The Guardian - Rebecca Solnit
After the panicky IPCC report on climate change, it’s easy for pessimism to set in – but that would be conceding defeat
 |
| Illustration: Nathalie Lees |
In response to Monday’s release of the
IPCC report on the climate crisis
– which warned that “unprecedented” changes were needed if global
warming increases 1.5C beyond the pre-industrial period – a standup
comic I know posted this plaintive request on her Facebook: “Damn this
latest report about climate change is just terrifying. People that know a
lot about this stuff, is there anything to be potentially optimistic
about? I think this week I feel even worse than Nov 2016 and I’m really
trying to find some hope here.”
A bunch of her friends posted variations on “we’re doomed” and “it’s
hopeless,” which perhaps made them feel that they were in charge of one
thing in this
overwhelming situation,
the facts. They weren’t, of course. They were letting understandable
grief at the news morph into an assumption that they know just how the
future is going to turn out. They don’t.
The future hasn’t already been decided. That is, climate change is an
inescapable present and future reality, but the point of the IPCC
report is that there is still a chance to seize the best-case scenario
rather than surrender to the worst. Natan Sharansky, who spent nine
years in a gulag for his work with Soviet dissident Andrei Sarkovsky,
recalls his mentor saying, “They want us to believe there’s no chance of
success. But whether or not there’s hope for change is not the
question. If you want to be a free person, you don’t stand up for human
rights because it will work, but because it is right. We must continue
living as decent people.” Right now living as decent people means every
one of us with resources taking serious climate action, or stepping up
what we’re already doing.
Climate action is human rights, because climate change affects the
most vulnerable first and hardest – it already has, with droughts,
fires, floods, crop failures. It affects the myriad species and habitats
that make this earth such an intricately beautiful place, from the
coral reefs to the caribou herds. What we’re deciding now is what life
will be like for the kids born this year who will be 82 in 2100, and
their grandchildren, and their grandchildren’s grandchildren. They will
curse the era that devastated the planet, and perhaps they’ll bless the
memory of those who tried to limit this destruction. The report says we
need to drop fossil fuel consumption by 45% by 2030, when these kids
will be 12. That’s a difficult but not impossible proposition.
The histories of change that have made me hopeful are often about small groups that seem at the outset unrealistic in their ambition
Taking action is the best way to live in conditions of crisis and
violation, for your spirit and your conscience as well as for society.
It’s entirely compatible with grief and horror; you can work to elect
climate heroes while being sad. There are no guarantees – but just as
Sakharov and Sharansky probably didn’t imagine that the Soviet Union
would dissolve itself in the early 1990s, so we can anticipate that we
don’t exactly know what will happen and how our actions will help shape
the future.
The histories of change that have made me hopeful are often about
small groups that seem at the outset unrealistic in their ambition.
Whether they were taking on slavery in antebellum USA or human rights in
the Soviet bloc, these movements grew exponentially and changed
consciousness and then toppled institutions or regimes. We also don’t
know what technological breakthroughs, large-scale social changes, or
catastrophic ecological feedback loops will shape the next 20 years.
Knowing that we don’t know isn’t grounds for confidence, but it is fuel
against despair, which is a form of certainty. This future is as
uncertain as it’s ever been.
There have been countless encouraging developments in the
global climate movement. The movement was small, fragmented, mild a
dozen years ago, and the climate recommendations then were mostly
polite, with too much change-your-lightbulbs focus on personal virtue.
But personal virtue only matters if it scales up (and even individual
acts depend on collective decisions – I have, for example, 100%
renewable electricity at home because other citizens pushed our amoral
power company to evolve, and it’s more feasible for me to ride a bike
because there are now bike lanes all over my city).
The
movement that has taken on pipelines and fuel trains, refineries and
shipping terminals, fracking and mountaintop removal, divestment and
finance, policy and law, and sometimes won is evidence of what can
happen in 12 years. Some of what were regarded as climate activists’
wild ideas and unreasonable demands are now policy and conventional
common sense. There are so many transformative projects under way from
local work to transition off fossil fuels, to the effort to stop
pipelines (with some major victories, including the one to stop the
Trans-Mountain pipeline, which won in court in late August), to the
lawsuit against the US government on behalf of 21 young people, charging
it with violating their rights and the public trust. The trial begins
on 29 October in Eugene, Oregon.
The other thing I find most encouraging and even a little
awe-inspiring is how profoundly the global energy landscape has already
changed in this century. At the beginning of the 21st century,
renewables were expensive, inefficient, infant technologies incapable of
meeting our energy needs. In a revolution at least as profound as the
industrial revolution, wind and solar engineering and manufacturing have
changed everything; we now have the technological capacity to largely
leave fossil fuel behind. It was not possible then; it is now. That is
stunning. And encouraging.
 |
| A child in flood-affected Bangladesh in 2017. What we’re deciding now is
what life will be like for the kids born this year who will be 82 in
2100. Photograph: Zakir Chowdhury/Barcroft Images |
Astoundingly, 98% of the energy Costa Rica generates is from
non-fossil fuel sources. Scotland closed its last coal-fired power plant
two years ago and overall emissions there are half what they were in
1990. Texas is getting more of its energy from wind than from coal –
about a quarter on good days and half on a great day recently. Iowa
already gets more than a third of its energy from wind because wind is
already more cost-effective than fossil fuel, and more turbines are
being set up. Cities and states in the USA and elsewhere are setting
ambitious goals to reduce fossil fuel consumption or go entirely
renewable. Last month California committed to make its electricity 100%
carbon-free by 2045. There are stories like this from all over the world
that tell us a transition is already under way. They need to scale up
and speed up, but we are not starting from scratch today.
The IPCC report recommends urgent work on many fronts – from how we
produce food and to what use we put land (more forests) to how we
generate and use energy (and the unsexy business of energy efficiency
also matters). It describes four paths forward, three of which depend on
carbon-capturing technologies not yet realized, the fourth includes the
most radical reductions in fossil-fuel use and planting a lot of trees.
The major obstacles to this withdrawal are political, the fossil fuel
and energy corporations and the governments obscenely intertwined with
them. I called up Steve Kretzmann, the longtime director of the climate
policy-and-action group Oil Change International (on whose board I sit),
and he reflected on the two approaches to climate action – changing
consumption and changing production.
Going after production often gets neglected, and places like Alberta,
Canada, like to boast about their virtuous energy consumption projects
while their energy production – in Alberta’s case, the tar sands –
threatens the future of the planet. Addressing production means going
after some of the most powerful and ruthless corporations on earth and
the regimes that protect them and are rewarded by them – or, as with
Russia and Saudi Arabia and to some extent the US are indistinguishable
from them.
Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New Zealand, France and Costa Rica – are working on bans on new exploration and extraction
Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New Zealand, France and Costa Rica –
are already working on bans on new exploration and extractionSteve told
me, “We have to be real about this: this is the oil industry and wars
are fought over it. There’s a lot of political power here and there’s a
lot of people defending that power.” But he also noted, “The moment it’s
clear it’s inexorably on the wane, it will pop.” You can hasten the
popping by cutting the enormous subsidies, and by divesting from fossil
fuel corporations – to date the once-mocked divestment movement has
gotten $6tn withdrawn. As Damien Carrington reported for the Guardian
last month, “Major oil companies such as Shell have this year cited
divestment as a material risk to its business.”
We also need to shut down production directly, with a just transition
for workers in those sectors. Five countries – Belize, Ireland, New
Zealand, France and Costa Rica – are already working on bans on new
exploration and extraction, and the World Bank sent shockwaves around
the world last December when it announced that after 2019 it would no
longer finance oil and gas extraction.
Given that the clean energy comes with lots of jobs – and jobs that
don’t give people black lung and don’t poison surrounding communities –
there’s a lot of ancillary benefit. Fossil fuel is, even aside from the
carbon it pumps into the atmosphere, literally poison, from the mercury
that contaminates the air when coal is burned and the mountains of coal
ash residue to the toxic emissions and water contamination of fracking
and the sinister chemicals emitted by refineries to the smog from cars.
“Giving up” is often how fossil fuel is talked about, as though it’s
pure loss, but renouncing poison doesn’t have to be framed as sacrifice.
Part of the work we need to do is to imagine not only the devastation
of climate change, and the immense difference between 2 or 3 degrees of
warming and 1.5 degrees, but the benefits of making a transition from
fossil fuel. The fading away of the malevolent power of the oil
companies would be a profound transformation, politically as well as
ecologically.
I don’t know exactly if or how we’ll get to where we need to go, but I
know that we must set out better options with all the passion, power
and intelligence we have. A revolution is what we need, and we can begin
by imagining and demanding it and doing what we can to try to realize
it. Rather than waiting to see what happens, we can be what happens. And
by the way, the comedian I mentioned: she’s already organizing
fundraisers for climate groups.
Links
