Climate action, we were told, would be distant, gradual, and painless
Butterflies and moths,.London & Edinburgh,T.C. & E.C. Jack[1910].
I was going to write about something else today but I was reading about the debate last night and there was some climate talk that actually seemed interesting and relevant to big climate questions. Especially as I’m reading The Uninhabitable Earth (which I will write more about at some point) it had me thinking about the way even advocates have been perhaps misguidedly talking about climate change for many years, and even though things are shifting, the mainstream discourse is still pretty far behind, despite it finally becoming an upper-tier issue. So this is going to be a classic, CP season 1 style, from the hip climate screed let’s go!
First, for those who didn’t watch the debate—which includes me because I decided years ago that I would no longer engage with politics as a sporting event—there were, I believe 12 minutes of discussion on climate change. A lot of it was Trump relying on, really his only communications strategy, which is known as “flooding the zone with shit,” so some talk about wind fumes and tiny windows, etc. This led to honestly a pretty solid brag in which he told Biden “I know more about wind than you do.” There was also talk of environmental justice which is amazing, good for the host, and then some debate about the oil industry.
The big headline was that Biden said he wants the country to “transition away from the oil industry” including putting an end to fossil fuel subsidies. These are both things Biden is solidly on the record as supporting, and honestly, non-controversial at this point. But it’s being treated as revelation, or a gaffe, or a downright scandal by the right, who are like oh my god he admit it. Part of this is just Republican climate denial, because ceasing to use oil as fuel would sound preposterous if you are trying to live in a self-fabricated reality where climate change is not happening.
But the fact that this is even viewed as remotely controversial in a discussion about climate change makes me think that climate communicators and advocates have failed to convey both the urgency of the problem and the need to actually end the fossil fuel industry.
That climate came up at all, and has been coming up more on the national stage, is somewhat encouraging. Trump actually tried to get climate removed from last night’s debate agenda and failed, likely knowing it’s become a losing issue. Such shifts, along with improving public opinion numbers, represent a huge victory for the climate movement, albeit in tandem with the failure of having it take this long, surely fed by intensifying disasters. It’s a signal nonetheless that denial and evasion as an opposition strategy is losing its effectiveness. Republicans can’t really get away with saying oh this isn’t real—now they have to say, well maybe it is real, and sure we’ll plant some trees, build some new technology, but we’re not going to actually stop burning fossil fuels come on now.
But the exchange also made it clear that even people who are solidly pro-climate action like Joe Biden, the majority of Democrats, and even climate advocates, are still struggling with how to talk about a problem whose solution requires a rapid dismantling and rebuilding of the entire global economy. Now that the center stage debate over is this real or is this fake is seemingly on its way out (a strategy that, by the way, likely delayed action to the point that what we do now is far too late), the new debate is turning into, how fast must we act and how much are we willing to disrupt the status quo.
This came up in the Democratic primary, when candidates largely agreed on long-term goals, but only Jay Inslee seemed to convey what that would require politically in the short-term. As David Roberts wrote way, way back then:
Democrats have never really grappled with the details of aggressive short-term climate policy. And because the unbroken wall of Republican opposition makes substantial federal climate policy impossible anyway and perpetually holds the debate to the remedial “is it real” level, Democrats never really get called on it.
When pushed even a tiny bit on this front last night, Biden crumbled immediately, backpedaling to say oh I only meant federal subsidies are going away, and “we’re not getting rid of fossil fuels for a long time.” But anyone who is serious about stopping catastrophic climate change cannot credibly, simultaneously say that we are going to keep burning fossil fuels for a long time.
Some of what is going on here is obviously political posturing for key states that currently do a lot of fossil fuel extraction. But I feel like it also speaks to climate scientists’ and the climate movement’s failure to emphasize the urgency and enormity of the problem, and the over-reliance on rosy narratives about renewable market share.
For so long, the conventional wisdom was to pull your punches and give optimistic narratives, in large part because in the early days especially, the challenge was getting people to not immediately tune the issue out. I remember an early climate change campaign I worked on in maybe 2006 was for a renewable portfolio standard in Oregon, and the literature we’d hand out featured a rainbow kite blowing in the wind on the beach. For years after that, messaging was all about green jobs and high speed rail being cool, and a lot of it still is. At the same time, plans and commitments to climate action seemed to be eternally looking several decades out. Climate action, we were told, would be distant, gradual, and painless.
It’s hard to deny, even if it made sense at the time, that this framing has not served us well. A major shift in that narrative came when the IPCC released its bombshell 2018 report that, in fact, action needs to be rapid, drastic, and start immediately. The world needs to get to net zero emissions by 2050 and cut annual emissions in half in just 12 years (now just 10 years). Even if you are banking on a very large amount of carbon removal (a topic for another day), that feat demands breakneck phasing out of fossil fuel use. And we are doing a pretty lousy job so far. If nations hit all of their existing pledges and commitments, we are still likely headed toward unprecedented human suffering at nearly 3 degrees of warming—and very few countries are on track for even that.
Another problem is that market environmentalism has fixated on increasing market share and lowering the costs of renewables like wind and solar, with far less attention paid to actually stopping the extraction and burning of fossil fuels. The expansion of renewables is truly one of the bright spots in climate action. But counterintuitively, more wind turbines and solar panels don’t necessarily mean lower emissions. As David Wallace-Wells writes in The Uninhabitable Earth:
Over the last twenty-five years, the cost per unit of renewable energy has fallen so far that you can hardly measure the price, today, using the same scales (since just 2009, for instance, solar energy costs have fallen more than 80 percent). Over the same twenty-five years, the proportion of global energy use derived from renewables has not grown an inch. Solar isn’t eating away at fossil fuel use, in other words, even slowly; it’s just buttressing it.
To be fair, in recent years, there has been an encouraging rise of “leave it in the ground” messaging and supply side activism in the climate movement, which hopefully will continue to gain momentum. But oil production grinds on. The United States has become the world’s largest producer of oil and gas, and a report from Oil Change International found that between 2018 and 2050, the United States is set to unleash the world’s largest burst of CO2 emissions as a result of new oil and gas development. California, a leader in renewable energy policy, nonetheless ranks fourth in the nation for crude oil production. Meanwhile, as Wallace-Wells writes, “a single wildfire can entirely eliminate the emissions gains made that year by all of the state’s aggressive environmental policies.”
All of this is to say that, even among elected officials and candidates who believe in climate change and the need for action, very few are bringing the real talk about the level of change and disruption to our current economy and our lives that this problem requires. Namely, that an entire industry has to die. And we have to kill it. Not just any industry, but one that in large part has powered centuries of comfort and prosperity in the Global North.
That doesn’t mean we should be cheerily marching into a horror show of economic hemorrhage. This is where the importance of a just transition comes in, and plans like the Green New Deal’s emphasis on job creation, economic justice, and building a new economy. Making the transition will be very, very hard in the short term, but it can also be a portal to a more just and sane society. And besides, it’s our only option. Perhaps the most important factor that politicians rarely talk about is that inaction has a price tag that is many times higher than action. Joe Biden says his climate plan will cost $2 trillion over four years. That may sound like a lot, but remember that the US so far has spent $6 trillion on its coronavirus response. One report estimated global damages incurred if we hit 3.7 degrees of global warming at $551 trillion.
So the narrative shift needed is not that the change ahead is going to be fucking horrible so buckle up. It’s that we are about to enter, regardless of which path we take, a totally different world than the one we are in now. We can’t keep this world, so to keep talking about it as a baseline we need to protect is out of step with reality. It’s gone already. The debate last night was an illustration of how far along each political party—and to some extent mainstream America—is in understanding that reality. And how much work the movement has ahead of us in getting people there.
Links
- Thousands of children were separated from their families by the Trump administration, and the parents of 545 of those children still can’t be found. Some were babies when they were separated, meaning they have not been with their parents for most of their lives.
- This election will determine the future of American democracy.
- “Our social, environmental and economic systems seem to have entered a liminal space between the old world but not quite fully formed in the new. Far from bouncing back to ‘normal,’ they may be on the precipice of something new and strange.”
- There’s some crazy shit going down in Boston Schools including that the Boston School Committee Chairperson had to resign after mocking ethnic names in a public Zoom meeting.
- Economic pain could flip Arizona blue.
- MA State Police basically never fires any of its troopers, even if they drunkenly lead local cops on a car chase and have to be tackled and handcuffed, among other indiscretions.
- Remember all those trees that were going to be removed in one of Boston’s mostly Black neighborhoods? Well the city is backing down!
- Here’s a great interview with Jay Rosen on why the media fails at covering Trump over and over and why fact checking and standing up to him still works in his favor.
- At first I saw this and was like seriously, I do not care at all if these actual adults can’t go to Disneyland, but you know what, after reading this I get it because we all have our stupid bullshit.
- If this week you were like wtf is Quibi, here you go this explains why it failed including because it was stupid.
Listening
Here this song will help you.
This one is probably a little rough and maybe too many swears because my dudes I am tired. Vote yet? We got ours in last week Jamie dropped them off in the box at City Hall. I’ve been phonebanking with LUCHA and Seed the Vote, and text banking with The Frontline. Both are very easy to do from the comfort of your living room if you are looking to do some volunteering with grassroots groups building power before and after the election. There is also a big day of action in the works on October 27 check it out.
I know the calls and flyers and texts and emails are maybe getting annoying. They may feel intrusive or repetitive. Democracy is honestly pretty annoying but it is not nearly as annoying as not democracy. As a wise sage recently said, it’s a team sport. So whenever you are thinking ah jesus another call, just try to think of it as your periodic reminder that you are a part of something beautiful and bigger than yourself. And if you get an election text from me you can tell me to fuck off if it makes you feel better I won’t mind.
Tate