Subscribers to The Climate Crisis newsletter received this piece in their in-boxes. Sign up to receive future installments.
This, it now seems clear, is the year when karma stops playing nice and gets down to brass tacks. Either we acknowledge science and put on a mask, or we are going to kill people and cripple our economy. Either white Americans acknowledge our racist history and get to work on repairing its effects, or the country will be further divided into fearful and angry camps. These aren’t situations where we get a second chance.
And, as this week demonstrated, either we seize the suddenly vivid possibilities for a rapid energy transformation, or we watch the world disintegrate. On Ellesmere Island, in the Arctic, Canada’s largest remaining ice shelf (an area significantly larger than Manhattan) collapsed over the course of two days. “Above normal air temperatures, offshore winds and open water in front of the ice shelf are all part of the recipe for ice shelf break up,” the Canadian Ice Service tweeted. Meanwhile, in Mumbai, where the coronavirus may have already infected half of the people living in the city’s vast slums, record rainfall produced misery almost impossible to imagine. An “astonishing” eighty-two inches of rain fell on the city between July 10th and August 7th; the monsoon often produces flooding, but not like this. One of the city’s English language newspapers ran a front page that simply said “SPIRIT OF MUMBAI: TIRED AND BEATEN.”
At the same moment, we had some of the clearest signs of the climate battle turning. On August 4th, BP became the first oil supermajor to begin abandoning its business model: it announced that it would cut oil and gas production by forty per cent over the next decade, and dramatically increase its investments in low-carbon technology. There are plenty of caveats in the pledge, but, essentially, BP capitulated to years of activist protest; to the challenge of cheap, clean renewable energy; and to the destruction of demand that came with coronavirus. The American giants—Exxon and Chevron—still have political cover from the Trump Administration, but even they are grappling with reality. On August 5th, Exxon conceded that it might have to wipe a fifth of its reserves off its books by year’s end—investments in places like Canada’s tar sands that are too expensive to be profitable at today’s prices. There’s clearly no growth coming: Exxon’s share price now depends on it paying a reliable dividend. To keep doing so, the company is taking extreme measures, like ending the match it pays its employees for their 401(k)s. The fire sale is under way.
We know the path forward. Dave Roberts, the ever-reliable energy analyst for Vox, laid it out beautifully in an interview with Saul Griffith of Rewiring America. The rapid adoption of the technologies that are discussed again and again in this column—like air-source heat pumps and electric motors—show that it’s possible to cut America’s emissions by seventy to eighty per cent by 2035. In other words, there’s nothing quixotic about the Green New Deal. It’s on the shelf, waiting to be taken down. Waiting, in fact, to be financed: the key role of the federal government here is not to pay for rebuilding people’s houses and buildings but to prime the pump so that private capital can do the job, allowing most of us to reap real savings from radically reduced energy bills.
That still requires government leaders to take the initiative. Obviously, we have to elect Joe Biden. (Our decompensating President said last week that Biden is “against energy,” which, in context, is a strong endorsement.) But electing Biden is insufficient. If he wins, Biden must be pressured to use the climate crisis to heal our economic woes. Environmentalists are increasingly maneuvering to make sure that the advisers in a potential Biden Administration understand both the peril and the promise of the moment: we either go big or we go under. Moses reminded the Israelites of the paths God had set before them: “life and prosperity, and death and disaster.” In 2020, biology, history, and now physics are making the same call.
Passing the Mic
Sarah Lunnon served as a county councillor in Gloucestershire, England, as a member of the Green Party; she’s now a spokesperson for Extinction Rebellion, the climate-protest movement that sprang up in response to the 2018 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The group is supporting a Climate and Ecological Emergency Bill, which, if passed by the British Parliament, would result in, among other things, the convening of a “citizens’ assembly” on climate, similar to the gatherings that the French leader Priscillia Ludosky described to me in a recent column. (In Washington State, similar plans are also under way). My interview with Lunnon has been edited for length and clarity.
How will the citizens’ assembly work, logistically?
Citizens’ assemblies are being used around the world. Different countries are running them in slightly different ways, but the basic design is the same: a body of people are chosen so that they reflect the population of a country, state, or county, by age, ethnicity, education, gender, etc. The aim is to bring together a cross-section of society. This group, with independent support, hears from a range of expert advisers and stakeholders, asks questions and uniquely deliberates, discusses, and reflects on what they have heard. They then give their recommendations regarding a set of issues that shape government policy.
Citizens’ assemblies are a form of deliberative democracy, a process in which ordinary people make political decisions. Public hearings, ranging from citizens’ juries with less than twenty people to citizens’ summits of more than seven hundred, can transform policymaking. This was seen in Ireland, where a citizens’ assembly considered changes to the country’s abortion law, which received widespread public support in a following referendum.
Is the idea that it might show lawmakers that they’ve been working with too narrow a range of possible solutions—that they can and should think more broadly?
Rebecca Willis, an expert lead for the Climate Assembly UK, has studied how U.K. politicians think and talk about climate change. She concludes—and this is probably true of most democracies—that politicians are almost embarrassed to campaign on climate change, scared to be seen as zealots, and find it difficult to relate action on climate, and probably wildlife and ecological loss, as improving the well-being of those who vote for them. Voters seeing life carry on as normal, seeing climate and wildlife as unimportant in the national conversation, conclude that it’s not actually an emergency and don’t press politicians for change.
A citizens’ assembly allows those we recognize as our peers to be educated on the full nature of the emergency and then make recommendations, legitimizing the required radical response to the crisis. It not only broadens the possible responses but it justifies politicians in acting, as they are doing what has been requested by the people. A citizens’ assembly would provide our politicians with the plan, the justification, and the shield (against political pushback).
