From climate change to police violence and the refugee crisis, this was the year when ordinary people stood up to declare an emergency, writes the author and activist in an extract from the foreword of The Bedside Guardian 2015
A climate change march in Berlin last month. Photograph: Ipon/SIPA/REX Shutterstock
By Naomi Klein, reposted from The Guardian, Dec 15, 2015
What do we do when our political leaders treat profound moral crises as if they are nothing extraordinary? Nothing to see here, move along?
What if a supposedly ho-hum phenomenon is actually an existential threat to our species? How do we wrench the script away from those in power and sound the alarm?
In the final months of his editorship, Alan Rusbridger publically struggled with this question in a memorable essay that kicked off the Guardian’s special coverage of the climate crisis. “Changes to the Earth’s climate rarely make it to the top of the news list,” he wrote. “The changes may be happening too fast for human comfort, but they happen too slowly for the newsmakers – and, to be fair, for most readers … There may be untold catastrophes, famines, floods, droughts, wars, migrations and sufferings just around the corner. But that is futurology, not news, so it is not going to force itself on any front page anytime soon.”
At the end of the hottest year on record – one marked by serial disasters, as well as armed conflicts exacerbated by drought – it’s getting tough to view climate change as futurology. Yet Rusbridger’s central point holds: this is a complex, slow-motion crisis. And with politicians loth to put it front and centre, how can the warming of our world compete with the many other pressing issues that scream daily for our attention?
Rusbridger’s solution was simple: don’t wait for politicians to treat climate as a crisis. Instead, just do it. Most extraordinary about the Guardian’s coverage has been its strong focus on fossil fuel divestment, based on research showing that oil, gas and coal companies have several times more carbon in their proven reserves than is compatible with keeping warming below 2C – something our governments have pledged to do [in last week’s Paris climate deal, a new goal of just 1.5C was set]. Just a few years ago, the fact that fossil fuel companies were frantically searching out more carbon despite the fact that the climate system is destabilising was treated as an utterly normal part of the market system. Nothing remarkable. Not a story.
But then a relatively small group of activists drew the line and said “no”. They redefined the frenetic quest for more carbon as immoral behaviour, perpetuated by, as author and activist Bill McKibben put it, “a rogue industry”. And they said it must be stopped.
When the Guardian launched its #Keepitintheground series, things started changing very quickly. Suddenly all kinds of people came out of the woodwork to say that they, too, supported divestment – from Prince Charles to Ed Davey, then minister for energy and climate change. Even a former chairman of Shell declared divestment a “rational approach”.
Dilbit, simply refers to tar-like bitumen that has been diluted with one or more lighter petroleum products so that it can flow through a pipeline, such as the TransCanada Energy East and Kinder Morgan Trans Mountain pipelines. In short, the study confirms that diluted bitumen sinks in water if not cleaned up immediately.
Inside Climate News reports, “[The study] offers the most comprehensive analysis to date of dilbit spill properties, environmental and health impacts and effectiveness of response methods. …The 144-page report’s main message is that the thick type of oil called diluted bitumen … initially behaves like conventional oil in the first few days following a spill but then quickly degrades, or weathers, into a substance so chemically and physically different that it defies standard spill responses.”
The study states, “The prospect of a release of crude oil into the environment through a pipeline failure inherently raises a number of concerns. These concerns include not only minimizing a number of possible long-term environmental impacts but also protecting the safety of responders and the public during and after the spill response. When all risks are considered systematically, there must be a greater level of concern associated with spills of diluted bitumen compared to spills of commonly transported crude oils.”
It also states, “Spills of diluted bitumen into a body of water initially float and spread while evaporation of volatile compounds may present health and explosion hazards, as occurs with nearly all crude oils. It is the subsequent weathering effects, unique to diluted bitumen, that merit special response strategies and tactics… In cases where traditional removal or containment techniques are not immediately successful, the possibility of submerged and sunken oil increases. This situation is highly problematic for spill response because 1) there are few effective techniques for detection, containment, and recovery of oil that is submerged in the water column, and 2) available techniques for responding to oil that has sunken to the bottom have variable effectiveness depending on the spill conditions.”
The study recommends that:
oil companies need to inform regulators which type of crude oil they are transporting in every pipeline segment before a spill occurs
operators should also design different spill response plans depending on the oil type
when a spill does occur, operators must identify the oil type—by industry name—within six hours and, if requested, analyze a sample within 24 hours.
The National Academy of Science study follows a Royal Society of Canada report released last month.
The Canadian Press reported that the expert panel that wrote the report “says the heavy oilsands-derived crude that would move through proposed pipelines such as Energy East and the Trans Mountain Expansion has components that are less likely to break down in water than lighter types of oil. …The panel identified seven ‘high-priority research needs’, which are:
the impact of oil spills in high-risk and poorly understood areas, such as the Arctic
the effects on aquatic wildlife
a national baseline research and monitoring program for areas that may be affected by a spill in the future
controlled field research to understand how a spectrum of crude types behave in different ecosystems and conditions
investigating the efficacy of spill response and being able to learn from spills soon after they occur
improved spill prevention
improved risk assessment protocols for oil spills.”
And a November 2013 federal government report also found that diluted bitumen sinks in seawater. The Canadian Press has reported, “Diluted bitumen … sinks in salt water when battered by waves and mixed with sediments, according to a new study by the federal government. However, when free of sediments, the crude floats even after evaporation and exposure to light, the study determined. The report, conducted by Environment Canada, the Department of Fisheries and Oceans and Natural Resources Canada, also said that the commercial dispersant Corexit 9500 used in cleaning up conventional spills had a limited effect on dispersing diluted bitumen.”
The Energy East pipeline would move 1.1 million barrels per day over 961 waterways to an export terminal on the Bay of Fundy. The Trans Mountain expansion would move 890,000 barrels per day through Jasper National Park, across the Vedder Fan aquifer, and could see a supertanker loaded every day at the Burrard Inlet marine terminal on the Pacific Ocean.
For more on our campaign against these pipelines, please click here.
The Globe and Mailreports, “There is no indication yet that the deal agreed to by 195 counties, including Canada, in Paris on Saturday will add new wrinkles to Alberta’s plan….” The tar sands currently emits 70 megatonnes of greenhouse gases a year. Under Alberta’s ‘climate leadership’ plan, that would be allowed to rise to a cap of 100 megatonnes a year. That represents a 43 per cent increase in the carbon emissions from the tar sands. Beyond the cap, the Alberta plan allows for another 10 megatonnes of emissions a year for new upgrading and cogeneration facilities.
So how can a 1.5°C target allow for a significant increase in tar sands emissions and the plan to almost double current production from 2.3 million barrels a day to 4 million barrels a day by 2024? The Globe and Mail suggests, “The big winners are likely to be companies that are developing green energy and technology to reduce emissions from fossil fuels. …Energy-sector leaders that support the [Alberta and Paris] proposals say the cap provides incentives to develop technology to cut emissions. …Cenovus Energy Inc. [which extracts about 144,000 barrels per day out of the tar sands] welcomed the global solidarity on the issue.”
Technology has its limits though. A University College London study released earlier this year found that for Canada to do its fair share to meet a 2 degrees Celsius target it would have to leave 85 per cent of the tar sands in the ground. The Globe and Mailreported at that time, “The figure assumes that new technologies will make possible a reduction in the carbon intensity of oil sands production. If this does not happen, the authors say, then even less of the oil-sands reserve should be extracted.” The study also found that carbon capture and storage technologies would not significantly change this reality.
Beyond the approach of the technological fix, corporations may also use their own ‘fair share’ argument. Today’s Globe and Mail article notes, “The Canadian Association of Petroleum Producers [says] Canada must play a role, even if its emissions make up 1.6 per cent of the global total… Chelsie Klassen, the group’s spokeswoman [also says] ‘Canadians can count on us to do our part through technology and innovation in Canada.'” That said, the United States Energy Information Administration lists 85 countries whose combined annual emissions amount to 103 megatonnes, less than what Alberta alone would produce under its production and upgrading cap in 2020. And according to the World Resources Institute, Canada is the 9th biggest carbon emitter in the world and the biggest carbon emitter on a per capita basis.
And another article in today’s Globe and Mail reports, “Environment Minister Catherine McKenna acknowledged the effort that will be required from the Liberal government – and the country – to achieve the 2-degree target, let alone the lower figure Ottawa endorsed in Paris. ‘We’ve spent a lot of time focusing on getting an ambitious agreement here in Paris and then we’re going to go home and figure out the plan’, she said at the close of the summit. ‘But what is very clear is that we are going to put a price on carbon, [and] that we know that we need to move to a low-carbon economy. And we’re going to figure out the tools to do that in conjunction with the provinces and territories and also the aboriginal leaders.'”
Here we see no indication that the expansion of the tar sands might be limited, nor any suggestion that there would be an impact on tar sands export pipelines like TransCanada’s 1.1 million barrels per day Energy East pipeline and Kinder Morgan’s 890,000 barrels per day Trans Mountain pipeline.
Surprisingly, that article adds, “On Sunday, Foreign Affairs Minister Stéphane Dion, in an interview with The Globe and Mail, suggested it is an open question as to whether Ottawa will seek a more ambitious target with the provinces [than than the one the Harper government set]. ‘Ms. McKenna said it was the floor. So we’ll see if we may improve it’, he said. ‘But I would argue though that because of the inertia of the federal government over the last 10 years, the target we have tabled in Paris is not easy to meet, contrary to common wisdom. It is quite difficult, but doable.'”
The Harper government had promised a 30 per cent reduction of carbon emissions below 2005 levels by 2030, which translates (when using the standard baseline of 1990) to 14 per cent below 1990 levels by 2030. In comparison, the European Union has pledged a 40 per cent reduction below 1990 levels by 2030.
The Trudeau government seems intent on keeping its election-time promise to meet with provincial governments at a summit within 90 days of the conclusion of the Paris talks. That should mean that the meeting will happen by March 12. While the presumption may be that this will produce a new ambitious plan, the Globe and Mail cautions, “So far, the provincial climate plans leave Canada falling well short of [even the low] international commitment made by the former Harper government. More action will be required to meet the Conservatives’ 2030 target, a goal that was widely criticized as one of the weakest among industrialized countries.”
In terms of other upcoming dates, the Trudeau government is expected to render its decision on whether the Trans Mountain pipeline expansion (from 300,000 barrels a day to 890,000 barrels a day) can proceed by May 20, 2016. A decision on the Energy East pipeline could conceivably come by April 2017. This coming May 7-15, 2016, there will be a global mobilization to shut down the world’s most dangerous fossil fuel projects, including those in Canada. DeSmog Canada reports, “The Break Free From Fossil Fuels campaign will involve acts of civil disobedience including forming human chains to block oil exports, interfering with coal mine operations and marching on the corporate headquarters of fossil fuel companies.”
By Bill McKibben, reposted from the New York Times, Dec 13, 2015
Paris — THE climate news last week came out of Paris, where the world’s nations signed off on an agreement to finally begin addressing global warming.
Or, alternately, the climate news came out of Chennai, India, where hundreds died as flooding turned a city of five million into an island. And out of Britain, where the heaviest rains ever measured over 24 hours in the Lake District turned picturesque villages into lakes. And out of the Maldives in the Indian Ocean, where record rainfalls flooded atolls.
In the hot, sodden mess that is our planet as 2015 drags to a close, the pact reached in Paris feels, in a lot of ways, like an ambitious agreement designed for about 1995, when the first conference of parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change took place in Berlin.
Under its provisions, nations have made voluntary pledges to begin reducing their carbon emissions. These are modest — the United States, for instance, plans to cut carbon dioxide emissions by 2025 by 12 to 19 percent from their levels in 1990. As the scrupulous scorekeepers at Climate Action Tracker, a nongovernment organization, put it, that’s a “medium” goal “at the least ambitious end of what would be a fair contribution.”
And that’s about par for the course here. Other countries, like gas station owners on opposite corners looking at each other’s prices, have calibrated their targets about the same: enough to keep both environmentalists and the fossil fuel industry from complaining too much. They have managed to provide enough financing to keep poor countries from walking out of the talks, but not enough to really push the renewables revolution into high gear. (Secretary of State John Kerry, in a fine speech, doubled America’s contribution — to $800 million, which is more than Congress is likely to appropriate, but risible compared to the need.)
So the world emerges, finally, with something like a climate accord, albeit unenforceable. If all parties kept their promises, the planet would warm by an estimated 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit, or 3.5 degrees Celsius, above preindustrial levels. And that is way, way too much. We are set to pass the 1 degree Celsius mark this year, and that’s already enough to melt ice caps and push the sea level threateningly higher.
The irony is, an agreement like this adopted at the first climate conference in 1995 might have worked. Even then it wouldn’t have completely stopped global warming, but it would have given us a chance of meeting the 1.5 degree Celsius target that the world notionally agreed on.
Instead, as we now know from recent revelations about Exxon Mobil, those were exactly the years the fossil fuel industry set to work to make sure doubt replaced resolve. Its delaying tactics were cruelly effective. To meet that 1.5 degree target now would require breakneck action of a kind most nations aren’t really contemplating. At this point we’d need to leave almost all remaining coal and much of the oil and gas in the ground and put the world’s industries to work on an emergency basis building solar panels and windmills.
That we have any agreement at all, of course, is testament to the mighty movement that activists around the world have built over the last five years. At Copenhagen, world leaders could go home with nothing and pay no price.
That’s no longer true.
But what this means is that we need to build the movement even bigger in the coming years, so that the Paris agreement turns into a floor and not a ceiling for action. We’ll be blocking pipelines, fighting new coal mines, urging divestment from fossil fuels — trying, in short, to keep weakening the mighty industry that still stands in the way of real progress. With every major world leader now on the record saying they at least theoretically support bold action to make the transition to renewable energy, we’ve got a new tool to work with.
And we’ll try to keep hoping that it adds up fast enough to matter. That’s a little hard, as the hottest year ever measured draws to a close. One doesn’t want to rain on the Paris parade — but that’s what seems to be happening somewhere every day now.
Like Washington State, where high temperatures and heavy rainfalls led the governor to declare a state of emergency late last week, as landslides closed highways. Or Portland, Ore., which had the rainiest December day in its recorded history. Or Norway, which had the worst flooding in more than a century of record keeping. Or … SOURCE
Bill McKibben is the founder of 350.org, the global grass-roots climate campaign. He teaches environmental studies at Middlebury College.
By Brent Patterson, Political director of the Council of Canadians, reposted from The Council of Canadians, Dec 13, 2015
At the recently concluded COP21 climate talks in Paris the Trudeau government endorsed the inclusion of text in the agreement that commits the world to limiting global warming to “well below 2 degrees Celsius” and to “pursue efforts” to keep it below 1.5 degrees Celsius. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says the Paris Agreement is “historic, ambitious and balanced” and that, “We will move towards a climate resilient economy, and we will invest in public transit, green infrastructure and clean technologies to create new jobs and support our communities.” Alberta premier Rachel Notley says she is confident that her province can contribute and thrive under these targets.
So what do we need to do to meet this target?
In January, the Globe and Mailreported, “Using a computer model, economists at University College London calculated both the economic value and carbon content of fossil fuels around the world and looked at the most cost-effective way for fossil-fuel development to proceed while trying to hold to the two-degree global target.” The study says Alberta’s oil reserves hold 48 billion barrels of oil. “[It} then finds that only 7.5 billion barrels of that, or about 15 per cent, can be used by 2050 as part of the global allotment of fossil-fuel use in a two-degree scenario.”
The article adds, “The figure assumes that new technologies will make possible a reduction in the carbon intensity of oil sands production. If this does not happen, the authors say, then even less of the oil-sands reserve should be extracted. …In their analysis, the authors of the study also looked a the potential impact of carbon capture and storage technologies (CCS) and found that the result was not enough to change the overall picture, in part because such technologies are not expected to come online rapidly enough to allow fossil fuel burning without consequence.”
Alberta Energy says, “Oil sands production is expected to increase from 2.3 million barrels per day in 2014 to 4 million barrels per day in 2024, keeping pace with demand, providing jobs to Canadians, and creating a sound economic basis for the future.” The current production level of 2.3 million barrels a day equals 839.5 million barrels a year. That means that the limit of 7.5 billion barrels of oil to meet the 2 degrees Celsius target would be reached in 8.9 years. In other words, according to the University College London study, the tar sands would need to be shut down in 2024 just as Alberta Energy projects production almost doubling.
Likewise, the proposed Energy East pipeline would move 1.1 million barrels of oil a day, which is about 401.5 million barrels per year. Just the Energy East pipeline alone (no other pipelines, no other tar sands production) would hit the carbon budget of 7.5 billion barrels in just under 19 years.
If Canada were to “pursue efforts” to keep the global temperature increase below 1.5 degrees Celsius, as agreed to in the Paris Agreement, these time frames would be even shorter.
We can presume that the Trudeau and Notley governments may not accept the findings of the University College London study. Or it is possible that, despite this study factoring in new technologies, they believe “clean technologies” (to use Trudeau’s phrase from last night) can be effectively employed to avoid transitioning away from the tar sands. It’s also possible that the Paris Agreement’s commitment to “carbon neutrality” by the latter half of this century will be seen as the fix. Carbon neutrality (which is not the same as zero emissions) likely includes mechanisms like carbon emission trading and Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+).
In short, carbon emission trading allows a country to purchase the right to emit more by another country trading its right to emit carbon to them. And REDD+ basically says that, since deforestation accounts for 12 to 29 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions, a country buying a forest to stop that deforestation should be given carbon credits for preventing those emissions.
We might also presume that the Trudeau government may not see “free trade” agreements like the Canada-European Union Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA) and the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as contributors to climate change. Both contain investor-state dispute settlement (ISDS) provisions that allow transnational corporations to sue national government for lost profits resulting from public interest measures. Any corporation based in any of the 28 European Union member states or the 11 TPP countries with investments in the tar sands could conceivably sue Canada for measures that would restrict those operations or limit its market.
Many people were relieved that the Harper government did not represent this country at the COP21 talks and are pleased that the Trudeau government was not perceived to be playing an obstructionist role in Paris. Let us build on that, and on the government’s stated commitment to the 1.5 degrees Celsius target, to make the case that the Paris Agreement compels us to transition to a 100 per cent clean economy by 2050 and that a further expansion of the tar sands, more pipelines, market mechanisms like carbon emission trading, and more “free trade” deals like CETA and the TPP are inconsistent with that goal.
If the Trudeau government has truly committed to a future that limits global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, how else is it going to get us there?
Author/activists Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein photographed at a 2012 event for the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives.
Two of the world’s foremost advocates for action against climate change have let it be known they are largely unimpressed with the COP21 agreement in Paris.
Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything and Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, characterize the deal as too little too late. Still, both famous journalist-activists mark COP21 as a potential catalyst for heightened activism to pressure the world’s governments to do more to forestall a greenhouse-gas fueled catastrophe.
In an interview today with Huffington Post UK, Klein sounded out of step with the enthusiasm voiced by many other climate change fighters when the accord was hammered out.
“It’s a very strange thing to cheer for setting a target that you are knowingly failing to meet,” Klein told her interviewer.
“It’s like going: ‘I acknowledge that I will die of a heart attack if I don’t radically lower my blood pressure. I acknowledge that in order to do that I need to cut out alcohol, fatty foods and exercise every day. I therefore will exercise once a week, eat four hamburgers instead of five and only binge drink twice a week and you have to call me a hero because I’ve never done this before and you have no idea how lazy I used to be.'”
‘Motivate a movement’
Later in the interview Klein emphasized that climate change and economic justice must be linked in efforts for progressive social change.
“If it is just about going on a march and if it just about parts per million of carbon in the atmosphere that’s not going to motivate a movement that is as motivated as Exxon and Shell to protect the status quo.
“When people are fighting for a future that is better than their present, not just better than a catastrophe far off in the future, better than right now which is intolerable, better than unemployment, better than crumbling services, better than relentless austerity – that’s the movement.
“That’s why I find it endlessly frustrating that Europe’s anti-austerity parties almost never talk about climate change.”
‘A floor and not a ceiling’
Writing yesterday in the op-ed pages of the New York Times under the headline “Falling Short on Climate in Paris,” McKibben assailed the fossil-fuel industry’s decades of self-serving propaganda for putting the world’s nations, likely, too far in the hole to fend off climate disaster. And he portrayed COP21 as too much a compromise.
Signatories, he wrote, “like gas station owners on opposite corners looking at each other’s prices, have calibrated their targets about the same: enough to keep both environmentalists and the fossil fuel industry from complaining too much. They have managed to provide enough financing to keep poor countries from walking out of the talks, but not enough to really push the renewables revolution into high gear.”
McKibben doubted Congress would approve America’s pledged contribution of $800 million and even that amount he termed “risible compared to the need.”
But McKibben, like Klein, urged activists to key off COP21 in pushing for change. He wrote:
“[W]e need to build the movement even bigger in the coming years, so that the Paris agreement turns into a floor and not a ceiling for action. We’ll be blocking pipelines, fighting new coal mines, urging divestment from fossil fuels — trying, in short, to keep weakening the mighty industry that still stands in the way of real progress. With every major world leader now on the record saying they at least theoretically support bold action to make the transition to renewable energy, we’ve got a new tool to work with.” SOURCE
Thanks a lot, Republicans. You weren’t in Paris physically, but you still managed to prevent last week’s global climate summit from reaching an agreement that would give humanity a better than iffy chance of avoiding catastrophic sea-level rise, scorching temperatures, and killer floods and drought in the years ahead. An iffy chance is better than none, and government and civil-society leaders worldwide left Paris pledging to build on the agreement so it becomes a floor, not a ceiling, of ambition. Nevertheless, on both scientific and humanitarian grounds, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders is correct to say that the Paris Agreement “goes nowhere near far enough.” And the main reason why it doesn’t are his Republican colleagues in the United States Senate, which would have to ratify any bona fide treaty the Obama administration might have preferred in Paris.
The Paris summit was by no means a failure; its accomplishments deserve the adjective “historic.” By aiming to limit temperature rise to “well below” 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels and “pursue” a goal of 1.5 C, the world’s governments went further than ever before in defining the allowable amount of future climate disruption. This was a case of moving the goalposts in the best possible way. What’s more, both developed and developing nations pledged to entirely eliminate emissions of greenhouse gases “as soon as possible,” in effect promising to de-carbonize the global economy. Thus the leaders of both of the world’s climate change superpowers, the United States and China, praised the accord, with President Obama hailing the agreement not “perfect” but “our best chance to save the only planet we have.” A headline in The Guardian said the agreement heralded “the end of the fossil fuel era.”
But the celebratory tone of politicians’ statements, news coverage, and even most of the comments from non-governmental organizations in Europe and the United States overlooks how lethally punishing this agreement will be for huge masses of people in the Global South. It also skips past just how far short the agreement falls from what science demands—and science does not compromise. Even if the largely voluntary provisions of the Paris agreement are fully implemented, literally tens of millions of people in poor and vulnerable regions such as Bangladesh, the Marshall Islands, and much of Africa and Asia are being doomed to homelessness, impoverishment, and death, with children predicted to bear the brunt of the suffering. That such a heartless future is applauded as success in the Global North only reminds us how tragic, indeed criminal, it is that fossil-fuel interests and the politicians they buy have blocked serious climate action for the past two decades.
The best way to lower the death toll and improve civilization’s future prospects is for civil society all over the world—climate-justice advocates, community and religious leaders, business and financial executives—to push harder than ever to turn the noble but non-binding aspirations declared in Paris into rapid, concrete transformations of our energy, agriculture, consumerist, and other socioeconomic systems. We can build a better future than what currently awaits us, and the Paris Agreement can help, but only if the resistance of the old order—as personified by the climate deniers and foot-draggers in Congress and their paymasters in the fossil-fuel industry—is routed once and for all.
The world changed in Paris last week, but it is crucial to be clear about how much. Setting a 1.5 to 2 degrees temperature goal marks a massive potential shift in the global economy. If governments at all levels and businesses, investors, and organized consumers around the world take action, starting now, that is commensurate with the 1.5 to 2 C goal, as green leaders such as Germany and California have begun, it could indeed spell the end of the fossil-fuel era.
The key words, however, are “if” and “starting now.” And here the Paris agreement again bows to the obstinance of Republicans on Capitol Hill. Governments are not required to reduce heat-trapping emissions by a single molecule, much less by a scientifically appropriate amount; they are required only to publicly declare how much and how soon they intendto make reductions and then report them transparently after the fact. Nor need these voluntary reductions begin until 2020, thereby inviting five more years of digging our global climate hole still deeper before changing course, a calamitous choice.
“Don’t wait one more day to shift to clean energy sources.” It’s easy to dismiss celebrities who speak out on issues of the day, but the actor Leonardo DiCaprio got it exactly right when he delivered this plea to a gathering of mayors, governors, and other “sub-national” officials on the sidelines of the Paris summit. Waiting until 2020 to cut heat-trapping emissions invites disaster. If humanity wants a decent chance at hitting the 1.5 C target—which is essential for the survival of millions of people and of such sensitive ecosystems as coral reefs, which are a foundation of the marine food chain that provides one in six humans with the bulk of the protein in their diets—greenhouse gas emissions must peakby 2020, scientists say, not merely increase more slowly, as the Paris Agreement envisions. Peaking by 2020 is also critical for the earth’s snow and ice-cover. Polar ice sheets are already melting at a terrifying rate; lose Greenland and West Antarctica, and we unleash an eventual 80 feet of sea-level rise, dooming our descendants.
The Paris Agreement almost certainly would have been stronger in these and other respects if the Obama administration had not been constrained by Republicans’ hostility to acknowledging, much less fighting, man-made climate change. Secretary of State John Kerry admitted as much to fellow negotiators in the final hours of the talks. “He said he wished that we could include specific dates and figures for emissions cuts and financial aid [to help developing countries adapt to climate impacts and choose clean over dirty energy], but he explained that this could trigger a review by the US Senate that could scuttle the entire agreement,” a delegate from a Mediterranean country told The Nation, requesting anonymity because his government is a US ally.
The big question after Paris is whether the agreement signed there, despite the weaknesses imposed by congressional Republicans (and others—Saudi Arabia was no angel), will send a sufficiently strong signal that decision makers worldwide start making fundamentally different choices more or less right away. Al Gore, who in recent years has transitioned from the public to the private sector and reportedly made tens of millions of dollars investing in climate-friendly companies, is unabashedly optimistic. “This universal and ambitious agreement sends a clear signal to governments, businesses, and investors everywhere: the transformation of our global economy from one fueled by dirty energy to one fueled by sustainable economic growth is now firmly and inevitably underway,” Gore said. The smart money was already moving in this direction before Paris. The plummeting costs of solar, wind, and energy efficiency were one motivation. Another was the growing drumbeat of warnings from such impeccably establishment voices as the International Energy Agency and the governor of the Bank of England that the vast majority of the earth’s remaining fossil fuels must be left in the ground to honor the 2 degrees target, raising the risk of trillions of dollars in stranded assets.
Including the 1.5 degrees target in the Paris Agreement ups the ante considerably. Hitting the 2 degrees target requires getting the entire world economy off of fossil fuels by roughly 2050, an all-star panel of climate scientists explained at the summit, but hitting the 1.5 degrees target accelerates that scheduled by a decade or two. This means that not only coal but also oil and gas must be left behind, and sooner than almost anyone imagined. Thus 1.5 degrees amounts to a death sentence for the global petroleum complex as currently operated. It is only logical, then, that companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron and petro-states such as Saudi Arabia and Russia will fight to the death to avoid it.
Overcoming the resistance of the status quo in this and many other manifestations of the fossil-fuel era is the moral imperative of our time. Hans Schellnhuber, one of the world’s most eminent climate scientists and a top adviser to Pope Francis as he prepared his climate change encyclical, Laudato Si’, made a point in Paris of highlighting the importance of the fossil fuel–divestment movement, which he portrayed as a modern-day descendant of the 19th-century movement to abolish slavery. “It will be job of civil society, including business leaders, cities and the investor community to finish the job that national governments have begun here in Paris, said Schellnhuber. “In particular I’d like to mention that the divestment movement will be crucial.”
Perhaps the most encouraging, and game-changing, development in the climate struggle in recent years has been the emergence of a mass movement dedicated to climate justice—for all people, all generations (including those yet to come), and all species. Global in scope and vision, local in strength and focus, unswayed by blandishments of insider status or incremental progress, this movement is grounded in commitments to democratic process, economic fairness, and human solidarity. It is still often underestimated by the powers that be, even as it accumulates an increasingly impressive string of triumphs, from pushing in the United States until President Obama and Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton finally rejected the Keystone XL tar-sands pipeline to surprising nearly the entire international community by lodging the previously dismissed goal of 1.5 degrees in the final Paris Agreement.
More triumphs are needed, the challenges ahead are staggering, and too many innocents will suffer before it’s over. But Paris, and all that made its imperfect but exhilarating result possible, tells us that this struggle is not in vain. Victory is possible. Victory is necessary. And the path to victory is its own reward.
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