If you think that climate change is turning out to be worse than anyone had thought, it’s not hard to find people who agree with you.
Just check out some recent headlines:
- “Scientists Have Been Underestimating the Pace of Climate Change” says Scientific American
- “The Oceans are Warming Faster than Scientists Thought,” says CNN
- “Destruction from Climate Change will be ‘Worse, Much Worse, than You Think’,” says the Washington Post
And after reading all those, the obvious question arises — “Climate Change: Why is it So Often ‘Sooner than Predicted’?” Fortunately, you’ll find the answer at Resilience.org: Climate science is still an inexact way of predicting the future. But mostly it’s because scientists are trying to spare us from hearing the worst, so they edit out some of the doom from their reports.
Which, to me at least, is not a particularly reassuring fact to discover. And it makes it seem as if the nations of the world have made little real progress to save the climate.
Thirty Years of Climate Discussion but Little Government Action
After all, ever since the late 1980s, major governments, along with the news media and the public, have known the basic facts about climate change: that unseen pollution mostly from humans burning fossil fuels was heating the atmosphere to dangerous levels that would lead to worse storms, floods and droughts along with rising seas that would flood many coastal cities. That in turn will put human civilization at risk.
For the last three decades, environmental groups have diligently lobbied their governments to slow carbon and methane emissions. Activists have put pressure on industry too. They’ve been smart, full of energy and creative. And those activists have fought on and on, winning many victories against great odds.
Yet, despite several big international treaties — especially the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement — and some impressive accomplishments including holding up pipelines and getting institutional investors to divest from fossil fuels, the pollution and the warming have not stopped.
Quite the opposite. In the last three decades since the climate movement has gotten active, the world’s economy has released more greenhouse pollution than in the years previously since the Industrial Revolution.
Clearly, whatever progress on public policy that the movement has made with governments and businesses, those governments and businesses have failed to take meaningful action.
Why? Common explanations tend to blame the climate movement rather than either government or industry:
- Scientists either scared people too much or didn’t scare them enough
- Al Gore gave too many boring PowerPoints filled with data in charts and graphs
- Fundraising appeals from eco groups used photos of polar bears instead of people or talked about Bangladesh instead of Bozeman, Montana or Birmingham, Alabama
- So-called “Big Green” environmental organizations spent too much time lobbying in national capitals and at the U.N. and not enough time building support among the broad public
Another very common approach is to blame the public for being too apathetic to care about urgent warnings from scientists or too selfish to give up their wasteful consumer lifestyles.
While I agree that these may have been challenges for the climate movement, I respectfully disagree that any of them, or all of them combined, were fatal to the movement’s success.
After all, just speaking for the United States, we’ve solved problems that are pretty techy before (ie, reaching the moon through the Apollo Program). We’ve successfully dealt with problems that are hard to see or far away (like World War II). And our citizens have shown great ability for self-sacrifice in a good cause (I remember the grape boycotts that my white, midwestern mom joined in the 1970s to support the movement of Chicano farm workers in California for better working conditions).
The climate movement has achieved significant success reaching the public, as surveys showing vast majorities of citizens supporting climate action and clean energy demonstrate. We should not blame green groups for the failure of governments and business to act on climate solutions. And we should not blame ordinary citizens for failing to buy enough Priuses or turn down their thermostats enough.
Nor should we accept that climate change is the “problem from hell” as some communications experts have claimed, that global heating is too hard for people in the U.S. or other developed countries to understand because greenhouse pollution is invisible and its effects are often felt far away or are predicted to occur in the future.
No, the real problem is much simpler and the real culprit is much more specific: the world’s biggest, richest and most powerful special interest has thwarted the climate movement at every step.
I mean, of course, the fossil fuel industry.
Led by oil companies, dirty energy producers have not only stopped governments from acting against climate chaos. Those companies have also covered up their own role in the problem.
With enough money to burn and enough money to bribe, as Naomi Klein has put it, oil companies have used their massive political influence to reward their friends and punish their critics in government, all the while hiring pliable scientists and PR flaks to confuse the public about the real science.
Worst of all, oil companies have used their massive stores of cash to defeat promising legislation for climate solutions. For example, reports the Intercept, in 2018 an industry lobby group called the American Fuel and Petrochemical Manufacturers “mobilized over $30 million to defeat the carbon tax proposed in Washington State, easily outspending an environmentalist campaign funded by philanthropist billionaires and small donors.”
As the Intercept article explains, the same oil industry group has now started bragging about how they’ve managed to criminalize protest against new oil and gas pipelines in several states.
So, stop worrying about greedy consumers or apathetic voters. They’re not the reason the climate movement has failed. The oil industry is the real obstacle to climate action. To have any hope to save the world from climate chaos, we must first get oil companies out of politics. And then we must phase out their product, once and for all.
The challenge of course, is massive. Dirty energy companies claim ownership of reserves of oil, gas and coal worth between $10 and $20 trillion worldwide.
Is there any precedent for fighting such wealth and the political power it can buy?
The Most Successful Political Movement Ever
Fortunately for them, none of the big social movements of recent decades — whether civil rights, women’s rights or LGBTQ rights — had to face anything like a $10 trillion enemy. That very fact means none of these movements are a good model for fighting the economic and political power of oil companies.
But if we go back into history a little further, we do find one movement that did face off against such wealth and power. This was the most successful social campaign of the last two hundred years and perhaps ever — the movement to abolish slavery.
Active on three continents, but especially in Britain and the United States for nearly a century from about 1780 until the end of the American Civil War in 1865, the abolition movement worked tirelessly and intelligently to win freedom against great odds for millions of enslaved people.
And most importantly of all, abolition triumphed not merely over emotional or cultural attitudes like racism among white people but against the largest monied special interest of its day.
Whether it was the West Indian sugar planters that British abolitionists had to overcome or the southern cotton planters who ran slavery in the United States, at the height of its power, the constellation of wealthy interests that abolitionists dubbed “the Slave Power” was the biggest and most powerful political force on both sides of the Atlantic.
MSNBC journalist Chris Hayes has noted that, in the amoral financial accounting of the slave economy, the “asset value” of enslaved people in the U.S. alone right before the Civil War would equal about $10 trillion in today’s money.
Coincidentally, that’s about the same as the low estimate for the amount of fossil fuel reserves held by oil, gas and coal companies worldwide today: $10 trillion.
Of course, there’s no moral equivalent between human beings and molecules of fossil fuels, as Hayes notes. The main point is for today’s climate movement to learn the rules of success from the history of abolition.
To break a political power with that much wealth, we would do well to follow the only example in modern history when it’s happened before. To break the $10 trillion Oil Power today, we should study what abolitionists did in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries to break the $10 trillion Slave Power.
And that’s what I’ll do in the book I’m writing now, Abolish Oil Now: Our Last, Best Hope to Save the Climate, Stop Endless Wars and Live in Freedom.
My publisher is planning to put the book out in 2020, but you can read the book’s outline now. And of course, I’ll publish updates here over the next few months.
I reposted this piece from my author website.
— Erik Curren
The reason slavery ended had a lot to do with the fact that we transitioned to machines and fossil fuel energy which were much more profitable. Transitioning away from FFs means economic collapse and starvation. There is nothing even close to FFs for humanity to transition to.
You’re right that fossil fuels did replace human slaves for many applications. But as the existence of more slaves than ever in history today proves, slavery and fossil fuels are not incompatible. In fact, in the United States, slavery showed no signs of disappearing in the late 1850s, even as coal was powering more factories and helping spread railroads. In fact, the most profitable year for slave-powered agriculture was 1860.
Without the work of abolitionists, slavery certainly would have persisted for decades longer. Far from dying out on its own, slavery was expanding. There”s a fascinating novel that even imagines what slavery would look like today if there had been no Civil War to end it: “Underground Airlines” imagines that four southern states still allow slavery, and they run it in a very modern way, in an industrial prison cotton farm and clothing sweatshop like we now have in Asia, using both fossil fuels and enslaved labor together.
As to the future, I do not share your gloomy prognosis. I think there’s plenty that we can still do to cut greenhouse pollution and adapt to resource declines. Anyway, I don’t see any point in despairing unless you plan to retire to a monastery to spend every day in prayer. Otherwise, the only reasonable thing to do is to continue to fight on, even against long odds.
I only despair when I hear people say there is no way we can do less (which is the only thing that will have the profound effect required) so we must ramp up industrial civilization and aim it at “green”.
We have more than enough of most everything if we could only step back a bit. Not talking about living in caves.
First rule of holes…stop digging!
I agree, Jef, that humans, especially in the United States, where we are so wasteful, will have to do with less in the future. In some ways that won’t even be much of a sacrifice. In others, it will be more difficult. We should certainly stop digging ourselves deeper into a hole. Part of that is abolishing oil now. Some of that we can replace with clean energy. But not all. So there will have to be some serious energy efficiency and conservation too.
Did you know that in the world today there are almost 1.5 billion operational cars? What’s more, a new car is showing up on the scene about every half second.
I did some math and discovered that (just) one billion cars, if lined up literally bumper to bumper (bumpers touching) they would not only wrap entirely around Earth’s equator but they would do so 114 times! That’s 14 times the distance between Earth and moon!
I did this math because I wanted to be able to visualize a billion cars. I wanted a palpable sense of the scale.
In several or many of the Green New Deal proposals on offer are proposals to give massive government subsidies toward the aim of replacing American internal combustion automobiles with electric ones. Sounds great, right? Actually — no. Manufacturing even a quarter billion new cars (electric or otherwise) puts us far, far beyond the merely “dangerous” climate situation we’re currently in and moves us solidly into catastrophic anthropogenic climate disruption.
So what are we to do, then? I’m proposing that we do something quite radical — that we simply end what I call “car culture”. That we drop it like a hot potato and as soon as humanly possible. We don’t need cars, and it’s time for us to do a design overhaul of our villages, towns, cities and suburbs so that we require them even less than we seem to now.
Let’s build a sub-movement within the climate / environmental movement in which we inform the world that a billion new (or even a half billion new) electric cars ought not to be manufactured. When folks begin to really understand what this means they will understand why we also have to unfold a process of “energy descent” in the so-called “developed nations” of the world. And energy descent will mean the end of economic growth and industrial civilization as we now know it. But this doesn’t mean we can’t have some industrial products or that we must live in caves, barefoot and naked. No. We can have bicycles and ultra-light (small and slow) electric vehicles. We can have ample food and shelter and clothing. We can live good and happy, comfortable lives. But we can’t fly everywhere on a whim, and we certainly cannot have a car culture.
It’s time for us all to begin to get very honest about what kind of future we can afford within our “carbon budget”. And, by the way, there is simply no budget left. We burned it already. Which is why we must simply attempt the miracle of a rapid, deliberate energy descent.
I can’t believe I am still questioning AGW.
I just read an entire 2013 thread which started when I googled Jeremy Corbyn’s brother who I saw on RT, who says all the same things my parents do.
Can someone please debunk the deniers once and for all? Or not?
What about the thermometer-in-the-tea kettle argument? Anyone?
What if the FF industries know something about peak oil we don’t, and this is how they bring about the electric economy (over which they reign)