The climate rebellion is coming
With democratic channels blocked by predatory delay and system biases, what will people do to respond to the increasingly deadly climate crisis?
Last week, Joe Manchin once again yanked the climate policy football away just as the White House and the American people tried to kick it. He did so despite having been intimately involved in developing the bill, and being able to get anything he wanted in negotiations by virtue of being the deciding vote. By saying no, he and all 50 senate Republicans, extinguished the last chance to enact needle-moving climate change mitigation policy for at least several years (probably1).
In the days since this happened, temperatures in the U.S. have shattered records, and wildfires are burning across Alaska, New Mexico, Nevada, Texas, and elsewhere.
At the same time, a historically intense heat wave has been baking Europe, igniting fires across the continent. Temperatures in the UK exceeded for the first time ever the threshold of 40 degrees Celsius (104 Fahrenheit). Its a milestone that was considered possible decades in the future, but far-fetched today. Now it’s reality. (If you live in Arizona and think 104 doesn’t sound especially hot, consider that the UK is normally so temperate that only 5 percent of homes have air conditioning.)
There was also unprecedented heat in China, India, North Africa, and the Middle East. Nearly half the people on earth were affected by extreme heat in recent days.
The unanimous Republican opposition to Build Back Better was presumably not influenced as much by personal financial interests as Manchin’s was, since most senate Republicans don’t own private coal companies. Instead, they were motivated by some mix of sincere conviction, political advantage-seeking, wishful thinking, and ignorance. But the particular motivations of the politicians condemning us to a degraded future isn’t really the point. The point, rather, is that despite the damage being done to our planet and the existence of good solutions, the normal channels for creating change continue to fail.2
Most of the time, patience is a necessary and normal part of making change through the legislative process. Historically, if you failed in the Xth Congress you would regroup, come back stronger, and try again in the X+1th Congress. Many movements for progress across history have succeeded this way. While the many injustices that took place during the years that those movements came up short weren’t okay, the forward-looking benefits of the eventual victory weren’t lessened because of the delay.
Climate change, unfortunately, is different.
Unlike LGBTQ equality, ending racial discrimination in voting, rights for Americans with disabilities, and other movements for change, the more time that passes before we zero out emissions of greenhouse gases (GHG), the worse the subsequent 500+ years of life on earth will be. Every delay in climate action is an increment of failure.
A slight but important detour: climate change, as you probably know, is subject to a set of feedback loops, whereby the worse it gets, the faster it gets worse. The most significant of these feedback loops are:
Higher temperatures melt glacial ice, exposing more ocean, dirt, and rock, which all absorb heat from the sun, unlike ice which reflects it. There is then less heat from the sun reflected and more absorbed by newly exposed ocean and earth, contributing to further warming. The additional heat absorbed by the oceans and earth melts still more glacial ice…
Warmer conditions melt long-frozen ground which, as it thaws, releases carbon dioxide and methane that had long been trapped. As the methane and CO2 collects in the atmosphere, it further accelerates warming. The additional warming melts more long-frozen ground, releasing more greenhouse gases…
Increased heat evaporates more water from oceans, rivers, and lakes, which puts more water vapor in the atmosphere, where the warmer air can hold more water vapor. The larger quantity of water vapor in the atmosphere can itself retain more heat, further amplifying ongoing warming. The retained heat contributes to higher temperatures, evaporating more water…
Hotter weather dries vegetation, resulting in more wildfires. As fires burn trees and plants, the carbon dioxide they absorbed and stored gets release into the atmosphere, worsening the greenhouse effect that is heating the earth. As the earth grows hotter, there are still more wildfires, which burn more plants and release more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere…
Every day/month/year longer it takes us to eliminate emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases, the more momentum these feedback loops develop and the harder they become to stop.3
Coming back to every delay in climate action being an increment of failure, if we are able to eliminate net greenhouse gas emissions4 by the year 2050 it will be an incredible achievement, but the world will be permanently more degraded and destabilized than it would have been if we had accomplished the same thing by 2048.5 And if we reach net zero by 2048, the world will be less livable than it would have been if we’d gotten there by 2045. And so on. In other words, time matters in responding to climate change in a way that is categorically different than for other pressing issues, even those with the highest moral claims for redress.
Here at Destabilized our focus is understanding the era of discontinuity we’re living through so we can anticipate what may come and prepare for it in the wide range of ways we need to. The reason to remind ourselves how dire the climate situation has become (including the feedback loop detour), and how dark it is that Build Back Better failed, is this is what people will see when they step back, take stock of the situation, and figure out what to do next. What strategies and tactics might they consider after yet another failure of the system to respond to the stark climate reality?
On vacation a few weeks ago, my family was talking about the movie 127 Hours, the true story of Aron Ralston (played by James Franco), a climber whose wrist was pinned by a shifting boulder during a solo descent of Utah’s Bluejohn Canyon in 2003. Unable to free himself and facing death if he couldn’t escape, after five days he used a dull pocket knife to cut clear through his own forearm. He survived and wrote a book about it, on which the movie is based. Members of my family discussed whether they would have the fortitude to do the same in that situation. A couple said they wouldn’t, which is pretty reasonable. But, like most people, they have (thankfully) never been pinned by a boulder and facing a slow, certain death. If they were, who knows. People are capable of doing radical things when faced with extreme situations where the alternatives are unthinkable.
Global warming is not like being pinned under a boulder and slowly dying in a canyon. But it’s also not entirely unlike it.
We’ve understood global warming for at least 50 years, and in that time while activists have sought change through traditional channels it has metastasized into the greatest crisis in human history. People don’t want to suffer because of climate change, and they don’t want their kids or grandkids to suffer. More than ever, people paying attention are likely to feel the need to do something to stop global warming. At the same time, normal democratic processes continue to resist meaningful action, and hope that this may change is at a low ebb (Democrats have more challenging Senate seats to defend in 2022 and 2024 than climate action-blocking Republicans do).
So what happens next? Will climate activists go back to the drawing board and devise better organizing and advocacy strategies for the next Congress? Some will and that’s a very good thing (we should all actively support them). Others, feeling trapped between a biosphere growing more dangerously volatile and a fossil fuel-defended status quo that impedes action, may feel that approach is no longer sufficient. What will people in that camp do?
In the coming years, I suspect we will see more radical strategies and tactics from a segment of climate activists and their supporters. Whether it takes the form of marches that block traffic and disrupt everyday life and general strikes that slow economic activity, or more violent and illegal actions like sabotage of fossil fuel infrastructure, we will see. The latter is certainly possible, some activists already advocate the use of targeted sabotage as a tactic.
I oppose violence as a political strategy categorically because even if a cause is just, violence is a slippery slope. Normalizing the use of violence for political ends also tends to advantage anti-democratic forces. As an analyst, though, I expect the combination of the worsening climate crisis and a system that won’t or can’t respond, makes it likely that climate activism in the next five years will become much more disruptive, unpredictable, and, potentially, violent.
If radical climate action does occur, it will exacerbate instability in three ways.
It will directly disrupt the functioning of everyday life in the manner intended.
It will inspire a backlash that will empower militias and authoritarian leaders, while deepening political divisions.
If climate action proponents engage in violence, even if targeted only at fossil fuel infrastructure and not people, it could normalize and justify political violence by other factions, potentially leading to ongoing civil conflict.
In any country, this is a volatile cocktail. In a country with 400 million guns, it is especially so.
We were already headed toward elevated societal upheaval in the coming decades. The failure of the U.S. political system to respond to the climate crisis reinforces this trajectory.
Manchin loves attention and is flakier than a croissant, so who knows what he might decide to do at the last minute. And of course it’s not completely impossible that Democrats could pick up seats in the House and Senate and have another chance in 2023 – but I wouldn’t bet on it.
Like much of my analysis, this is mainly focused on the U.S., and some countries are doing much better than we are (and some worse). But an analysis of the global climate response has the same topline as the U.S.: too little, too slow.
If you find this existentially terrifying, you’re understanding feedback loops correctly.
As most of you probably know, this is often called “net zero,” a concept that captures the reality that there will never be zero greenhouse gas emissions, but that utilizing carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technology – which doesn’t currently exist at any scale yet, but we hope will in the future – can create an overall effect of zero emissions.
Perhaps not permanent in the sense of eternal, but certainly permanent on any timescale that’s within an order of magnitude of a human life. In other words, permanent for all practical intents and purposes.