have put our planet on a one-way ticket to oblivion? And why do we expect people to be enthusiastic about solutions that almost entirely consist of stopping or restricting doing things that many aspire to? The brutal truth is that people are failing to act, not because they don’t believe the threat is real, but because the solutions on offer – halting further development or even returning to a simpler way of life – is an unappealing prospect.

Not only does this narrative fail to empower people or enable the environmental movement to come up with solutions that motivate people to act, I believe that it poses a particular problem for the Labour party. At its core, the current narrative is fundamentally conservative, at odds with progressive thinking – promising that the poorest in our society to be no worse off than they are now (the most ‘Labour’ version of the story that I’ve heard so far) is not quite what I had in mind when I joined up. Going along with this story is why Labour’s current environmental policies don’t quite seem to sit comfortably with our other ‘mainstream’ policies and why it seems like a game of dare between the parties to adopt the most severe and unpopular stance.

In 1997 we rewrote the storybook on the economy: you can have a strong economy and a caring social policy. Indeed since then we have gone further and won the argument that the two go hand-in-hand – while a strong economy can deliver social justice, progressive social policies enable and underpin a strong economy. In the same way, we now need to develop our own story and change the way we think about the environment – a story that puts continued improvements in lifestyles at the centre, but couples it with tackling climate change.

In these terms, we’d take on the Tories and the environmentalists. With their calls for aviation taxes, they want foreign travel to be beyond the reach of ordinary people. Instead, we would be making people’s lives better by reducing joyless travel such as commuting with our innovative housing, teleworking and public transport policies, and allowing low-cost flights and airport expansion to continue as a result of our ambitious investments in low-carbon technologies. Their narrow view on economic development and calls to reduce consumption would be condemning us to the serious prospect of a recession. Instead, we would be creating new green-collar and hi-tech jobs by pursuing an economy that provides goods and services more efficiently and uses resources effectively.

By rejecting the conservative narrative, we can come up with our own solutions that keep our progressive vision for society at their heart, but also address our concerns for the environment. Most importantly, we can offer the leadership, inspiration, motivation and incentives that people so badly need in order to act.