immanence

As people around the world prepare for Global Climate Strike Week (Sept. 20-27) and for the UN Climate Action Summit in New York City on Sept. 23, here are some thoughts and sources to help us think about what’s at stake, what’s possible, and what we can do. This blog may be updated as needed, so please revisit it periodically.

Framing thoughts

Readers of this blog will know that I consider the climate crisis to be one of the most serious issues facing humans today and in years and decades to come. It presents a deep challenge to human civilization in its currently dominant forms — including to the reigning economic and technological systems, as well as the taken-for-granted lifestyle choices made by billions who participate actively in those systems. (Let’s keep the characterization of those “systems” in abeyance, even while we recognize that different elements have contributed to them: fossil-fuel industrialism, capitalism, at least in its inadequately regulated forms, consumerism, colonialism, and so on.)

The following considerations are part of the rethinking that the climate crisis calls us to engage in.

• If business-as-usual is no longer an option, then the distinctive features of “business-as-usual” must justify their continuance. This means asking questions like: What, if anything, of X [the fossil-fuel industrialist technological model, the capitalist economic model, et al.] should continue, as opposed to being replaced? What should the latter be replaced with? And what’s the best way of doing that? These are obviously extremely complicated questions, but a lot of thought (and action) has already gone into them, so if they seem mind-boggling, the first place to start might be with some self-education. (On the more technological and “wonky” side, Drawdown is an excellent starting place; on the deeper, more “civilizational” side, it’s hard to point to one place, but try here and here and here and here and here for a spectrum of starting points.)

• These questions lend themselves to more radical and more conservative responses. Radical responses favor rapid elimination of the causes of the crisis: i.e., the fossil fuel use that directly contributes to changing the atmospheric carbon balance, the capitalist relations and economic inequalities that underlie the vested interests on all sides that maintain the status-quo, and so on. Conservative responses favor retaining those things that cannot be clearly and conclusively replaced or transformed with better alternatives; in other words, in ways that don’t risk creating “solutions” that are worse than the problems they are meant to address. This radical-to-conservative spectrum of responses is obviously quite broad, but bringing the two ends onto the same page is important and can be done once the basic premises of a scientifically informed understanding of climate change are accepted.

• As for accepting those basic premises: we’re getting there (in the U.S. at least, and the U.S. is still a largely negative outlier in global opinion). Climate communication and climate activism are therefore crucial: communicating about the climate crisis is an essential element of responding to it and of getting a plurality of interests on board; and activism on the climate crisis is in large part what provokes communication about it. These two things are therefore what the list below focuses on.

What to watch for and where to watch for it

1) Pay attention to credible news outlets. The Columbia Journalism Review, The Nation, and The Guardian have partnered to spearhead an initiative called Covering Climate Now which has signed up over 250 newsrooms and journalistic outlets with a combined global readership of over 1 billion. Signatories have pledged to “running a week’s worth of climate coverage” in the lead-up to the Sept. 23 Climate Action Summit. Covering Climate Now includes a running sample of coverage from climate partners. Of daily news sources, The Guardian (including The Guardian US) is probably the best in its continuing and well-informed coverage on climate issues, so they deserve your support. (And it’s free, though if you read it enough, they will ask you to support them.) And over the coming days, Democracy Now! will be among many sources of in-depth, daily climate reportage.

2) Find out what is happening locally, participate in it, and contribute to the local coverage of it. The map here shows events around the world that are formally aligned with the Global Climate Strike. If you are familiar with events that aren’t listed there, add them to the map. The Global Climate Strike and 350.org web sites include plenty of information on how to organize a climate strike and/or a school strike, how to be an ally to striking students, and more.

3) Watch how the issue gets taken up, and how potential responses get parlayed into strategies for addressing the climate crisis. Specifically, watch how representatives of business-as-usual attempt to corral the issue into solutions that work best for them (e.g., carbon offsets, decarbonization technologies, green business strategies, and so on). And watch how grassroots climate justice activism gets portrayed and/or erased in the coverage of global negotiations. Specifically, watch how the policy demands of the Youth Climate Strike Coalition get taken up. There are five of them, and they are both specific enough to be meaningful, yet open-ended enough to welcome different perspectives on how to deal with them:

• A Green New Deal
• Respect of Indigenous Land and Sovereignty
• Environmental Justice
• Protection and Restoration of Biodiversity
• Implementation of Sustainable Agriculture

4) Follow the coverage of Greta Thunberg, but not only of her. Greta is a star, no doubt about that. She is also an effectively constructed meme. None of that takes away from her leading role in spurring school kids around the world to action — at a time when masses of protesting young people are probably the only thing that could possibly prod political authorities into supporting the actions that are necessary. She will be a focus of popular media coverage for the next few weeks, and a focus of attacks by interests that are critical of the climate movement (and of more thoughtful analyses that are skeptical of such memetic strategies for climate action). Watching how this plays out will give us a sense of how student climate activism develops in the coming years. And that activism will be essential.

There’s a start, then, to following the coming week and a half of mobilization, action, and media coverage. Watch this web site for occasional updates.