In 2004, I contributed to Feeling the Heat, a book in which nine journalists traveled the world to report on the impacts of climate change. My chapters covered Australia, Florida, Fiji, and Antarctica. Today, you no longer have to travel to cover climate catastrophes because they’re regularly coming to a neighborhood near you.
This summer—the hottest in human history—saw deadly wildfires in Hawai‘i and Canada, flooding in Vermont, thunderstorms and tornadoes in Massachusetts and Maryland, and record heat waves across the Southwest and in the waters off the coast of Florida.
Similar disasters were reported in Europe—where scientists documented more than 61,000 heat-related deaths during the previous summer’s record temperatures—and in China, India, Latin America, southern Africa, and pretty much everywhere else.
In Antarctica, one of the climate scientists studying ice core samples dating back 800,000 years explained that we had long thought of climate change as being like a thermostat happening gradually over centuries, but more recent science shows it’s more like a light switch that can change everything in a few decades.
It’s too easy to look back in anger at the opportunities that we had to avoid tripping that switch. As far back as 1988—the hottest year on record at the time (the last nine years are now the nine hottest on record)—NASA scientist James Hansen, in widely viewed televised testimony, warned the U.S. Senate that fossil-fuel-fired climate change was a clear and present danger.
Even earlier, in the 1970s, there were policy options that could have driven a rapid transition from fossil fuels to cleaner, less polluting energies. All were blocked by the fossil fuel industry and its political operatives in the U.S. Congress, the White House, and in other governments around the world.
I was at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, when 117 of the world’s heads of state chose not to pursue climate action under pressure from Saudi Arabia and other oil producers. An attempt by then Environmental Protection Agency Administrator William Reilly to get the United States to commit to action was undermined by then President George H.W. Bush’s Chief of Staff, John Sununu, who thought his mechanical engineering degree made him a climate expert and attacked Hansen’s science as “bunk.” A youth delegate had her microphone cut off, and several people were arrested when they protested.
Despite a few outspoken voices today, such as U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres and his recent warning of “global boiling,” our political leaders still haven’t lived up to their 2015 Paris climate accord commitment to keep global temperature increases to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels, a target the world is expected to blow through in the next decade.
Last year, the Biden Administration passed the Inflation Reduction Act (with zero Republican votes), the first serious climate legislation in U.S. history and a law that would have worked wonders had it passed in 1988. Instead, the world finds itself in an expanding climate catastrophe, with global greenhouse gas emissions continuing to rise after a slight dip at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The next U.N. climate meeting, scheduled for November, is looking like a cruel joke, taking place in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, and led by the head of the Abu Dhabi National Oil Company, who wants to shift the conversation from phasing out coal and oil to “decarbonizing” energy.
Meanwhile, advocates for actual climate solutions have begun to recognize that we are now having to practice triage—saving what we can—including the hoped-for goal of preserving 10 percent of the tropical coral reefs that existed in the twentieth century. At the same time, we must also ensure that climate adaptation strategies—badly needed in flood-prone cities like Houston, Jakarta, and Lagos—don’t become a substitute for rapidly quitting fossil fuels and ending deforestation while shifting to regenerative (carbon-sequestering) agriculture and aquaculture, as demonstrated by groups such as The Land Institute in Kansas and Ocean Era in Hawai‘i.
Incentivizing innovation in legislation and large markets like California has also helped scale up clean energy so that today wind and solar are cheaper power sources than coal, oil, and gas, according to research by BloombergNEF and others.
Combining the traditional ecological knowledge of Indigenous communities with Western science is also helping us find solutions for restoration and carbon sequestration. These include prescribed and cultural fires in high-risk wildfire zones in the western United States and assuring continued Native forest stewardship in the Amazon, as promoted by Sonia Guajajara, Brazil’s minister of Indigenous peoples, at a recent meeting of leaders from the eight Amazon nations.
Guajajara, who’s spent most of her life as a grassroots activist, brings to mind a banner at the 1992 summit: “When the people lead, the leaders will follow.”
That also seems to sum up recent trends in climate activism. In 2019, Senator Ed Markey, Democrat of Massachusetts, and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Democrat of New York, introduced the original Green New Deal Congressional resolution that would eventually lead to Biden Administration climate legislation, but only after Representative Nancy Pelosi, Democrat of California, had her Capitol Hill office occupied by young climate activists from the Sunrise Movement.
In 2020, Senator Jeff Merkley, Democrat of Oregon, confirmed the value of this kind of citizen engagement during a Zoom meeting of hundreds of ocean climate activists, stating, “We need an outside force and an inside force to make anything happen in Congress, and so let’s forge that together.”
Some activists now work mainly within the system—Citizens’ Climate Lobby, E2 (Environmental Entrepreneurs), the BlueGreen Alliance—while others practice direct action—Greenpeace, Extinction Rebellion—or express their frustration through head-scratching stunts—Just Stop Oil, The Last Generation—such as throwing tomato soup and mashed potatoes at famous paintings in public museums.
A lot of new climate organizing is taking place among younger activists and emerging leaders, including Sweden’s Greta Thunberg, Uganda’s Leah Namugerwa, and India’s Licypriya Kangujam. They’re suing oil companies and the governments that support them and leading sit-ins, student strikes, and fossil fuel divestment campaigns, while also emphasizing the essential links between the environment, racial equity, and a just economy. At the same time, author and climate activist Bill McKibben recently founded Third Act to encourage people over sixty to engage in the cause.
Still, there is no movement consensus on whether we’ve yet reached the inflection point needed to realize global pledges of total decarbonization by 2050, along with the drawing down of excess carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The fact that 2022 saw a record $7 trillion spent on fossil fuel subsidies, according to the International Monetary Fund, suggests otherwise.
Unfortunately, the most comprehensive twenty-year climate plan remains a work of fiction—2020’s The Ministry for the Future, a novel by utopian science fiction author Kim Stanley Robinson.
In an interview for Rising Tide: The Ocean Podcast, Robinson suggested his book is “a tapestry of possible solutions, obvious problems, and also the macro-story: How are we going to pay for all this stuff?” He envisions movements and individuals ranging from frustrated green bureaucrats to stealthy eco-terrorists to tens of thousands of mostly decentralized major climate projects—from soil restoration in Nepal to geoengineered ice dams in Antarctica.
They would all pressure governments and their central banks to create a new “carbon coin” currency—an idea recently explored in The Wall Street Journal—that would pay out for decarbonization efforts despite ongoing opposition from the fossil fuel cartels.
“In World War II, money was directed to winning the war,” Robinson points out. “Now money has to be directed to saving the biosphere.”
He adds that climate is “on the table now as one of the biggest problems facing us in a way that it’s never been before . . . . The story of the twenty-first century is going to be the story of dealing with climate change . . . . What I worry about is people are going to give up or think ‘well, it’s already game over, why not just party,’ but it’s never really game over. You always just have to keep doing the work from the point you’re at.”