The future is unwritten: taking action is best cure for
climate change angst
Rebecca Solnit
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
Sun 14 Oct 2018 08.10 BST Last modified on Sun 14 Oct 2018
08.53 BST
Greenpeace members gather while the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change, IPCC, hold a press conference in Incheon, South Korea, on 8
October.
Greenpeace members
gather while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC, hold a press
conference in Incheon, South Korea, on 8 October. Photograph: Ahn Young-joon/AP
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.
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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.
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.
Saturday interview
Mary Robinson on climate change: ‘Feeling “This is too big
for
me” is no use to anybody’
‘
Human rights has
always been a struggle’ ... Mary Robinson in her office in Dublin. Photograph:
Johnny Savage/Guardian
The former president of Ireland has a new raison d’être:
saving the planet. Yet, despite the dire warnings of this week’s IPCC report,
she is surprisingly upbeat
by Rory Carroll
Fri 12 Oct 2018 15.00 BST Last modified on Fri 12 Oct 2018
21.25 BST
On the morning that the world’s leading climate scientists
warn that the planet has until 2030 to avert a global warming catastrophe, Mary
Robinson appears suitably sombre. She wears black shoes, black trousers and a
black sweater and perches at the end of a long table at her climate justice
foundation, headquartered in an austere, imposing Georgian building opposite
Trinity College Dublin. The only dash of brightness is a multicoloured brooch
on her lapel. “It symbolises the sustainable development goals,” she says.
“It’s the one good emblem that the United Nations has produced, so I like to
wear it.”
There seems little reason for cheer on this Monday. The
landmark report by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has
just warned that urgent, unprecedented changes are needed to keep global
warming to a maximum of 1.5C; even half a degree beyond this will significantly
worsen the risks of drought, floods, extreme heat and poverty for hundreds of
millions of people. Donald Trump, rejecter of the Paris climate agreement, is
riding high on the back of Brett Kavanaugh’s elevation to the US supreme court.
Britain and the EU are consumed by Brexit. Brazil is on course to elect a
president who wants to open the Amazon to agribusiness. Closer to home, the
Irish government is flunking its climate policy goals. Now, climate scientists
warn that the clock ticks ever closer to midnight.
“Governments are not responding at all adequately to the
stark reality that the IPCC is pointing to: that we have about 11 years to make
really significant change,” says Robinson, sitting ramrod straight, all
business. “This report is extraordinarily important, because it’s telling us
that 2 degrees is not safe. It’s beyond safe. Therefore, we have to work much,
much harder to stay at 1.5 degrees. I’ve seen what 1 degree is doing in more
vulnerable countries ... villages are having to move, there’s slippage, there’s
seawater incursion.”
The glass may not be
half full, but there's something in the glass that you work on. Hope brings
energy
Robinson sips a glass of water and sighs. “We’re in a bumpy
time. We’re in a bad political cycle, particularly because the United States is
not only not giving leadership, but is being disruptive of multilateralism and
is encouraging populism in other countries.”
This could be the start of a depressing interview that
concludes we should hitch a ride on Virgin Galactic’s first trip to space and
try to stay there. But it turns out to be surprisingly upbeat. Despite the
headlines, Robinson, who served as the UN secretary general’s special envoy on
climate change after serving as the president of Ireland and the UN high
commissioner for human rights, is hopeful.
She has anticipated the IPCC report by writing a
book-cum-manifesto, Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a
Sustainable Future, published this week. It tells stories of farmers and
activists, mostly women, who tackle climate change in Africa, Asia and the
Americas. They are examples of positive change that Robinson thinks can help
turn the tide.
“I don’t think as a human race that we can be so stupid that
we can’t face an existential threat together and find a common humanity and
solidarity to respond to it. Because we do have the capacity and the means to
do it – if we have the political will.”
Climate change may be man-made, but Robinson believes women
are key to the solution, through planting trees, recycling waste, eating less
meat and a thousand other measures, big and small. “There’s a nurturing
quality, a concern for children, that’s very deep in women. And women change
behaviour. It’s women who decide what the diet will be. And, of course, in
vulnerable countries, it’s women who bear the brunt of climate change.”
The former barrister karate-chops the air for emphasis.
“I’ve learned from Archbishop Desmond Tutu to be a ‘prisoner of hope’, a great
expression that he uses. That means the glass may not be half full, but there’s
something in the glass that you work on. Hope brings energy.”
Mary Robinson with
the Indian activist Ela Bhatt and the former US president Jimmy Carter in East
Jerusalem for the NGO The Elders
So, while the Trump administration withholds leadership and
money from the global effort for clean energy – “That’s where it hurts” – the
US may yet meet Paris emissions targets, thanks to efforts by We Are Still In,
a coalition of mayors, governors, tribal leaders, colleges, businesses, faith
groups and investors that is continuing to follow the terms of the agreement.
The movement to divestment from fossil fuels is also making progress. “They’ve
now moved to trillions being divested. That’s very significant.”
Grim scientific prognoses must not paralyse civil society,
says Robinson. It must unite, march, organise, pressure politicians. “Feeling a
complete inability to do anything – ‘This is too big for me, I give up’ –
that’s no use to anybody. [With] despair, all the energy to do something goes
out of the room.”
Robinson says she is adapting her own behaviour: fewer
flights and more teleconferencing; eating less meat as an “aspirant
vegetarian”; using public transport, although she confesses to taking taxis
frequently. “I talk to the taxi drivers, that’s my compensation. I get them to
message for me. Ten years ago, taxi drivers were the most sceptical about
climate change. Now, they’re the most keen to get an electric car, or at least
a hybrid.”
At the age of 73, Robinson has carved out a new role in
public life. No longer a high-powered global bureaucrat with a big budget and
staff, no longer a head of state trailed by pomp, she instead relies on a
formidable intellect, her brand name and her social and political network. You
could call it soft power, except Robinson does not do soft. She is friendly and
courteous, but the famous iron-grip handshake is still there; so too her
antiphathy towards smalltalk. The gaze is direct, the sentences exact. When I
go off-topic and ask about Brexit, or the Irish presidential election, there is
a tight smile. “We’re straying far from the book, aren’t we?”
Supporters and critics have long noted a personal stiffness
matched by an unbending commitment to liberal principles. How else would a GP’s
daughter from Ballina, County Mayo, emerge in the 1970s as a law professor and
outspoken advocate for women’s rights and contraception while other politicians
genuflected before the might of the country’s Roman Catholic church? She was
denounced from the pulpit and had condoms sent to her in the post. Nominated by
the Labour party as a long-shot candidate for the presidency in 1990, she won.
It was an astonishing result that prefigured Ireland’s social liberalisation.
It enshrined Robinson as a progressive talisman.
Women change behaviour;
they decide what the diet will be. And they bear the brunt of climate change
Kofi Annan tapped her up to become the UN’s high
commissioner for human rights in 1997, three months before her presidential
term ended. It was a rare misstep. She has expressed regret for letting the
then secretary general “sort of bully” her into leaving the presidency early to
head to Geneva. Later, George W Bush’s administration bristled at her stance on
human rights, Palestine and other issues after 9/11, which contributed to her
stepping down in 2002.
A year later, Robinson found herself in a Dublin maternity
ward holding her first grandchild, Rory. “I was flooded with a sense of
adrenaline, a physical sensation unlike anything I had ever felt before,” she
writes in Climate Justice. “In that moment, my sense of time altered and I
began to think in a time span of a hundred years. I knew instinctively that I
would now view Rory’s life through the prism of our planet’s precarious future
... the abstract data on climate change that I had skirted around for so long
became deeply personal.”
Robinson was struck by the injustice that those least
responsible, such as islanders in Kiribati or herders in Kenya, suffered most
from climate change, and by the fact that much of the world ignored scientists’
warnings. Her response is to tell the stories of people such as Sharon Hanshaw,
a hairdresser in Mississippi who led community recovery efforts after Hurricane
Katrina; Constance Okollet, a Ugandan farmer who taught neighbours to plant
trees to stop topsoil erosion; and Natalie Isaacs, an Australian entrepreneur
who launched an online initiative to help households curb their carbon
footprints. “I try to illustrate the hope and the fightback,” says Robinson.
“And the need for empathy. We need to have empathy now with those who are
suffering ... because that’s where we’ll all be very shortly if we don’t change
course.”
Robinson wanted to do a documentary to accompany the book,
but she was advised instead to do a podcast. “Being of my generation, I said:
‘What’s a podcast?’” she laughs. She agreed. Thus was born an unlikely
phenomenon: Mary Robinson, comedian. The former president co-hosts the podcast
Mothers of Invention with Maeve Higgins, an Irish comedian based in New York.
They banter while discussing climate change and interviewing guests. “People
listen through Maeve, through her questions. It’s making it much more real.
There’s no doubt that Maeve is drawing me to the dark side. I’m getting funnier
because of that.” Higgins does the comedic heavy lifting, riffing and throwing
out lines while Robinson plays the straight foil.
“I’ve learned that young people now in the United States get
their politics from comical programmes,” says Robinson. She alludes to The
Daily Show, but mixes up Jon Stewart with Jimmy Stewart and Trevor Noah with
Trevor Nunn, which is actually pretty funny.
Robinson considers comedy a sensible response to existential
threat. “Laughter in a very serious discussion is much more persuasive than if
we were all the time serious, serious, serious.” I consider asking her to tell
a joke, but my nerve fails; back to business. “We have 11 years to change
course and it has to be done with a seriousness of purpose, particularly by
governments, because they determine the rules.”
Preparations for a conference in Poland in December to
ensure implementation of the Paris agreement are not going well, she says:
“There’s a lot of arguing around what needs to be done.” She hopes the IPCC
report will focus minds. “Future governments won’t be able to do what governments
now have 11 years to do. In the future, we will have these tipping points – the
Arctic will be gone, the coral reefs will be gone, the permafrost will be
dissolving ... all these things will just spin us out of control.”
Governments need to end fossil fuel subsidies and increase
tax on carbon, she says. “Put a real price on carbon and do it now. These are
the levers that move things quickly and get the investment into clean energy.
If governments are not capable of being more serious, then they lack moral
leadership, which is what we really need now.”
Leaving aside the rest of the world, the country outside
Robinson’s door challenges her optimism. When Irish civil society marches these
days, it is for housing, not climate change. The government hinted that it
would increase carbon tax in this week’s budget, but it did not. Climate change
has barely registered in the presidential election. Robinson seems unabashed.
“In my experience, human rights has always been a struggle. We don’t always
keep going forward; there are setbacks and then you dig deeper. You get the
prisoner-of-hope mentality and you fight harder.”
Climate Justice: Hope, Resilience and the Fight for a
Sustainable Future is out now (Bloomsbury, £16.99). To order a copy for £12.49,
go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK P&P over £10,
online orders only. Phone orders minimum P&P of £1.99.
This article was amended on 12 October 2018 to correct the
caption accompanying the picture of Mary Robinson in East Jerusalem. She was visiting
the area with the NGO The Elders, not as the UN high commissioner for human
rights.
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