Interview: Ingmar Rentzhog, Founder of We Don't Have Time

1.  What was the idea/inspiration behind creating We Don't Have Time, a tech start-up aiming to become the world's largest social media platform for the climate crisis?

I was an entrepreneur in the finance industry when I had my first kid. Becoming a father got me thinking more about the world my children were going to inherit, and so I started reading about the climate crisis. 

At first, I thought: It cannot be this bad. If it was, everybody would talk about it, and our leaders would focus all their energy on trying to solve this crisis. But as I dug deeper into it, I realized that it actually was far worse than I thought it was and that it still was not taken seriously. 

My real moment of clarity was when Donald Trump was elected as US president. That was when I realized that our leaders would not fix this for us. So I sold my company and founded We Don’t have Time with my colleague David Olsson.

2.  Tell us about your Organization’s initiatives to educate a global audience about climate change and about your Stockholm50 Associated Event, where I am also holding an art show titled Reef Dwellers, which has been endorsed by the UN Ocean Decade.

We are a communication platform, which means we are always looking for great opportunities to spread climate solutions to a big, worldwide audience. It was very natural for us to organize a big event in association with a large UN summit like Stockholm+50 since it meant that a lot of interesting people would be in Stockholm during that period.

In the end, our own event, we organized in cooperation with UNDP and a lot of other partners, turned out to be far bigger than we expected it to be. This five-day event, with 50 hours of live broadcasting, 250 speakers, and a global audience of more than 31 million, was by far our biggest undertaking to date. 

3.  Does your organization collaborate with Museums, United Nations, if so which ones?

We collaborate closely with the UN Development Program, UNDP. Not just for the STHLM+50 Climate Hub but also for the ongoing broadcast series Dino Talks – which focuses on the enormous amount of fossil-fuel subsidies that all our governments continue to hand out to the oil companies and on the effects it has on all of us. 

We do not currently collaborate with any specific museums, but we have several partners in the culture sector. One of them, Articheck, is dedicated to making museums, galleries, and conservators more sustainable. We also have a partnership with OpenArt, which is currently organizing Scandinavia’s biggest outdoor art exhibition in the city of Örebro, Sweden. 

4.  The Climate Heritage Network (CHN) members --including myself --are invited to provide inputs on the culture or heritage dimensions of climate action. What are your thoughts on the impact of culture or heritage dimensions on climate change, education?

The climate crisis is, in a way, a communication problem. We need to find new ways of telling stories and change the narratives so that people embrace the transformation rather than reject it. 

Art and other forms of culture are super important in that respect. 

We had Netflix’s Sustainability Officer Emma Stewart on one of our shows earlier this year. She said: 

”Science tells us what we need to do, but art makes us want to do it.” 

There is a lot of truth in that sentence.

5.  What are your thoughts on the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative at Stockholm+50. 

We wholeheartedly support any initiative to rapidly phase out all fossil fuels, especially at this moment in time where so many governments, including our own here in Sweden, are spending huge amounts of taxpayers' money on increasing the subsidies.

6.  Anything else you might want to add.

Whenever you – or a company, leader, or organization – take climate action, make sure you let others know about it.  This is how we speed up change.

7.  How can people get involved with your Organization?

It is super easy. Just download the app - and become part of the solution. The more we are, the bigger our impact.

Link to STHLM+50 Climate Hub