The Guardian
- Rebecca Solnit
It’s easy to despair at the climate crisis, or to decide it’s already too
late – but it’s not. Here’s how to keep the fight alive
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Illustration: Klawe Rzeczy/The Guardian
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The world as we knew it is coming to an end, and it’s up to us how it ends and
what comes after. It’s the end of the age of fossil fuel, but if the
fossil-fuel corporations have their way the ending will be delayed as long as
possible, with as much carbon burned as possible. If the rest of us prevail,
we will radically reduce our use of those fuels by 2030, and almost entirely
by 2050. We will meet climate change with real change, and defeat the
fossil-fuel industry in the next nine years.
If we succeed, those who come after will look back on the age of fossil fuel as
an age of corruption and poison. The grandchildren of those who are young now
will hear horror stories about how people once burned great mountains of
poisonous stuff dug up from deep underground that made children sick and birds
die and the air filthy and the planet heat up.
We must remake the world, and we can remake it better. The Covid-19 pandemic is
proof that if we take a crisis seriously, we can change how we live, almost
overnight, dramatically, globally, digging up great piles of money from nowhere,
like the $3tn the US initially threw at the pandemic.
The climate summit that just concluded in Glasgow didn’t get us there, though
many good and even remarkable
things happened. Those people who in many cases hardly deserve the term “leader” were pulled
forward by what activists and real leaders from climate-vulnerable countries
demanded; they were held back by the vested interests and their own attachment
to the status quo and the profit to be made from continued destruction. As the
ever-acute David Roberts put it: “Whether and how fast
India phases out coal
has nothing at all to do with what its diplomat says in Glasgow and everything
to do with domestic Indian politics, which have their own logic and are only
faintly affected by international politics.”
Six months ago, the usually cautious International Energy Agency called for a
stop to investment in new fossil-fuel projects, declaring: “The world has a
viable pathway to building a global energy sector with net-zero emissions in
2050, but it is narrow and requires an unprecedented transformation of how
energy is produced, transported and used globally.” Pressure from activists
pushed and prodded the IEA to this point, and 20 nations
committed at Cop26
to stop subsidies for overseas fossil fuel projects.
The emotional toll of the climate crisis has become an urgent crisis of its own.
It’s best met, I believe, by both being well grounded in the facts, and working
towards achieving a decent future – and by acknowledging there are grounds for
fear, anxiety and depression in both the looming possibilities and in
institutional inaction. What follows is a set of tools I’ve found useful both
for the inward business of attending to my state of mind, and for the outward
work of trying to do something about the climate crisis – which are not
necessarily separate jobs.
1. Feed your feelings on facts
Beware of feelings that aren’t based on facts. I run across a lot of emotional
responses to inaccurate analysis of the situation. Sometimes these are responses
to nothing more than a vague apprehension that we’re doomed.
One of the curious things about the climate crisis is that the uninformed are
often more grim and fatalistic than the experts in the field – the scientists,
organisers and policymakers who are deep in the data and the politics. Too many
people like to spread their despair, saying: “It’s too late” and “There’s
nothing we can do”. These are excuses for doing nothing, and erase those doing
something. That’s not what the experts say.
We still have time to choose the best rather than the worst scenarios, though
the longer we wait the harder it gets, and the more dramatic the measures are
required. We know what to do, and that knowledge is getting more refined and
precise, but also more creative, all the time. The only obstacles are political
and imaginative.
2. Pay attention to what’s already
happening
Another oft-heard complaint is “nobody is doing anything about this”. But this
is said by people who are not looking at what so many others are doing so
passionately and often effectively. The climate movement has grown in power,
sophistication and inclusiveness, and has won many battles. I have been around
long enough to remember when the movement against what was then called “global
warming” was small and mild-mannered, preaching the gospel of Priuses and
compact fluorescent lightbulbs, and mostly being ignored.
One of the victories of climate activism – and consequences of dire climate
events – is that a lot more people are concerned about climate than they were
even a few years years ago, from ordinary citizens to powerful politicians. The
climate movement – which is really thousands of movements with thousands of
campaigns around the world – has had enormous impact.
In the US, where I live, a lot is happening at the local, state and federal
levels. Local measures can seem insignificant, but often they scale up. For
example, a few years ago the Californian city of Berkeley decided to ban the
installation of gas appliances in new buildings. Berkeley is one small city, so
it would be easy to dismiss the impact – but now more than 50 California
municipalities
have followed
suit, and all-electric could become standard far beyond the state. In the UK,
the group Insulate Britain has
staged blockades
while demanding that the government improve building insulation standards, which
is something I never imagined people would protest about. But insulation is a
survival and justice issue in this coming winter of rising fuel costs and
scarcity, as well as a climate issue.
There are organisations, initiatives and legislation on various scales, and
there is a scale that is right for everyone. Sometimes it’s getting your college
to divest, or your city to change building regulations, or your state to adopt
an aggressive clean-energy plan (as Oregon did this summer) or ban fracking (as
New York State did a few years ago) or protect an old-growth forest.
If some past victories are hard to see, it’s because there’s nothing left behind
to see: the coal-fired plant that was never built, the pipeline that was
stopped, the drilling that was banned, the trees that weren’t chopped down. As
my friend Daniel Jubelirer of the
Sunrise Project
advises, if you find the sheer volume of data and issues overwhelming, join up,
learn as you go and perhaps pick an area to master.
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A climate protest organised by the Indigenous Environmental
Network, the Sunrise Movement and other groups in Washington DC,
October 2021. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
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3. Look beyond the individual and find good people
When I ask people what they’re doing about the climate crisis, they often cite
virtuous lifestyle choices, such as being vegan or not flying. Those are good
things to do. They are also
relatively insignificant. The world must change, but it won’t happen because one person does or does
not consume something – and I would prefer we not imagine ourselves primarily as
consumers.
As citizens of the Earth, we have a responsibility to participate. As citizens
massed together, we have the power to affect change, and it is only on that
scale that enough change can happen. Individual choices can slowly scale up, or
sometimes be catalysts, but we’ve run out of time for the slow. It is not the
things we refrain from doing, but those things we do passionately, and together,
that will count the most. And personal change is not separate from collective
change: in a municipality powered by clean energy, for instance, everyone is a
clean-energy consumer.
If you live on a diet of mainstream news – which focuses on celebrities and
elected politicians, and reserves the term “powerful” for high-profile and
wealthy individuals – you will be told in a thousand ways that you have no role
in the fate of the Earth, beyond your consumer choices.
Movements, campaigns, organisations, alliances and networks are how ordinary
people become powerful – so powerful that you can see they inspire terror in
elites, governments and corporations alike, who devote themselves to trying to
stifle and undermine them. But these places are also where you meet dreamers,
idealists, altruists – people who believe in living by principle. You meet
people who are hopeful, or even more than hopeful: great movements often begin
with people fighting for things that seem all but impossible at the outset,
whether an end to slavery, votes for women or rights for LGTBQ+ people.
Values and emotions are contagious, and that applies whether you’re hanging out
with the Zapatistas or the Kardashians. I have often met people who think the
time I have spent around progressive movements was pure dutifulness or
dues-paying, when in fact it was a reward in itself – because to find idealism
amid indifference and cynicism is that good.
4. The future is not yet written
People who proclaim with authority what is or is not going to happen just
bolster their own sense of self and sabotage your belief in what is possible.
There was, according to conventional wisdom, never going to be marriage equality
in Ireland or Spain, or a US president
honouring
trans visibility day, or Canada ceding 20% of its land mass to indigenous
self-governance
as Nunavut, or an end to Britain running on coal, or Costa Rica coming close to 100%
clean energy. The historical record tells us that the unexpected happens
regularly – and by unexpected, I mean unexpected to people who thought they knew
what was going to happen.
In 2015, Christiana Figueres led 192 nations to a successful global climate
treaty in Paris. But when she was first asked to take on the job, she blurted
out that it was impossible. She took it on anyway, and the night before the
treaty was announced, people around me were still saying it was impossible, and
preparing for failure. Then it succeeded – not in finishing the job, but in
moving it forward.
The future is not yet written. We are writing it now.
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A wind turbine near Wolfsburg, Germany. Photograph: Felipe Trueba/EPA
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5. Indirect consequences matter
In September, Harvard University announced it would
divest from fossil fuel. It took organisers 10 years to make that happen. For more than nine years you
could have looked at the campaign as unsuccessful, even though it was part of a
global movement that got trillions of dollars out of fossil-fuel investments,
recast the fossil-fuel industry as criminal and raised ethical questions for all
investors to consider. This month, Bloomberg News
reported
that the “cost of capital” for fossil fuel and renewable energy projects used to
be comparable, but thanks largely to shareholder and divestment activists, the
cost for fossil projects is now about 20%, while that for renewables is between
3% and 5%. This affects what gets funded and what is profitable.
The campaign against the Keystone XL oil pipeline was, for many years, a jumble
of wins and losses and stalls and setbacks – and then finally the pipeline was
completely halted when Joe Biden came into office. This was not a gift from
Biden; it was a debt being paid to the climate activists who had made it an
important goal. Patience counts, and change is not linear. It radiates outward
like ripples from a stone thrown into a pond. It matters in ways no one
anticipates. Indirect consequences can be some of the most important ones.
The Keystone XL campaign was long and hard, and the heroes who fought it did a
lot of things besides stop one pipeline. They made the Alberta tar sands – one
of the filthiest fossil fuel operations on Earth – far better recognised as an
environmental atrocity and a global climate bomb that had to be defused. The
organisers built beautiful coalitions between farmers, Native landholders, local
communities and an international movement. They taught us why pipelines are a
pressure point, and inspired people to fight and win many other pipeline
battles.
The Keystone XL campaign may have helped inspire the Lakota leaders at Standing
Rock who stood up against the
Dakota Access pipeline
in 2016. That struggle didn’t stop the pipeline but it may yet. It’s not over.
And it did so much else. A friend from Standing Rock told me it gave hope to the
Native youth there and elsewhere, and a sense of their own agency and value that
mattered. It led to many remarkable things, including a huge intertribal
gathering and the healing of old wounds – notably when hundreds of former US
soldiers got down on their knees to apologise for what the US army did to Native
Americans.
And it inspired one young woman, who had driven there from New York with her
friends, to decide to run for office. You wouldn’t have heard of her then, but
you have now: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. As a congresswoman, she did so much to
amplify the need for a Green New Deal. The deal hasn’t passed Congress, but it
did change the sense of what is possible, and it undid the old false divide
between jobs and the environment. It seems to have shaped the Biden
administration’s emphasis on green jobs as part of an energy transition, and as
such it’s out there in the world now in the form of the
Build Back Better
legislation plan.
If you follow the ripples from Standing Rock, to a young woman’s decision to run
for Congress, and the Sunrise Movement’s espousal of a new framework on climate
action, you can see indirect change – which demonstrates that our actions often
matter, even when we don’t achieve our primary goal immediately. And even if we
do, the impact may be far more complex than we had anticipated.
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Activists and Indigenous community members protest against the
Enbridge Line 3 pipeline from Alberta, Canada in Solvay,
Minnesota, US, June 2021. Photograph: Kerem Yucel/AFP/Getty Images
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6. Imagination is a superpower
There is a sad failure of imagination at the root of this crisis. An inability
to perceive both the terrible and the wonderful. An inability to imagine how all
these things are connected, how what we burn in our powerplants and car engines
pumps out carbon dioxide that goes up into the sky. Some cannot see that the
world, which has been so stable for 10,000 years, is now destabilised, and full
of new perils and dangerous feedback loops. Others cannot imagine that we can
actually do what is necessary – which is nothing less than building a new and
better world. This is one of the remarkable things about this crisis: though the
early climate movement emphasised austerity, a lot of what we need to give up is
poison, destruction, injustice and devastation. The world could be far richer by
many measures if we do what this catastrophe demands of us. If we don’t,
catastrophes such as the violent flooding that recently cut off Canada’s largest
port and stranded the city of Vancouver are reminders that the cost of
addressing the crisis is dwarfed by the cost of not doing so.
7. Check the facts (and watch out for liars)
Thinking about the future requires imagination, but also precision. Waves of
climate lies have washed over the public for decades. The age of climate denial
is largely over, succeeded by more
subtle distortions
of the facts, and by false solutions from those who seek to benefit from stasis.
Oil companies are spending a lot on advertising that features outright lies and
the hyping of minor projects or false solutions. These lies seek to prevent what
must happen, which is that carbon must stay in the ground, and that everything
from food production to transportation must change.
There is a lot of fuss about carbon capture technologies – and a very nice old
joke that the best carbon capture technology of all is called a tree. The
nonexistent technology of large-scale, human-made carbon capture is often
brought up to suggest that we can keep producing those emissions. We cannot.
Geoengineering
is another distraction beloved by technocrats, apparently because they can
imagine big, centralised technological innovation, but not the impact of
countless small, localised changes.
In 2017, Mark Jacobson of Stanford University’s
Solutions Project
concluded that almost every nation on Earth already has the natural resources it
needs to transition to renewable energy. “We have the solutions” read a banner
at the huge 2014 New York City climate march, and they have only grown more
effective since then.
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A rally in support of the Global Climate Strike in Quezon City,
Philippines, 2019. Photograph: Rolex dela Peña/EPA
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8. History can guide us
The American left, someone once told a friend of mine, is bad at celebrating its
victories. (The same may well go for the left in other countries, too.) We have
victories. Some of them are very large, and are why your life is the shape it
is. The victories are reminders that we are not powerless, and our work is not
futile. The future is not yet written, but by reading the past, we see patterns
that can help us shape that future.
To remember that things were different, and how they were changed, is to be
equipped to make change – and to be hopeful, because hope lies in the
possibility of things being different. Despair and depression often come from
the sense that nothing will change, or that we have no capacity to make that
change.
Sometimes it helps to understand that this very moment is astonishing. Early in
this century, we had no adequate alternative to fossil fuel. Wind and solar were
relatively expensive and inefficient, and battery technology was still in its
infancy. The most unnoticed revolution of our era is an energy revolution: solar
and wind costs have plummeted as new, more efficient designs have been invented,
and they are now widely considered to be more than adequate to power our future.
The scale of change in the past 50 years is evidence of the power of movements.
The nation I was born into 60 years ago had tiny lesbian and gay rights
movements, nothing resembling a feminist movement, a Black-led civil rights
movement whose victories mostly lay ahead, and a small conservation movement
that had not yet morphed into an environmental movement – and few recognised the
systemic interdependences at the heart of environmentalism. A lot of assumptions
were yet to be dismantled; a lot of alternatives yet to be born.
9. Remember the predecessors
We are the first generations to face a catastrophe of the reach, scale and
duration of climate change. But we are far from the first to live under some
kind of threat, or to fear what is to come. I often think of those who were
valiant and principled in the death camps of Nazi Germany. I think of my Latin
American neighbours, some of whom braved terrifying migrations, walking across
the desert for days to escape death squads, dictatorships and climate
catastrophe. I think of the Indigenous people of the Americas, who already lived
through the end of their worlds when their lands were stolen, their populations
decimated and colonial domination disrupted their lives and cultures in every
possible way. What it took to persevere under those conditions is almost
unimaginable, and also all around us.
Indigenous leadership has mattered tremendously for the climate movement, in
specific campaigns and as ongoing testimony that there are other ways to think
about time, nature, value, wealth and human roles. A
report
that came out this summer demonstrated how powerful and crucial Native
leadership has been for the climate movement: “Indigenous resistance has stopped
or delayed greenhouse gas pollution equivalent to at least one-quarter of annual
US and Canadian emissions.”
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An old growth forest in Vancouver Island, Canada. Photograph: Cole Burston/AFP/Getty Images
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10. Don’t neglect beauty
Climate chaos makes us fear that we will lose what is beautiful in this world. I
want to say that in 50 years, and 100 years, the moon will rise, and be
beautiful, and shine its silvery light across the sea, even if the coastline
isn’t where it used to be. In 50 years, the light on the mountains, and the way
every raindrop on a blade of grass refracts light will still be beautiful.
Flowers will bloom and they will be beautiful; children will be born, and they,
too, will be beautiful.
Only when it is over will we truly see the ugliness of this era of fossil fuels
and rampant economic inequality. Part of what we are fighting for is beauty, and
this means giving your attention to beauty in the present. If you forget what
you’re fighting for, you can become miserable, bitter and lost.
For a long time we have told horror stories about ice and coral reefs and
violent weather events to try to wake people up to the fact that the climate is
changing. I have a different fear now – that this chaos will come to seem
inevitable, and even normal, as war does to someone who has lived their life in
wartime.
I believe we now need to tell stories about how beautiful, how rich, how
harmonious the Earth we inherited was, how beautiful its patterns were, and in
some times and places still are, and how much we can do to restore this and to
protect what survives. To take that beauty as a sacred trust, and celebrate the
memory of it. Otherwise we might forget why we are fighting.
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