The climate crisis is so troubling because we know the dimensions of the problem and we know the outlines of the solution—but we don’t know how to get from one to the other past the obstacles that politics and greed have scattered on the path. Our most crucial job as a species is to figure out that route.
We should spend a minute considering the dangers we’re facing, because the scale and the pace of the crisis determines the scale and the pace of the solutions. By this point, most people are aware that the danger is no longer theoretical or abstract—four-fifths of Americans live in counties that have had a federally declared disaster in recent years, almost all of them related to the windstorms, floods, droughts, and wildfires that a warming climate makes more common.
As we burn coal and oil and gas, the carbon that combustion emits steadily raises the global temperature: We’re closing in on two degrees Fahrenheit, which doesn’t sound like much. So say it another way: the heat equivalent each day of 400,000 Hiroshima-sized bombs.
That’s why, say, California had the largest fire in its history in 2017—and why the record was broken again in the summer of 2018, with the most deadly and destructive wildfire following in November. It’s why Hurricane Michael raked across the Florida Panhandle with winds thirty miles per hour faster than the region had ever seen before. It’s why Hurricane Harvey brought more rain to Houston than any storm in American history, and why Hurricane Florence this year broke all the rainfall records for the East Coast—it literally dumped the equivalent of all the water in Chesapeake Bay on the Carolinas.
The answer to this nightmare is relatively clear: We need to stop burning coal and oil and gas, and replace them with other sources of power. Other steps would help, too: Factory farming, for instance, contributes its share of greenhouse gases. But fossil fuels are the motherlode.
A decade ago, it wasn’t entirely clear what would replace it, but that mystery has been solved. The engineers have done their thing, dropping the cost of solar power nearly 90 percent over the last decade. Now sun and wind are the cheapest ways to generate power across most of the globe, even before you charge fossil fuels a price for the damage they’re doing to the climate. (If you did that, the economics would be astonishingly clear even to the hardest-headed.)
The answer to this nightmare is relatively clear: We need to stop burning coal and oil and gas, and replace them with other sources of power.
Batteries are dropping in price on the same plummeting curve, so storing all that renewable energy is no longer an insurmountable task. New appliances like air-source heat pumps offer cost-effective ways to replace old oil furnaces. Electric cars aren’t just cleaner—they’re also cheaper to operate since they have so few moving parts. E-bikes and scooters offer ways to make cities quieter and more serendipitous. Electric trains and buses are spreading fast across China. In fact, the eventual shape of the future is as clear as it is delightful: a world running on the power that comes from that giant nuclear reactor hanging in the sky, the one we’ve learned how to tap simply by pointing a sheet of silicon skyward.
But the trouble in that vision is the word “eventual.”
On the current trajectory, we won’t get to this visionary future until well past the point that we’ve heated our Earth to—well, if not to hell, then to a place with a similar temperature.
Even if every country on Earth kept the promises they made in the United Nations Paris Agreement, the temperature of the planet will still go up 6 or 7 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100. That is to say, seventy-five years from now the world will run on sun and wind (they’re free—that’s a hard business proposition to beat). It’s just that the Earth they power will, on our present trend, be a scorched one.
If we want to avoid that, we have to figure out how to speed up that transition—how to move with the speed that economies and political systems rarely move. The best equivalent might be how America industrialized at the entry to World War II—but this effort will have to be sustained longer, and it will have to be global.
The fine articles in this issue of The Progressive give some sense of the efforts now underway around the world to raise concern and force change. Let’s look at the obstacle that such campaigns must somehow overcome.
That obstacle is not so much inertia, or human psychology—these play a role, as they do in all human affairs. But the nub of the problem here is the power of the richest industry in the history of the planet.
The fossil fuel industry has been the backbone of our economy since the nineteenth century—we can give it credit for much of the growth that we have enjoyed. But it is now the force that stands in the way of urgent change, because it cannot bear to give up its business model.
If you’re Exxon or Chevron or Saudi Aramco, you may know that renewable energy makes more sense for the planet (indeed, good investigative reporting has made clear that the oil majors knew everything there was to know about global warming back in the 1980s). You may even know you could make good money building solar panels and wind turbines. But not as much money. Because once the solar panel is on your roof, the power comes for free. You don’t need tankers plying the seas, and pipelines criss-crossing the continents. You just need the clouds to part so you can fill your battery again. And if you’re an oil company or a utility, that’s the nastiest possible business plan.
And so you fight. You fight by organizing against the wave of propaganda that for a generation has kept alive the completely ridiculous debate about whether global warming was “real”—a point that science had decided by the mid-1990s but which still perplexes our President. You fight by pouring money into every campaign to do something about it. When voters in California’s San Luis Obispo County this fall tried to ban fracking, the oil industry spent $8 million to beat them—that’s nearly $100 per voter. Even larger sums were spent prior to November 6 to defeat proposed fracking regulations on the ballot in Colorado, and kill a modest carbon tax in Washington State that was even backed by that dangerous radical Bill Gates.
And so we need to fight, too. In fact, we are fighting.
Across the nation and the world there is widespread resistance, led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and energy extraction. As you’ll read in this issue, these tend to be poor communities, communities of color, indigenous communities—and they’ve found allies in scientists, and in an increasingly politicized environmental movement that understands human solidarity is as important as scientific studies.
Beginning with the battle over Keystone XL, people went to jail in large numbers. Now every single new fossil fuel proposal faces a battle, many of which they lose, and all of which exact a cost from the industry. But never underestimate the industry’s power. It’s been enough to keep even a supposed environmental stalwart like California Governor Jerry Brown issuing permits for new oil wells, including in the middle of his state’s crowded cities.
So the battle needs to be engaged on many fronts. Given the slowness of political change (and remember, delay is the main goal of the powers that be), campaigners are increasingly targeting the financial networks that keep us on the carbon-burning path.
A divestment campaign modeled on the one that helped end South African apartheid has now become the largest of its kind in history, passing $6 trillion in endowments and portfolios. In the past year New York City has pledged to pull its $200 billion pension funds out of fossil fuels, and in July they were followed by the entire nation of Ireland.
Across the nation and the world there is widespread resistance, led by communities on the frontlines of climate change and energy extraction.
But divestment is only the beginning. Activists are also targeting the banks that provide loans for new fossil fuel development and the insurance companies that underwrite the projects. They’re demanding not only that the flow of dollars for dirty energy cease, but that the money be diverted into clean energy under the control of local communities.
This transition is not easy for anyone. The unions that represent, say, pipeline builders have been nearly as obstinate as the oil companies when it comes to blocking change. But political leaders have begun to sense the possibility of large-scale change—that’s why Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have been championing a Green New Deal, creating millions of useful and new, good-paying jobs in the course of weaning the country off fossil fuels at rapid speed. We desperately need to see that kind of change, in part because it will help galvanize action around the world.
The mire of the moment is all too clear—Trump has made it safe for others to follow his dangerous lead, and fascists, like Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, threaten the rainforests that keep the planet habitable. But the engineers have given us a chance, if we can figure out how to seize it. Job one is breaking the political power of the fossil fuel industry. Before it breaks the Earth.