Hopeful realism today is about assessing our planetary emergency, focusing on observable facts, and finding hope in the search for optimal solutions to the global predicament we face.
Most News is Bad News, and It is Worse Than Ever
Current carbon emissions have surged to greater rates than ever. The headline for the New York Times article on October 16, was, “Carbon Dioxide Levels Jumped by a Record Amount, U.N. Says.” Meanwhile, the Trump administration has cancelled over $28 billion in funding for 200 infrastructure projects in Democrat-led cities, congressional districts, and states, many involving clean energy or renewables or are related to fighting climate change. To top it off, “Extreme weather events have caused devastation in a number of U.S. regions this year,” reported in an article in Live Science. It is extremely difficult to imagine who might be able to claim that “climate change” is a hoax. However, the effectiveness of repeating a “big lie” over and over again, has been demonstrated many times in history.
Last week, I attended the two-day international online conference on “The Global Heating Emergency: Preventing 2°C by 2040: What’s the Plan?” The conference was headlined by several internationally recognized leading climate scientists, energy experts, and political leaders, including James Hansen, who, as NASA’s chief climate scientist, testified in 1988 warning Congress of the rapidly accelerating dangers of ‘global warming, and Antonio Gutierrez, Secretary of the United Nations, who has much more recently warned the world’s governments repeatedly of the immediate emergency posed by the accelerating heating of the planet and its many disastrous consequences already felt in many locations.
Sir David King, the United Kingdom’s top climate scientist, and several other speakers, expert in diverse elements of the complex processes involved, reported the findings of their latest research. Other experts outlined potential strategies for reducing carbon emissions, removing carbon dioxide or methane from the atmosphere, and restoring the Earth’s ecosystems. All emphasized the extremely short timeline for taking action in order to avoid or delay the critical tipping points that could spin the planet into chaos and both ecological and societal collapse. Little was said about how to muster the political/social momentum to initiate or execute the strategies discussed at sufficient scale to achieve global impacts on the dangerous trends they know so well.
The political and economic news is not any better. Political instability grows as each new autocratic attempt to override institutional stabilities becomes ‘normalized.’ Authoritarian movements around the world despise science, except to the extent that gives them new technologies of surveillance and control, both of political economies and of citizens as well. They view climate chaos as a story meant to undermine their autocratic attempts. Under such conditions, it is extremely difficult to imagine that governments might take the lead in facing the global heating emergency. Most corporations continue to play the short-term game of share-price gain for outrageous executive “compensation.”
Without government and corporate cooperation and finance, how can any of the proposed strategies, alone or in concert, otherwise be mounted and executed? The scale of the climate emergency seem beyond the scope or capacities of all the NGOs combined. But, as a loose coalition of the willing, we must all do what we can do.
This is an Earth-System emergency and any of the approaches to reducing emissions, removing pollutants from the environment, or repair and restore the ecosystems of the planet, must be a global collective action on a scale never before imagined in human history.
Whatever Happened to 1.5º C?
Too late. That race has already been lost. No matter what nations might do now, however unlikely, an average of 1.5º C temperature rise above pre-industrial levels is here now. That is why the 2º C target is the plausible though difficult target to focus on now. That will be extremely difficult to reach by 2040, as Sir David King has explained so clearly. We know that 1.5 degrees is a mere average, but it reflects climate disturbances that are already having disastrous effects in a variety of places around the world.
That is why preventing 2º C temperature rise by 2040 is such an important goal, despite being way out at the edge of possibility. A necessity is a necessity, regardless of how difficult it may be to achieve. These things are abstract markers of chaos and potential civilizational collapse, but the consequences of failing to keep them at bay will be devastating to large swaths of humanity. Despite the extreme difficulty in achieving the goal, it would be suicidal to give up trying.
And, people do have a tendency to ‘shoot the messenger’ especially when the message is very bad. James Hansen’s career at NASA as its head of climate research was cut off after he testified honestly before Congress in 1988 about the importance of getting ahead of the looming climate crisis before it became insurmountable. Unfortunately, the world’s best climate scientists are listened to primarily by other scientists.
Politicians generally see no personal benefit in supporting the radical (which means, by the way, going to the root of the problem) collective actions necessary to transform the world’s fossil-fueled economies into ecologically sound low energy use economies grounded in human wellbeing rather than driven by the absurd levels of capital accumulation demanded by their multi-billion dollar corporations and mega-wealthy individuals who are their primary donors.
Global Social Mobilization for Societal Transformation
At the Global Heating Emergency conference I attended last week, the ‘big three strategies to reduce carbon emissions, remove carbon from the environment and to repair/restore the world’s ecosystems were proposed by some of the world’s top experts in their fields. All this must be accomplished, however, while we simultaneously building the resilience we need to survive under the life-threatening conditions that are already intensifying at various locations, even as we work hard to minimize them—if we do…
Also pointed out by most technical experts on each of the strategies they offered, were the difficulties in testing and deploying these strategies at scale within decades, for technical and other reasons. The material, organizational and political effort required to deploy these strategies makes the United States’ ramping up its war machine on entering World War II, look trivial. Yet, we cannot allow multiple Earth-System tipping points, some of which we appear to be crossing now, to cascade into climate chaos and ecosystem collapse.
So, it is clear that under the very best conditions, achieving sufficient impacts upon the increasingly self-amplifying processes of Earth-System destabilization, is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. When I think of the sum of all those estimates of how difficult the necessary strategies will be to execute and how much time they will take to deploy it adds up to an existential warning of the rough path ahead, and the rapid building of resilience that it requires of us now, while we take the most extreme measures possible to give human civilization a chance to persist.
This raises the ultimate “elephant in the room” question, which almost nobody is willing to discuss, no less suggest any plausible answer. The simple version I have occasionally heard is, “Do we have the political will?” But that is a vastly simplified mis-stated formulation of the question.
Whose political will? The concept of ‘political will’ is diffuse and sociologically adrift, although it ultimately refers to the will of the world’s political elites and economic oligarchs. Although it often implies that the ‘will of the people’ is the obstacle, which is true only to the extent that the public discourse is constrained by elite propaganda that precludes any public recognition of the necessity of societal transformation. And even more important, the will to do what?
If we think of the “four R’s” of necessary action to stave off climate/ecological collapse and therefore the collapse of civilization and protect us as much as possible in the interim instances of local and/or regional chaos—Radical Reduction of the emission of greenhouse gases, Removal of greenhouse gases already emitted, Repair/Restoration of destabilizing ecosystems around the world, and rapid building of human Resilience in preparation for survival in the rapidly growing life-threatening conditions confronting humanity—we must also think of how to overcome the massive political-economic obstacles to achieving them.
“Political will” in this context becomes an indicator of the intransigence of the global multibillionaire class and their political agents operating the governments of the world. On the other hand, many governments, mostly those of small-island and tropical nations whose survival is most immediately threatened, are taking serious steps on their own, without adequate funding. Yet, no solution is possible if taken only by single nations—even one as huge as China. Only by the collective coordinated actions of all, especially the so-called ‘advanced’ industrial nations of the Global North, do we have a chance to succeed. So far, most are ostensibly ‘on board’ but dragging their feet, and the biggest contributor to heating the planet—the USA—is reversing course due to autocratic denial at the highest level.
No viable institutional mechanisms currently exist that can or are willing to initiate the massive actions necessary to begin deploying these imperative global collective actions. That is one of the key reasons the how-to-begin issue remains unresolved within the civic and scientific groups that advocate them, but is not even mentioned in the public discourse. Everyone in these groups knows what is required, but none have the political resources or mandate to begin a full-on assault on the rapid decay of Earth-System conditions.
That is why the answer to the underlying question of how to organize humanity to take on its greatest challenge ever is so difficult to answer, yet must be answered now. Given the intransigence of the global and national elites, only the massive social mobilization of the people to demand action, seems to have a chance, if slim. The “NO KINGS” protest last weekend against the autocratic attempt in the USA, brought out at least 7 million people in around 2700 events across the nation, to set a new record in the US, and numerous rallies and protests in twenty eight other nations. While simple protest events do not produce societal transformation in and of themselves, the momentum they can trigger is key to override elite refusal to act.
The financial-political integration of government, corporations, and the ultra-rich has prevented almost all high officials from even proposing any of the serious climate/ecological actions that must be undertaken. Just think of the complex changes in ‘doing business’ in multiple sectors that are implicit in making those massive techno-industrial changes. Moreover, to take such complex economic-ecological actions require that the initiation of deep forms of societal reorganization necessary to operate an economy without fossil fuels.
I have quoted Bill Moyers before: “The only way to defeat organized money is with organized people.” Well, that may have been a paraphrase; at least it is what I remember. Mass protests are the first stage of organizing a social movement. We need to take the next steps now.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 