The green transition asks us all to change how we live and work. But what happens when millions of people and small businesses simply don’t have the economic capacity to make those choices?
Richard Kirtley, Aug 21, 2026
Off the back of a record-breaking summer for all of the wrong reasons, something that I’ve been pondering is the relationship between small businesses (who make up an extraordinary 99.18% of the UK’s 5.7 million private-sector businesses), those who live on the margins of the economy, and global warming, which is having a particularly catastrophic effect on the UK and Europe this summer.
When we talk about small businesses, it is worth remembering just how small many of them really are. Around 75% of UK private-sector businesses employ nobody beyond their owners. These aren’t businesses with huge teams, sustainability departments or vast reserves of capital. In many cases, they are simply one person trying to make a living.
This summer alone, we have seen frequent ‘records’ for the warmest temperatures ever recorded, multiple heatwaves, and wildfires that have gutted communities and neighbourhoods in ways that we have not seen in the UK before.
By the middle of July, the UK had already experienced three widespread heatwaves and more days above 30°C than during the entirety of the famous summer of 1976. For the first time on record, temperatures of 35°C or above were recorded in May, June and July in the same year. June also saw its temperature record broken on three consecutive days, eventually reaching 37.3°C in Suffolk on 26 June.
As I write this in August, the UK has now experienced its fifth heatwave of the summer, with temperatures reaching 38.1°C in London.
Indeed, to bring the scale of the issue home to me in Sheffield, just last week The Green Estate, a world-renowned demonstrator for urban resilience and regeneration here in Sheffield, has seen acres of its beautifully cultivated and loved meadows gutted by a meadow fire which spread rapidly due to the tinderbox conditions that a summer of record heat has led to.
Personally, I believe that everyone has a part to play in transitioning to a world which can handle these climate shocks, and one such way we, as a population, could do this would be a collective commitment to reduce our carbon footprint.
Take transport, for example. Surface transport remains the UK’s highest-emitting sector, and moving away from petrol and diesel cars towards electric vehicles is going to be an important part of reducing those emissions. Despite the number of miles travelled by cars having almost returned to pre-pandemic levels, emissions from cars are now around 12% lower than in 2019, with the Climate Change Committee estimating that around half of that reduction is likely to have come from the growing uptake of electric vehicles.
So, if we were all to switch to electric cars, and all make similar changes to the way we eat, travel, consume and live, collectively we could make an enormous difference.
Easy…right?!
Well, in today’s Substack, I wanted to spare a thought for the client base who we support who simply do not have the capacity to switch to such lifestyles.
For one thing, the money to purchase an electric vehicle (as an example) simply does not exist. But what I really think we need to consider is much more than just having the wealth to make such changes, but something far more important.
More important than having the money is having the capacity to engage with these issues and to make the changes that are so desperately needed to be taken by the collective.
Firstly, what do I mean by capacity?
Well, in this context, I’d define it as having the ability, breathing space and agency to actually make these decisions. It would mean, for example, not having to simply choose the ultra-processed ready meal or frozen meal over cooking using fresh ingredients because not only do you have the money to purchase such food, but you have the time and energy to cook it, as opposed to living from day to day in exhaustion due to the circumstances in which you find yourself, be it living as a single parent, or working in shift patterns that leave you completely exhausted.
It would mean having the time, space and fitness to walk or cycle to different events (say, the school drop-off) because you do not have to rush to the next event.
It would mean having the time to investigate whether an electric vehicle could work for you, the ability to access the finance required to purchase one, somewhere to charge it and enough financial security to take the risk of replacing a vehicle that, however polluting it might be, currently gets you to work every morning.
It means having the time to think about where your food comes from, where your energy comes from, how you travel, what you buy and what you throw away, all things that we can engage with as the general public in a strive to reduce the impact of climate change.
This is where my day job at Purple Shoots makes me think about this slightly differently. Because the people we support give us a window into what life looks like when much of that capacity simply isn’t there.
Since the beginning of 2024, we have supported more than 150 people with loans to start or grow their own small businesses. These aren’t people who have spotted a gap in the market, put together a pitch deck and raised a round of investment. They are overwhelmingly people who have been excluded from the mainstream financial system and who are trying to create something for themselves with very limited resources.
Our loanbook tells that story remarkably clearly.
Around 67% of the people we support are in receipt of benefits when they come to us. More than a third are unemployed, and a significant proportion are trying to build a business while relying on Universal Credit to keep themselves and their families afloat. More than 43% of our lending goes to people living in the two most deprived deciles of the country, with almost one in four of all our loans going to people living in the most deprived 10% of communities in England and Wales.
These are not people sitting on large savings pots deciding whether their next car should be petrol or electric. They are people trying to build businesses while managing extraordinarily tight household budgets. They are people for whom a broken washing machine, an unexpected energy bill or a £500 repair to the van they rely upon for work can fundamentally alter the finances of an entire month. Yet I believe we increasingly expect people in precisely these circumstances to participate in a transition which often requires significant investment upfront.
Society tells the self-employed gardener that eventually their diesel van needs to be replaced. We encourage the food business to think about where its ingredients come from and how its packaging is produced. We want tradespeople to move towards electric vehicles and equipment. We want businesses to become more energy efficient, households to consume differently, people to travel differently and all of us to make better, greener choices.
For the avoidance of doubt, I absolutely think we should, but wanting someone to make a choice and giving them the capacity to make that choice are two very different things.
There is another statistic from our loan-book which I think is particularly relevant here. Almost 60% of the people we have lent to had previously been rejected by another lender, while a further 23.6% had effectively been told not even to apply.
Think about what that means in the context of a green transition which is going to require investment. Taking the example of the tradespersons transition to green, if someone cannot access a few thousand pounds to buy the equipment they need to start earning, where exactly are they supposed to find the capital to replace a functioning diesel van with an electric one?
If somebody cannot borrow £3,000 to establish a gardening business, how are they supposed to finance a wholesale switch to battery-powered machinery?
If somebody is already making decisions about whether the money coming into their account this week will cover the rent, energy, food and childcare, how much mental capacity are we realistically expecting them to dedicate to calculating the carbon footprint of the products they buy?
This isn’t about people not caring, it isn’t about a lack of education and it certainly isn’t about people on lower incomes somehow being less interested in the world that their children will inherit. It is about capacity.
Poverty doesn’t simply reduce the amount of money somebody has. It narrows the number of choices available to them while financial insecurity shortens your horizon.
When you have savings, secure employment, access to affordable credit and money left at the end of the month, you can make decisions which pay off in five years’ time. You can spend more today to save money tomorrow. You can replace something before it breaks. You can take a risk on new technology. You can absorb an unexpected cost if that decision doesn’t quite work out as planned.
When you don’t have those things, the calculation is entirely different. The cheapest option today may be considerably more expensive over ten years, but that is irrelevant if it is the only option you can afford today and this, I think, presents us with a problem when we talk about climate change because climate change is perhaps the ultimate long-term problem. It requires us to make decisions today whose greatest benefits may not be felt for decades but many of the people we work with don’t have the luxury of making decisions on a decades-long horizon.
They are making decisions for next month, next week, sometimes, quite literally, for Friday and I perceive that there is a cruel irony sitting underneath all of this. Because many of the people and businesses who have the least capacity to make the changes required by climate change are also those with the least capacity to withstand its consequences.
Think again about that self-employed gardener. A week of temperatures approaching 40°C isn’t simply uncomfortable. It might mean a week where it isn’t safe or practical to work. For somebody in salaried employment that might be manageable. For a sole trader, a week without work can mean a week without income.
Think about a market trader whose stock is destroyed by extreme heat. A mobile food business facing soaring refrigeration costs. A tradesperson unable to work outside. A tiny business hit by flooding. A self-employed person whose tools, vehicle or premises are damaged by a wildfire. A larger business might have reserves, insurance, alternative premises, access to credit and people whose job it is to plan for precisely these sorts of risks. A microbusiness may have none of those things and suddenly we create a vicious circle.
Low income creates less capacity to adapt. Less capacity to adapt creates greater exposure to climate shocks. Climate shocks create financial losses and those financial losses leave even less capacity to adapt next time.
Which leads me to something I’ve increasingly started to wonder.
What if economic inclusion is actually part of climate policy?
We tend to put these things into different boxes. Poverty and financial exclusion belong over here. Small business policy sits somewhere else. Net Zero, transport and climate adaptation sit somewhere else again but I would 100% argue that they are far more connected than we think.
When we help somebody move from financial insecurity towards stability, we aren’t simply increasing their income; we’re increasing their capacity. The capacity to plan, the capacity to invest, the capacity to absorb a shock, the capacity to replace the cheapest option with the better long-term option and, ultimately, the capacity to participate in the enormous collective transition that we are asking society to make.
If we are serious about creating a just transition, then surely we have to recognise that millions of people cannot simply be instructed or incentivised into making greener choices. We have to create the economic conditions which allow them to have those choices in the first place.
We can’t meaningfully ask somebody to plan for 2050 when their economic circumstances mean they are still trying to survive until Friday.