New York Magazine Intelligencer - David Wallace-Wells
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A climate protester in Wales. Photo: PA Images via Getty Images
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One
plague, when big enough, occludes others, and the coronavirus pandemic
has, for six months now, almost fully eclipsed the very real, very
large, and very pressing threat of climate change. Even as the United
States normalizes a pandemic plateau producing roughly a thousand deaths
every day, with continuing national failure to contain the spread of
the disease becoming maddeningly familiar old news, COVID-19 is still
preventing us from seeing clearly the wreckage being done by global
warming, particularly
elsewhere in the world, in parts of the global South where Americans and Europeans prefer not to look.
Since
the beginning of the year, billions of locusts produced by climate
disruptions to local weather patterns have descended in clouds of as
many as 80 million insects on some of the world’s most food-insecure
regions, chewing up the croplands of the Horn of Africa, the Sahel,
India, and Pakistan, pushing
perhaps 5 million people to the brink of starvation and
threatening the livelihood of as much as 10 percent of the world’s population. Just months after a historic cyclone “pummeled” the country, about a third of Bangladesh was
underwater from torrential rains and flooding, while temperatures across the Middle East
soared above 120 degrees Fahrenheit. In Iraq, where it reached 125, the heat wave
was compounded by power outages
depriving Iraqis of air-conditioning that was, in these circumstances,
almost literally a lifeline.
Last month, as many as 38 million were
evacuated to avoid
hundreds of simultaneous river floods in China, where some regions received
twice as much rain as normal in June and July, and where the massive Three Gorges Dam was sufficiently stressed by the excess rainfall it has produced
fears,
likely premature, that the epic dam itself might collapse. In the
Atlantic, there have been already nine named storms this season, a mark
that is typically reached only in October, and the updated NOAA forecast
for the remainder of the year
projects
between three and six major hurricanes, and a total of 19 to 25 storms —
meaning there’s a decent chance we will fully exhaust the English
alphabet in our naming of storms and move on to Greek. As a whole, the
hurricane season is
expected
to be twice as intense as “normal.” In the midst of a pandemic, in a
country that can’t muster the logistical capacity to control it, we will
be functionally facing down two serious hurricane seasons at once. And
the president is now, ahead of those likely disasters,
literally pilfering FEMA’s disaster-relief funds to cover the very minimal amount of unemployment insurance Senate Republicans are unwilling to provide.
Over
the past six months, the coronavirus has often been called a “fire
drill” for climate change. But at present it looks more like a
white-noise machine, drowning out what would be, in any other year, the
unmistakable signal of a climate emergency. Last week,
new research
produced by the Climate Impact Lab on the relationship between warming
and mortality underscored just what scale of emergency we may be facing
in the decades ahead. By the end of the century, the researchers found,
unmitigated warming produced by worst-case emissions trajectories could
make climate change more deadly than all infectious disease in the world
combined. Bill Gates
summarized
the research this way: “By 2060, climate change could be just as deadly
as COVID-19, and by 2100 it could be five times as deadly.” And unlike
this pandemic, it would not abate and could not even be stalled, except
by entirely zeroing out every ounce of carbon being produced now — 37
gigatons annually — by the planet we have transformed into an emissions
factory, and then waiting, at least decades and perhaps centuries, for
the climate to stabilize.
A
pandemic is a horrible sort of social bottleneck. It is invariably
brutal, but you can get to the other side of it. Indeed, we are counting
on doing so — here in the U.S., counting on doing so only with the help
of vaccines, given our utter American incompetence at managing the
disease socially and politically without that simple silver-bullet
solution. But climate change doesn’t work in the same way; practically
speaking, without a complete elimination of the planet’s carbon
footprint, it won’t ever end. We will be living in that new, lethal era
of climate change indefinitely. Perhaps forever. Which makes the most
pressing question we face: How will we adapt?
Despite
all that, our collective focus on COVID-19 and our relative disinterest
in new climate news is intuitive, even understandable. Though it is far
from the world’s deadliest disease, even this year, the novelty of the
coronavirus makes it a terrifying specter, and beyond the obvious
sickness and death, the disruptions it has produced in nations and
communities trying valiantly to protect themselves can be overwhelming.
In the U.S., for instance, tens of millions are unemployed and tens of
millions at risk of eviction, millions have lost their health insurance
and we’ve just experienced the steepest drop in GDP in recorded American
history. The sudden arrival of the pandemic, and its likely medium-term
disappearance, makes a powerful emotional case for rapid and dramatic
response, one that the slower-boil, permanent threat of climate change
doesn’t.
In
another sense, of course, especially given how much longer climate
change will remain with us, turning away from one set of terrifying news
to focus on another set represents a deeply distressing moral,
intellectual, political, and managerial failure — marking one pathway by
which previously unthinkable environmental horrors become unfortunate
but accepted features of the modern world. Even as the world wakes up to
climate change — a
recent survey,
for instance, found a record-high 81 percent of Britons worried about
warming — the speed with which we seem capable of normalizing disaster
seems to accelerate, too. Last June, fires in the Brazilian Amazon were a
multiday international news story and a geopolitical scandal that led to would-be strongman
grandstanding
between Brazil’s climate-troll president, Jair Bolsonaro, and
sanctimonious French president, Emmanuel Macron.
This year, as of June,
the fires are 20 percent worse.
You have probably not read or heard about them. The European heat wave
of 2019 made headlines around the world; right now, in France, the
temperatures are considerably worse, indeed the worst they have been
since 2003, when that summer’s heat wave killed at least 50,000 across
Europe. Excepting that summer, this one will be
the hottest France has seen since 1873.
You probably haven’t heard much about that, either. Last year, record
melting of the Greenland ice sheet — 80 billion tons in about a week —
was passed around social media as a terrifying climate portent. This
year, an ice shelf the size of Manhattan — Canada’s largest —
suddenly collapsed,
with more than 40 percent of it breaking off in a single day, but was
not met with the same kind of general alarm or interest. You get the
point.
This
process of normalization was not unforeseeable, and yet it is
nevertheless disorienting to be living through it, watching extreme
weather and natural disaster big enough to once define whole local
generations become merely regrettably grim wallpaper to the ever-scarier
and more immediate news we doomscroll nightly. “This is the yowling
torque muffled by the bland-seeming phrase ‘climate apathy,’” I
wrote
a couple of years ago, “which may otherwise feel merely descriptive:
that through appeals to nativism, or by the logic of budget realities,
or in perverse contortions of ‘deservedness,’ by drawing our circles of
empathy smaller and smaller, or by simply turning a blind eye when
convenient, we will find ways to engineer new indifference.”
Writing then, I thought I was describing the future.
Gazing
out at the future from the promontory of the present, with the planet
having warmed one degree, the world of two degrees seems nightmarish —
and the worlds of three degrees, and four, and five yet more grotesque.
But one way we might manage to navigate that path without crumbling
collectively in despair is, perversely, to normalize climate suffering
at the same pace we accelerate it, as we have so much human pain over
centuries, so that we are always coming to terms with what is just ahead
of us, decrying what lies beyond that, and forgetting all that we had
ever said about the absolute moral unacceptability of the conditions of
the world we are passing through in the present tense, and blithely.
More recently, for Vox, David Roberts
picked up
the same thread in a long essay headlined, “The Scariest Thing About
Global Warming.” “For as long as I’ve followed global warming, advocates
and activists have shared a certain faith: When the impacts get really
bad, people will act,” he wrote. “But there is a scarier possibility, in
many ways more plausible: We never really wake up at all. No moment of
reckoning arrives. The atmosphere becomes progressively more unstable,
but it never does so fast enough, dramatically enough, to command the
sustained attention of any particular generation of human beings.
Instead, it is treated as rising background noise.”
Roberts
was ruminating on a commonsensical but obscure academic concept called
“shifting baseline syndrome,” which describes the pattern by which we
constantly reestablish benchmarks in assessing and evaluating rates of
change, such that generations of fishermen might each register only 10
percent declines, but find themselves, a century on, almost out of fish
to catch without ever having raised an alarm — or even noticed a crisis.
The pattern undeniably applies to our rapid normalization of climate
change, which has already made the planet warmer than it has ever been
at any point in the history of human civilization, over a period in
which we have somehow managed to acclimatize ourselves to what should be
truly alarming news — for example, that the city of Houston has been
hit by five “500-year storms” in the last five years. Many of us know
already that the term has become meaningless. Yet we rarely find
ourselves reflecting on just what made it meaningless: that we are all
already living as a planet entirely outside the window of temperatures
that enclose all of human history, a transformation that makes
everything we do on this new world unprecedented and uncertain, however
familiar it may feel, according to those ever-shifting baselines.
And
yet it is just as important, I think, to note that we are witnessing,
simultaneously, another kind of normalization, indeed a good
normalization — the normalization of climate alarm. Because even as we
fail to make time to reckon explicitly with the present tense of the
climate crisis, intuitions about it, and the future it portends for us,
that alarm has grown much more central to political and social
discourse, in America and elsewhere. Indeed, while the world’s attention
has been focused on the coronavirus, with little apparent appetite for
discussion or debate about the threat of warming, our collective,
planetary response to the pandemic has brought along with it a sort of
secret sidecar of unprecedented climate action. Fully 30 percent of the
European stimulus package
passed last month
is earmarked for climate initiatives — which, while far short of the
more than $2 trillion many believe is necessary to complete Europe’s
green transition and allow the continent to meet its Paris Climate
Accord commitments, is still a laudably large share of a quite large
stimulus package.
In the United States, the relief packages have been
less of a climate boon,
compromised in predictable ways by a Republican Senate, but over the
course of the pandemic, the climate plan of onetime activist–punching
bag Joe Biden
has come to resemble climate candidate Jay Inslee’s
— and at $2 trillion would mark by far the biggest commitment ever
proposed not just by a presidential nominee but any major political
figure in the country’s history until about a year ago. Indeed, that $2
trillion is 20 times the size of Barack Obama’s biggest green-energy
investment — the $90 billion he snuck into the Recovery Act, which
effectively kick-started the rapid global decline in the cost of
renewables. (An investment that similarly went under-debated, at least
compared to his failed cap-and-trade gambit.) In Paris, Mayor Anne
Hidalgo has used the opportunity of the pandemic to
transform the city,
long among the most polluted in Western Europe, into a green model and
cycler’s paradise — permanently. In China, the recovery record is
far from ideal, from a climate perspective, but a
recent report suggests
new investment in wind power there could produce an eightfold increase
in global capacity. There will be more bursts of stimulus in the next
months, and it should not surprise, at all, if those bursts followed
this same pattern: quietly radical climate action.
Some
of this pattern comes from the natural lessons about fighting warming
that comes from COVID-19, which teaches us that we are not invulnerable
to the natural world, however modern and advanced we may feel; that it
is better to respond quickly to emergent challenges rather than wait
until the terrifying future takes concrete shape before us; and that
while adapting to that new future may seem easier than preventing it in
the first place, it almost always pays off to invest in mitigation
first, if only to reduce the amount of adaptation you have to do later
(as the U.S. is learning the hard way now, its horrendous pandemic
plateau preventing anything like a normal school year or a bounce back
for the economy this fall).
It also has to do with the “radicalization”
of previously centrist Establishment forces, particularly in the field
of economics and public policy — we now have the IMF
publishing papers questioning neoliberalism, the Fed
arguing that corporate power has been undermining the health of the economy for decades, and right-wing policy advisers
suggesting
we discard GDP as a measure of human well-being, just to name a few
data points almost at random (and not even mentioning the
boundary-pushing work of economists on the left, like
Stephanie Kelton and
Mariana Mazzucato).
And of course, it has to do with just how big a hole even the countries
that responded relatively well to the pandemic have found themselves
in, with stimulus needs so expansive that in certain places
policy-makers are essentially going around looking for things to pay
for.
But
on climate action in particular, much of the movement undoubtedly comes
from how much more worried the world has become recently about the
medium-term threat of dramatic warming. Even when we don’t make time for
news about locust plagues or fires in the Amazon, foreboding about the
climate crisis has come to shape the country’s political, social, and
emotional relationship to its own future much more profoundly than ever
before. Our politics and policy can’t help but reflect those priorities
now, even when we aren’t debating them directly. We are now alarmed
enough about climate change, collectively, that even when we aren’t
particularly freaking out about it, we still find ourselves drifting
rapidly, as in a very fast stream, toward dramatic action.
I
want to be careful, here, to not overstate how much progress has been
made, in terms of policy — by any scientific measure, all of these
proposals, even taken together, are nevertheless inadequate, and of
course much remains to be seen about how any of it is implemented and
what effect on emissions, if any, is achieved. But I do want to clearly
note the very different place climate change, and climate action, now
occupies in the political conversation in the U.S. and around the world,
indeed how central climate change has become to the way nearly every
country in the world conceives of progress, and public investment, and
the very landscape of the future.
When massive public investment appears
necessary, as it has suddenly to stimulate a global recovery from the
pandemic, climate investments are now included by default — not just on
the margins or as window dressing, and, perhaps even more significantly,
without all that much debate or discord. In each of these cases, the
broad outlines of logic are the same: When engineering and designing
that investment, the urgency of stimulus doesn’t mean sidelining climate
goals, but embracing them, enfolding green prerogatives into an
existing portfolio of good-governance values, which used to exclude them
as “fringe.”
This
is another shift which the terrifying distraction of the pandemic has
perhaps prevented us from noticing or acknowledging properly. Because
activists have such a clear-eyed sense of just how necessary immediate
action is, and such a firm grasp of its necessary scale, they can be
very hard to impress. (Indeed, being hard to impress is simply part of
the job.) Others, less attuned to climate concerns, may not have even
really noticed that decarbonization has become so central to the way the
world’s governments are talking about recovery, or understood precisely
what it means for the future of climate policy — a future still largely
unresolved, and which remains very open to contestation.
None of these
plans are sufficient to meaningfully mitigate global warming, or prevent
the planet from warming past two degrees — the threshold long described
by scientists as “catastrophic,” and often called, by island nations,
“genocide.” But while we are still largely talking at the level of
rhetoric and policy pledges rather than already-banked gains, the
climate action quietly encoded in these stimulus measures — and likely
to be encoded in future rounds, as well — is nevertheless very real
progress. And it is in large part, I believe, a credit to the work of
climate activists deploying alarmist rhetoric in ever-greater numbers
and at ever-greater volume over the past several years.
That
last point is relevant simply because credit should be paid where it is
due. But it is also relevant because, over the last several months, two
much-talked-about books, a long, high-minded essay in
Foreign Affairs, and a prominent
Guardian
op-ed by two eminent climate scientists have offered a series of
similar arguments against the rising public alarm about global warming —
indeed, taken together as a wave of anti-alarm, these warnings are
themselves perhaps another sign that alarmism has gained a meaningful
foothold in the center of political discourse.
The
authors of these books and essays come from different places on the
spectrum of climate politics. Michael Shellenberger, author of
Apocalypse Never, and Bjorn Lomborg, author of
False Alarm,
are both argumentative critics of much environmental activism and are
considered by most climate advocates to be irresponsible quasi-deniers.
(To my mind, this goes a bit too far: While each reads the facts very
differently than I do, and picks, I think, the wrong enemies and points
of emphasis, targeting activists rather than the forces of delay, they
also, as Amy Westervelt
has suggested,
raise some relevant questions about the place of nuclear power and the
importance of making sure decarbonization enriches rather than
impoverishes us, respectively.)
Hal Harvey, the author of
“The Case for Climate Pragmatism” in
Foreign Affairs,
is a technocratic-minded energy analyst and the CEO of the research and
policy group Energy Innovation. Richard Betts and Zeke Hausfather, the
joint authors of the
Guardian essay, “
In tackling the global climate crisis, doom and optimism are both dangerous traps,”
are both among the most serious and well-respected climate scientists
and analysts pulled into quasi-public roles by the seriousness of the
crisis and the importance of their work on it. In other words, this
recent batch of pieces warning against panic and alarm arrives from a
few different perspectives, but each makes a similar charge: that
alarmism and fear-mongering is a danger to be considered alongside
climate skepticism, denial, and complacency (in the case of
Shellenberger and Lomborg, possibly a danger exceeding those others).
To that I would say: What danger? I’ve
written before
about the scientific validity of alarm — based on the science, alarmism
happens to be true. In their essay, Betts and Hausfather usefully
outline that, from a scientific perspective, what were recently
considered plausible best-case and plausible worst-case scenarios have
come to look, over the last several years, considerably less plausible,
giving us a narrower range of likely outcomes than we were staring at
less than a decade ago, when the last major omnibus IPCC report was
published (I’ve
written
about this, too). In that sense, they are right to suggest that,
compared to how we might have oriented our understanding of future
climate change five or ten years ago, we should probably be both a
little less panicked and a little less optimistic at once.
Unfortunately, compared to the climate of the present day — already
“unprecedented,” already producing those strings of 500-year storms and
once-unimaginable heat waves — even a best-case outcome is quite
alarming: At two degrees, 150 million more people may die from air
pollution, storms, and flooding that used to hit once a century but now
come every year, and we could see the migration of possibly hundreds of
millions of people. The world north of two degrees contains many more
disasters, much more punishingly extreme weather, much more social
disarray, and a much steeper climb to “adaptation” than humans have ever
managed in their entire history. Presumably, we will find ways to
manage it, at least to some degree, but that project will be much more
difficult, much more expensive, and much more full of human suffering
both discriminate and indiscriminate, the hotter the planet gets.
Trying
to forestall that warming, of course, raises the strategic question:
What political value is alarmism, fear-mongering, and urgent, strident
declarations of climate emergency? Thankfully, the last few years offer,
I think, something close to a natural experiment in precisely this kind
of activism. I am thinking, chiefly, of activists and organizations
like Greta Thunberg and the loose global alliance of school-age climate
strikers she has inspired; Varshini Prakash and the Sunrise Movement
here in the U.S.; and Extinction Rebellion, based in the U.K., with
various offshoots all around the globe.
None of these people or organizations were known to the world, in any significant way, when the U.N.’s IPCC
published its landmark “Doomsday” report in October 2018,
outlining just how radically different the planet would look at two
degrees of warming than at 1.5 — and why it was therefore quite
imperative to do what could be done to keep the temperature lower. And
the period of unmistakably alarmist activism that followed — and which
is embodied by those few leaders — hasn’t coincided with a diminution of
public concern about climate change, at all, but the opposite. Those
two years have been the most productive and progressive in the
decades-long history of climate politics. And while there are of course
other factors contributing to the change — chiefly the increasing
prevalence of extreme weather, particularly in the Northern Hemisphere,
where it had long been harder to see, and the declining price of
renewable energy everywhere on the planet — it is very hard to look
objectively at the political experience of the last several years as
someone hoping for decarbonization and see this alarmist activism as
dampening the pace of progress.
For
years, some climate activists have warned about the risks of using fear
as a PR tool, suggesting that fatalism could set in more quickly than
action, depriving the world of the collective opportunity for action
(or, in more local ways, depriving the forces of climate action of the
support of some natural allies). I am sure that there are some people on
the planet who’ve gone from engaged to disengaged over the last few
years, but the angle of change strikes me as tilting very much in the
opposite direction — making more people care about this issue, and
intensifying the concern of those who do care (both intuitions are very
much
reflected in polling,
for all its limitations). And while it is true there is a gap — in some
cases, a large one — between the values and principles espoused by
alarmist activists and what the median voters in their countries find
plausible, or advisable, in potential climate policy, that distance
isn’t an indictment of their activism, it’s a description of its
purpose: pulling the public toward more ambitious action. If activists
met voters where they were, they’d just be voters, too. And considering
that the alarmist rhetoric of that “Doomsday” report — that everything
needed to be done to avoid two degrees of warming — is now the official
platform goal of the Democratic Party, I’d say those activists have
pulled the public, and our politics, quite far indeed.
This
is not to say that these groups all speak precisely in unison, or that
all they do say lines up precisely with scientific consensus about the
state of the climate. Extinction Rebellion, in particular, has gotten
into trouble, again and again over the past year, by pushing narratives
of imminent social collapse. (This
recent Ecologist critique
by Thomas Nicholas, Galen Hall, and Colleen Schmidt does a good job
separating some of the group’s good political activism from some of its
misleading science.) In part as a result, and in part as a reflection of
some extremist tactics, the group is
quite unpopular
now in England. But precisely because of that they are also perhaps the
most eye-opening case study of the bunch.
Although XR is by far the
most prominent group of environmental activists at work in the U.K.
today, climate action hasn’t gotten less popular over the course of
their controversial activism, or less urgent, even as the group has
stumbled. In fact, again, the opposite, with the country’s Parliament
passing a bill promising net-zero emissions by 2050, and its prime
minister promising an end to the sale of nonelectric cars by 2035. Could
an XR-less England have squeezed such meaningful climate commitments
out of outgoing conservative prime minister Theresa May, her coalition
collapsing around her, or from a politically disheveled Boris Johnson,
trying to maneuver a path to a prime ministerial reelection through the
Brexit crisis, that no other Tory seemed willing to even dare? It is
almost impossible to imagine.
In
the U.S., the stimulus needs of the coronavirus pandemic are massive,
and suggest a different calculus here and now than when Johnson first
ascended to the prime ministership in England. But if you import the
American climate politics of even 2016 into the Democratic primary of
2020, what you’d get probably looks a lot more like the $90 billion in
the 2009 Recovery Act than the $2 trillion of Biden’s current plan.
Instead, our climate politics have moved quickly enough over the past
four years that the stimulus needs of today are being answered very
differently. Of course, what passes through Congress in 2021 — if
anything — may not look anything like that plan. But the difference
between the two — and, even more pointedly, the difference between
Biden’s primary and his general election pitch — reflects the hard work
and full-throated alarm of activists, as much as it does the size of the
stimulus need and the openness of Biden himself and his circle of
advisers.
In a recent conversation with my colleague Eric Levitz, the economic historian Adam Tooze
raised a related critique, though not directed at activists per se:
One
of the things that I would fault about the Green New Deal vision is
that it didn’t really spell out who its allies were going to be in the
business community. Or, for that matter, in the military. And I think
that’s a major problem because you end up impaled on the kind of
conflict you’re talking about. I don’t say this out of any enthusiasm
for Davos-style business leadership on climate, but just out of an
appreciation for what successful political-economic transformation has
entailed historically. And it clearly involves coalition-building in
which you grab on to particular bits of the security state, on the one
hand, and also various factions of business that have developed a
long-term strategic interest in transformation (which supersedes the
imperative of immediate profit maximization).
A bit later, he goes on:
I
think because the Green New Deal project was formulated so strongly
from the left — and in the context of a Black Lives Matter moment — it
centered itself on a coalition of the marginalized, what they call
front-line communities. Which is fine. But it’s also a way of picking a
fight with every conceivable interest that’s actually got power.
Tooze
is a brilliant synthetic thinker, whose off-the-cuff commentary is
often much more precise and provocative than the carefully composed
observations of others. And I don’t think he is wrong to imply that
climate progress is as much a matter of political power as moral virtue.
But regarding the efficacy of Green New Deal advocacy, in particular, I
think he is off the mark. Joe Biden is the very picture of American
Establishmentarianism, and his climate plan looks more like a Green New
Deal than it looks like Hillary Clinton’s or Barack Obama’s. Thanks to
the fact of the GND (and more particularly the
leaked “FAQ”
that caused such backlash), Biden can plausibly pitch his plan by
saying, “We’re not banning hamburgers or the internal combustion engine,
just investing in a massive jobs program that will make your
electricity cheaper and your air cleaner.”
In other words, he can
distance himself from “radicalism” while still pushing the most radical
climate plan, by far, ever proposed by any American presidential
candidate, and one that does quite a lot on the “climate justice” front,
too, spending fully 40 percent of its budget investing in front-line
communities. That rhetorical opportunity, and the political one, were
opened up by the Green New Deal and its advocates — and while personally
I’d prefer it if AOC and Ed Markey were writing the future climate
policy of the U.S. directly, it’s hard to miss how much, even in
“failure,” they have moved the center of public opinion, and political
power, toward their own goals. They have done so dizzyingly fast —
remember, Ocasio-Cortez hadn’t even been elected two years ago. All the
way back in 2016, if you’d heard of the Green New Deal at all, you’d
probably heard of it as the name of
Jill Stein’s climate
policy, and you might’ve thought of the Paris Climate Accords as the
end-all, be-all of global climate policy — rather than an inadequate,
and perhaps irredeemably broken, preliminary gesture. Times have really
changed.
And
while there hasn’t been nearly as much direct coordination between
climate activists and big business, the movement there has been
striking, too, if, as with everything else, still insufficient by the
standards of the science. Without the pressure of activists, would
Microsoft, or BlackRock, or BP have made commitments to decarbonization
and climate action anywhere close to the ones they have?
Intuitively,
the answer is “no,” but a powerful counterexample is offered by recent
history, as well. Five years ago, say, none of them were making anything
like these moves or investments, though the science was fundamentally
the same and the cost of decarbonization not dramatically higher. What
has changed, beyond the culture of climate concern more broadly, is
widespread fear, in the corporate world, of generational disgust and
abandonment. There is much talk on the environmental left, today, of
stranded assets — all the built infrastructure and oil (and coal and
gas) that will have to be abandoned for the world to come anywhere close
to its climate targets. But those companies outside the fossil-fuel
sector don’t want to be stranded either, forsaken by a rising generation
much more centrally focused on climate politics and much more demanding
that the corporations they patronize, even those only tangentially
related to climate issues, reflect those politics, too.
It’s the same
dynamic that made soda and shoe companies into outspoken, if not
entirely earnest, social-justice activists between the period following
the Ferguson protests, when Black Lives Matter was a nationally divisive
crusade, and the period following the George Floyd uprisings, when it
commanded overwhelming American support. Getting even the hypocrites
onboard is one mark of political progress, whether it’s through shame or
fear or genuine awakening. And that threat of generational revolt has
been made visible on climate not by large-scale boycotts, or consumer
protests at the pump or the cash register. It has been made visible by
protests, by outraged activists screaming out in alarm.
These
companies, and those like them, aren’t going to solve the climate
crisis on their own — of course not. Probably, they won’t even live up
to their pledges (though I’d bet more money on Microsoft doing its part
than BlackRock, if I could figure out precisely what BlackRock was
actually saying it was going to do). But if you believe corporate power
exerts any force in the world, it is certainly notable that such power
is now, after decades of near-total indifference, bending toward climate
action, however slowly and hypocritically. At the very least, corporate
communications are like a seismograph of public opinion, and suddenly
there is talk of urgency all across the board. Is it possible that
climate action would have more momentum today if those pushing hardest
for it had focused their energies on coalition building with the
security state and the Davos-sphere? In some very theoretical way, I
suppose. But these are all social experiments which history, and the
climate, allows us to run only once. This time, we got a confrontational
activism, and I’m very, very glad we did.
From
one vantage, this is shocking progress to have achieved in just a few
years, given how little movement was produced over the previous
generation. On the other hand, it really shouldn’t surprise anyone,
because it is precisely what political activism of this kind is meant to
do — not persuade the median voter to embrace the full platform of the
radicals in the streets but to shift the boundaries of political
discourse such that the median voter may still find that platform
uncomfortably radical but finds him or herself endorsing as reasonable,
and indeed necessary, action that seemed, until just before, hopelessly
extreme. (And indeed sets the public on a track to accept something more
like the truly radical platform before too long.) This is, like,
activism 101. To draw on an over-drawn-on analogy, it also explains how,
for instance, a country in which 75 percent of Americans disapproved of
Martin Luther King Jr. just before he was assassinated passed a
landmark civil-rights law one week later (and how one that had found him
only slightly more appealing had passed an even bigger one a few years
before). It explains how the women’s movement achieved the gains it has,
and how the fight for gay marriage was won — not by meeting the public
and its leaders where they are, but tugging them along through acts of
often-unpopular moral grandstanding.
This is the general strategy for
the rising left, in many ways still politically marginalized,
offered brilliantly by Thea Riofrancos in a recent call to arms in the New York
Times, and why Noam Chomsky has taken to
praising
Joe Biden, too. “Farther to the left than any Democratic candidate in
memory on things like climate,” he told Anand Giridharadas this week.
“It’s far better than anything that preceded it. Not because Biden had a
personal conversion or the DNC had some great insight, but because
they’re being hammered on by activists coming out of the Sanders
movement and others.” Activists aren’t aiming for popularity, or the
support of the average voter, though they’d welcome both, and we fool
ourselves by judging them on those metrics. XR doesn’t need to get its
founders Roger Hallam and Gail Bradbrook, or its spokesperson Rupert
Read, elected to Parliament to succeed, and Thunberg doesn’t need to be
elected secretary-general of the U.N. — indeed, as she has said, many
times, she doesn’t want that responsibility, or that power, but simply
to shame and coerce the world’s leaders into taking the state of the
science seriously. They’re not there yet — not to Greta’s satisfaction,
and not to mine. But at least they are having the same conversation now.
What
happens from here is not any kind of safe bet, at all — and, if I had
to bet, well, I’d bet on considerable further frustration and
disappointment from those who care most about the climate crisis about
what insufficient actions are being taken. The uncompromising alarmism
of activists may even complicate or stall efforts at climate action in
the near future, and of course there is much more to effectively
addressing the problem than marshaling political will to do
something —
you actually have to figure out what that something is, what trade-offs
need to be made, at what scale and in what places, then see to it that
it all actually gets done. But will is the critical first ingredient,
and for the time being, the political achievement on that metric is very
clear: The Overton window has shifted dramatically toward action, even
if all of those involved in moving it — Prakash and AOC, Justice
Democrats and New Consensus and Roosevelt Forward and Data for Progress,
XR and Greta and Xiye Bastida and Jamie Margolin and Alexandria
Villaseñor and many, many more — all are still living a bit outside the
window, frustrated it isn’t moving faster.
Of
course, activists often find themselves disappointed by the end product
— and invariably, that will be the case on climate, since the response
that science demands of us is so much bigger than anything our
contemporary politics seems capable of producing. But that
disappointment is not really failure; it is practically by design, and
what differentiates activism from revolutionary politics. (This is,
perhaps, activism 102.) If you believe that combating the climate crisis
requires a total reformation of the existing political and social
order, you are likely to regard Joe Biden’s move leftward on climate as
terribly inadequate. (There is, fortunately or unfortunately, a fair
amount of wisdom in that perspective, given the scale of the challenge
and how little time we have to address it.) And if your ideological
inclinations draw you toward skepticism — or skepticism that any
meaningful change is necessary — you will probably find any movement,
and any activism to drive it, self-destructive or worse. But if you are
hoping the climate crisis could be met with a response approaching the
necessary scale without first having to overturn the entire global
geopolitical order, Sunrise and XR aren’t threats to that vision — they
are the political agents making it possible.
Indeed,
here in the U.S., Prakash is actually helping craft Biden’s climate
plans, having given the candidate an “F” grade during the primary, with
Sunrise protesters disrupting not just a few of his events. This is an
additional sign, if you needed one, that Sunrise is not alienating the
relevant powers that be, but strong-arming and negotiating with them.
They made a place on those teams and in those rooms for themselves —
indeed, made a place for environmental activism and climate justice more
generally at the very center of Democratic politics. They did so
through organizing, and protesting, and above all, objecting, loudly,
that the status quo approach to their issue wasn’t working, and that
those who believed it should continue were unacceptable choices. As a
result, the party, and its candidate, moved. This is not a disconcerting
or counterproductive overreach. It is precisely how activism is meant
to work. And, indeed, it is working — especially if you’re looking at
the polls and the policies, and not the carbon concentrations, which are
still rising, and will continue to, almost invariably, for decades at
least.
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