Last week I had a coffee with Alex Slack of Everyturn, chewing the cud over the state of Sustainability. Alex relayed an anecdote about when Bono was campaigning against third world debt. His opening gambit when trying to get an organisation on board was to ask “so who’s Elvis around here?” He meant “who wants to step up and be the iconic figure that changes everything?”

I’ve been mulling on this ever since. Who is the Climate Elvis?

Greta Thunberg is the obvious candidate in the last decade, cutting through the noise with astonishing and direct simplicity, taking her from lone protester with a homemade ‘Skolstrejk för klimatet’ sign to an international spokesperson. But that strength was also her weakness – the anti-climate crew disparaged the rest of us for “destroying the economy because a teenager told us too” (I’ve left out the various unsavoury references to her neurodiversity that were often appended to this). The ‘sail across the Atlantic to the climate conference with a bucket for a toilet’ stunt didn’t really sell a low carbon economy to the wider population, particularly when it turned out the boat’s crew change was done by air, meaning two cross-Atlantic return tickets rather than the one if she had simply flown herself. And now Thunberg seems to have left the (climate) building and moved on to focus on the Palestinian cause.

The anti-climate voices in the UK are trying to pin Climate Elvis status on the Energy Security and Net Zero Secretary of State Ed Miliband, ignoring the fact it is not “Ed Miliband’s Net Zero”, but (former Conservative PM) Theresa May’s Net Zero – Miliband is simply trying to make May’s goal a reality. But they obviously feel that Miliband’s somewhat goofy enthusiasm is an achilles heel they can attack as ‘eco-lunacy’. As I said last week, I suspect the Government’s recent investment in nuclear energy is at least in part an attempt to neutralise these attacks.

So who have been effective Climate Elvises? Maybe controversially, I would nominate Margaret Thatcher as the original Climate Elvis, being the first premier of any country to make a major speech on climate change, and one that led to the establishment of the UNFCC, IPCC and, in turn, the Paris Agreement. Almost as unlikely, in a completely different way, UK Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott later fulfilled an Elvis role to push the Kyoto Agreement over the line through sheer force of will. Al Gore undoubtedly held the mantle for many years with An Inconvenient Truth, his establishment status grabbing attention in many boardrooms and effecting lots of change, before fading away.

So who is there today? In the UK, TV Dragon Deborah Meaden has a high profile profile and no-nonsense aura. Greg Jackson of Octopus calmly dismantles sceptics’ arguments in debates while bringing clean energy to the masses. Emma Pinchbeck, now lead at the advisory Climate Change Committee is another strong voice. But there doesn’t seem to be a giant figure bestriding the Earth, making change happen.

Maybe this is OK. Maybe we don’t need iconic figures to rally around any more. Maybe a Climate Elvis just becomes an Aunt Sally for others to lob abuse at. Maybe, as the King put it himself, we now need “a little less conversation, a little more action.”