climate activism
Climate Activists Must Organize Like It’s 2099
Though Donald Trump’s Black Friday release of the Fourth National Climate Assessment (FNCA) completely backfired–the media relentlessly covered the report, and with devastating detail–Trump nevertheless managed to escape being held to account for what is (arguably) the Assessment’s most damning observation:
“Current trends in annual greenhouse gas emissions, globally, are consistent with RCP8.5.”
What does this mean?
RCPs, or “Representative Concentration Pathways,” are “possible scenarios” scientists use to “evaluate the implications of different climate outcomes and associated impacts throughout the 21st century,” as the FNCA notes. RCP8.5 is the highest scenario, meaning that it “represents a future where annual greenhouse gas emissions increase significantly throughout the 21st century before leveling off by 2100.”
In other words, RCP8.5 is the worst possible scenario. It describes a world in which the global annual temperature will be, by the end of this century, 9°F higher (or more) than it is today.
We cannot survive such a world.
Trump was not held to account for the FNCA’s claim–or, rather, for what the claim suggests about his pro-fossil fuel environmental policies–because it was widely overlooked in news reports and FNCA “take-aways.” Consequently, when the White House bemoaned the fact that the report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario,” the media, the administration’s critics, and even scientists typically offered the retort that the Assessment addresses other scenarios; that it was properly vetted; and, that RCP8.5 was just one possible future we are facing.
In other words, not one mention of the fact that current trends are consistent with the worst case scenario, trends to which we are contributing significantly.
According to research recently published by the Global Carbon Project, the world “is on pace to release a record 37.1 gigatons of planet-warming emissions in 2018, led in large part by China, the United States and India.” Moreover, our nation’s emissions “are expected to rise 2.5 percent this year.”
The environmental policies of the Trump administration–as well as those championed by many state governments–are nothing less than RCP8.5 in the making. In fact, given that these policies have been formulated in the context of an overwhelming scientific consensus concerning climate change, they are an intentional production of accelerating species extinction, extreme weather, climate migration, climate-related social and economic inequalities, water and food scarcity, sea level rise, ecosystem collapse, climate change related illnesses, disease, and death, ocean dead zones, and polluted air.
They are policies at war with all life on earth.
We could say, then, that RCP8.5 is here and now.
And why not? After all, that “extreme scenario” the White House complained about is not something that will appear suddenly, out of thin air, in the year 2100. No, it will unfold, inexorably, through one deregulation after another, one fossil fuel tax break and subsidy after another, one pro-coal conference and promotion after another, until the water inundates our coastal cities, the pollinators die off, the aquifers dry up, and our food supply runs out.
Of course, even as we are in the process of creating a RCP8.5 world, that world is not inevitable. It is not our fate because we can change course.
But for that to be true, not only must we resist and organize; we must also do both like its 2099.
This article was originally published in Common Dreams.
What tipping point are we waiting for? On heat waves and climate resistance
Every “extreme weather event” that occurs without a powerful, on-the-ground climate activist response is a lost opportunity. In particular, it is a failure to seize the event as a moment to drive home the insanity of our representatives’ inadequate response (or lack thereof) to climate change.
In “Hurricane Mobilizations and ‘the Fierce Urgency’ of Climate Change,” I argued that we should “answer – with orchestrated national mobilizations unsurpassed in growth, force and intensity – the call of every record-breaking hurricane that forms in the Gulf and the Atlantic Ocean.”
We should do no less for other extreme weather events, like the recent scorching heat wave that brought record-setting temperatures across the globe, from Siberia to Los Angeles, and that killed 70 people in Quebec alone.
These extreme weather events are telling us, in no uncertain terms, that we are in a state of crisis. We are gradually approaching, and will likely exceed, a 1.5°C increase in global temperatures. In fact, we will likely exceed the 2°C warming limit championed in the Paris Accord. And given the Trump Administration’s commitment to the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels, we will likely pass crucial tipping points that will result in runaway climate change.
Truly, these extreme weather events are calls to radical action.
Why, then, aren’t we overwhelming “our cities, our state capitols, our federal agencies, our Congress, our White House, our corporations, our highways, our railroad tracks, our refineries with increasing waves of marches, canvassing, teach-ins, sit-ins, blockades, strikes, die-ins, occupations” – every single time a record-setting event occurs?
Why just the single march, the grand event, disconnected from the now-regular occasion of a one-hundred year flood, a triple-hurricane, a ravaging wildfire, a 117° day in Los Angeles – all of which, by the way, the press deliriously covers (unlike the grand event)?
Why aren’t we treating the radical nihilism of our climate denying representatives and economic elites with the resistance it deserves?
What tipping point are we waiting for?
(This article originally appeared in Counterpunch).
My new book is out! The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe (2018)
The Wretched of Mother Earth: The Handbook for Living, Dying, and Nonviolent Revolution in the Midst of Climate Change Catastrophe
“Let’s just assume our grandchildren are fucked.”
My new book is out.
Inspired by Sogyal Rinchope’s The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying and Leela Fernandes’ Transforming Feminist Practice, The Wretched of Mother Earth is a mixed-genre Buddhist, feminist, post-colonial, anarchist manifesto about climate change that is also a meditation on dying and death. It is a work in which I argue that if we hope to save ourselves from climate change catastrophe, we must face not only the prospect of human extinction; but also we must radically confront what produced the climate crisis in the first place: the “colonial power matrix” and our deadly attachments to it.
“This [book] is an invitation to experience the transformative power of heartbreak that weaves a healed earth community out of the raw material of grief and fear.” ~Stephanie Van Hook, Metta Center for Nonviolence
Good, bad, or ugly: I invite your reviews of my recent work.
The Wretched of Mother Earth is an ebook that you can order for $4.99 at Amazon (Kindle), Apple (iBooks), Barnes & Noble (NOOK), 24 Symbols, Playster, and Kobo.
Climate-change deniers: True Believers who just don’t care
We should dispense once and for all with the term “climate-change deniers.”
Why?
Because “climate-change deniers” keeps us from calling out these women and men – and most especially those who occupy the White House, Congress, and state houses – for performing disbelief about something that, more likely than not, many of them actually accept as true: our climate is changing radically due to human activities.
Most of them, I would wager, believe the science and need us to believe that they don’t. And they need us to believe them, or at least to take seriously the possibility that they honestly disbelieve, not only because they derive benefits from pretending and sowing doubt; but also because the last thing they want is for us to fashion a politics that contends with the frightening truth that even though they know, They Don’t Care.
They don’t care that our glaciers are melting.
They don’t care that sea levels are rising.
They don’t care that the permafrost is thawing and will likely release unsustainable amounts of methane gas into the atmosphere.
They don’t care that our oceans are acidifying.
They don’t care that our water tables are decreasing.
They don’t care that “extreme weather” is becoming the new normal, that resource conflicts due to climate change are turning children, women and men into climate refugees, that species are dying off at an alarming rate.
They don’t care.
And they don’t care that we can actually save ourselves, as well as other beings with whom our lives are inescapably intertwined, from the catastrophes climate change will produce.
This includes the unthinkable catastrophe of human extinction.
They don’t care because caring does not serve their interests.
H.R.673 – To prohibit United States contributions to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, and the Green Climate Fund.
115th Congress (2017-2018)
On January 24, 2017, Representative Blaine Luetkemeyer [R-MO-3] – who has argued that “for far too long, American tax dollars have been sent to the United Nations to produce controversial science and feel-good conferences” – introduced H.R. 673 to the U.S. House of Representatives. The bill expressly forbids “any Federal department or agency” from making contributions to, or for, “the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and the Green Climate Fund.”
Not only would this legislation undercut both international efforts to assess “the science related to climate change” (IPCC) and the legal framework within which the international community is addressing the climate crisis (UNFCCC); the bill would also significantly weaken efforts both “to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in developing countries” and “to help adapt vulnerable societies to the unavoidable impacts of climate change” (GCF).
To introduce such a bill goes beyond disbelief in climate science, for its purpose is to make impossible our capacity both to reach a level of certainty about climate change and its impacts, and to act upon what we discover. It is to silence.
But even more to the point: to introduce such a bill – and to then sign on and make it the law of the land (which this Congress will probably do) – is exactly what you do when you believe in the science and you don’t want the people to know the truth.
Representative Luetkemeyer is a true believer who simply does not care.
Neither do the co-sponsors of his bill. Representative Sam Graves of Missouri, for example, is himself the sponsor of the Stop the EPA Act. Both Jeff Duncan of South Carolina and Paul A. Gosar of Arizona have regularly questioned the science of climate change. The other co-sponsors – representatives Louis Gohmert (R-TX), Walter Jones (R-NC), Ann Wagner (R-MO), Ralph Abraham (R-LA) and Robert Latta (R-OH) – are equally as problematic. None of them score more than 7% on the League of Conservations Voters’ National Environmental Scorecard.
And all of them are recipients of energy sector dollars, the very fact of which should cause us to question their doubts and disbelief – especially since these can be so easily purchased by petro and other energy interests.
If these “climate-change deniers” who populate the halls of government are actually true believers of climate-change science, then we should be clear that the policies they produce and enact in such areas as, for example, health care, civil rights, immigration, labor, international relations, education, and taxes necessarily bear (and will bear) the weight of their nihilistic disregard. After all, men and women who do not care about the looming catastrophes of climate change knowing full well that they are looming, are by and large unlikely to propose health care legislation that is good for us or craft fair labor policies or offer legislation that recognizes the humanity of immigrants. And certainly they will fall short in proposing anything that protects our rights as a free people.
In other words, these faux climate-change deniers can be counted on to pass legislation that expresses their disregard for the vast majority of us.
And even if we take them at their word and suppose that they are true nonbelievers, their inaction concerning (if not indifference to) such phenomenon as sea level rise and melting permafrost suggests a profound lack of concern on their part for what is happening now, before their very eyes. It’s not as if these self-identified nonbelievers are championing mitigation plans or are trying to figure out how to support people increasingly displaced by drought and floods and extreme weather events. If anything, they’re trying to clear the way for more fossil fuel extraction and dependence. This is how nonbelievers operate.
Whether they are believers or nonbelievers is thus really of no matter. In either case, they do not care.
So let’s dispense with the “climate-change deniers” nomenclature. We are up against men and women in power – from corporate board rooms to the White House – who are willing, and happily so, to drive us over the cliff of climate catastrophe. They know that that is where they are driving us while believing, all along the way, in the science that is warning us that we are steadily and dangerously approaching that cliff.
They could really care less.
Climate activism, then – hell, all of our activism – must change accordingly.
UPDATE: Representatives Glen Grothman (R-WI), David Rouzer (R-NC), and Brian Babin (R-TX) have added their names to the list of co-sponsors.
Coming in from the Cold 