What we are getting VERY wrong about climate change
12/31/23
We are on the heels of the COP28 climate summit in Dubai. This year, there has actually been some positive news come out of the summit — most notably global leaders commitment to begin “moving away from fossil fuels.”
While it certainly could have been a lot worse (and these meetings have built a reputation of failing to deliver any significant climate agreement time and time again), there was at least some positive news, a step in the right direction if you will.
But the proverbial question remains in regards to climate change: are we doing too little, too late?
I want to be a climate optimist, I really do. Please believe me when I say that.
I’ve been working in the environmental and climate space for 15 years now. I want nothing more than to know we will have a (relatively) stable future so I can spend time enjoying our planet, in the blink-of-an-eye-time-here we all have. I want to know the air will be clean, the water, safe, and that we will continue to share this planet equitably with all the 8.7million other species of plants and animals.
Yet, I’ve had this deep down gut feeling climate change was not going to be ok — for quite some time. I think it probably goes back about 10 years. Back then it was this murmuring, nagging, easy to often put at bay feeling of, “Uhhh hello everyone? This seems really bad, why doesn’t anyone seem to care, like really care? Ok but back to regular life.”
Despite the agreement from COP28, the year that was 2023 confirmed just how bad the climate situation has become.
Perhaps your home town or country wasn’t affected by the raging heat waves, or the smoke filled air for weeks on end, or subject to another 1,000 year flood. If that was the case, consider yourself lucky.
The latest scientific evidence, reports, and information has shown us that our climate projections have become far worse off than what my tiny human brain could seem to wrap itself around...
See: here, here, and here.
(Side note: If you have never read an IPCC report, or at least the summary statements, I highly encourage you to do so. It will be eye opening. (Consider it the gold standard in terms of answering the question, “what the f*** is actually going on with the climate?”)
At the same time, climate solutions are growing. There are real success stories. Like this one.
But I continue to find myself more and more in the pessimistic camp (even if its shunned and apparently ‘frowned upon’ to give up hope). The day to day grind of working in climate, reading about worsening natural disasters, mounting inequities, and how just underprepared and underfunded our climate adaptation efforts really are, I find myself more and more planting my flag at Camp Pessimist.
Me planting my flag at camp pessimist, Photo by Debby Hudson on Unsplash
When I drill down into this pessimism, there are two main factors contributing to it, two things I think we are getting woefully wrong about climate change:
What We Are Getting Very Wrong About Climate Change
I’m fearful things are going to get way worse than they are already anticipated to get (which is way worse than most people think) because of two main reasons:
We think we can spend our way out of climate disaster, and
We don’t seem to be really willing to sacrifice.
1. We think we can spend our way out of climate disaster
Standing in the middle of the consumerism, capitalism, GDP polar vortex that is America, right in the middle of another holiday spending more than you have season, the prevailing thought often seems to be that if we just throw more money at climate solutions, we should be OK.
We need to throw more money at Direct Air Capture (DAC) solutions. We need to spend more money on reparations for poorer countries who are undoubtedly suffering the most affects of climate change while having contributed the least to the problem itself.
We need to just buy MORE ethically sourced clothing, shoes, and consumer goods. “This year, I’ll ditch fast fashion and just buy more sustainable clothes and goods,” we tell ourselves.
We need more tech solutions. We need more carbon accounting software, we need more “innovative products” and more “corporate sustainability.” We need more organizations to spend more on sustainability teams and departments.
We need more nonprofits to receive more funding to grow their programs and spend more in the fields and countries and issue areas they work in.
We need more conferences and events and more flying around to talk about how we are doing more to combat the problem. (I personally have loved seeing the LinkedIn humble brags from some of my fellow climate folks, “Upon returning from Dubai” “Just getting back from Dubai”…)
These are all fine endeavors. They are. Please don’t take this as abject criticism of those efforts. Many of these spaces are areas I’ve worked in for quite some time and met many people doing important work. And we know they are better than the alternatives: doing nothing or continuing doing mindless, soulless harm.
But these are all STILL down stream solutions.
What we really need is LESS.
Less of all of it.
That really is the uncomfortable truth. We don’t like to hear we “need less” of anything, but I think culturally we have the entirely wrong definition of what “less” really means.
Almost all current solutions to climate change are still down stream solutions. What do I mean by this?
By the time you need to suck carbon out of the air, there’s already too much carbon in the air (this we know).
By the time your company appears on stage to talk about all its recent sustainability clean up efforts to reduce waste, use less water, use less plastic, there’s already too much waste in the landfill, wasted water, and plastic in our oceans.
By the time you took funding from investors, institutions, that made their billions exploiting others, or exploiting nature for personal gain, there’s already been too much wealth accumulation on the heels of environmental degradation or personal exploitation.
These are a few examples of many. But when we think we can merely spend or consume our way out of climate change, we often forget just how far removed we have become from living in any sort of harmony or balance with nature.
We need our systems to be fundamentally less energy dependent.
We need our way of lives to be interconnected with nature in order to reconnect and need way less in terms of consumerism and capitalism.
We need less freedom to go wherever we want, whenever we want however we want. (Did he just say we need LESS FREEDOM??) Because only in some species constraint, will we truly appreciate the here and now.
We need less junk, mindless information, shit processed food, in order to remind us of what is truly important in life: spending time with family, spending time outside, enjoying the gift that is real, organic food.
(Don’t get me wrong, I am guilty of all of these things. But it is in collective sacrifice that the ecosystem of dependence and acceptance will be broken and the burden taken off of the individual and onto a shared collective path, together. A bit ironically, the more individual responsibility each individual takes, the less the group has to take.)
Think of the earth’s needs in terms of tech & productivity. For anyone (myself included) that’s gone down productivity or tech addiction rabbit holes, where do most all paths lead? To less. Doing less, focusing on less, using less, consuming less IN ORDER TO lead to more. More doing, more results, more important things.
Once you realize that wanting, needing less frees you up for so much MORE — more of the important things — then we are no longer afraid of less and begin to realize the myth of more we have been told, sold, and spoon fed.
And it is in this fundamental shift to less, we will free ourselves up for so much more. More of the really good, deep down we know good for us, stuff.
Less is more.
2. We don’t care enough to really sacrifice.
A second point that has landed me beginning to share in flag waving duty at Camp Pessimism is this notion of sacrifice.
Photo by Martin Castro on Unsplash
I’m always shushed, or criticized when I bring this point up with peers or others.
I don’t think as a society we really care. I don’t think we as humans really truly care enough to make meaningful sacrifices at scale.
That is always such a hard topic to broach, but it is in this truth seeking that I think we can actually free ourselves from pretending in order to begin the work that is really being done.
We love to tell ourselves (or others, truly) that we care about the planet. Time and time again we see statistics such as “80% of Democrats and 60% of Republicans care about the planet” or “75% of Gen Z says climate change is their number one concern.”
The shallow statistics are there. But at some point we have to understand perception and action and the disconnect between the two.
It is one thing to check a box on a questionnaire that says you care about the planet. I mean after all, who would want to be seen as not caring about the planet?
It is totally another aspect to take action on this concern. True, systems and feedback loop breaking action.
I’ll give two examples to illustrate this point:
There has without a doubt been a rise in “green” jobs, climate jobs, investment towards sustainable solutions. Yet still, in the US alone, in 2022 there were 1.45 million individuals working in green or green supporting jobs.
In 2022, there were 158 million Americans in some form of employment.
That means less than 1% of all eligible workers in the US work on in a climate or climate related field.
Less than 1%…. in 2023, the hottest year ever recorded in human history. When the issues AND solutions have both reached all-time highs (that translates to opportunity)
A second point is in regards to the oil companies.
Having been in the climate space for quite some time, its very common to continue to witness and hear and even participate in the vitriol directed at oil companies.
“They are to blame for our climate disasters!” climate activists and climate scientists will shout, tweet, write, time and time again.
And don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of truth in that. I myself have protested against the oil companies on many occasions in varying forms.
But the issue is that we, the common we, is in fact the customer of these oil companies. We, in fact, are the reason they have become so profitable in the first place.
67% of all oil used globally is for transportation. 2/3rds! To help move us, our junk, and our trash around. 67%!
How and For What Oil is Used
Put simply, we individuals, our movement, our goods, our services, our stuff to go into our other stuff, is responsible for 67% of the oil industry.
Why did global emissions drop so drastically during the covid19 pandemic? Why did the air and the water clear so quickly? We literally stopped moving. Of course that came with risk, death, restraint, etc due to the pandemic but the point was clear: so much of our pollution is from movement.
We often like to create a villain, some entity that is bigger than us, that is scary that we cant really see, that must be to blame for this mess.
Often, we label the oil and gas industry as such villain (and often deservedly so) but fail to remember they are in turn nothing more than a collection of individuals working for money, status, and power, entrenched in old thinking and deep pockets. And we, in turn, are their biggest customer.
A Final Note on Hope And Despair
It is for these two reasons, I’m fearful of our ability to truly curb or mitigate the effects of climate change. And with this fear, I am shifting much more of my time and energy and attention to how we can adapt to life on an already changed planet and what that means for our near-term future.
I recently came across a great read on Hope and Despair from an unlikely source, a book about productivity (yet it turned out to be way more than that…)
In Oliver Burkeman’s, Four Thousand Weeks, a book I absolutely loved reading, the Afterward articulates my feelings on despair in a way I could never begin to fully understand.
Oliver writes:
People sometimes ask Derrick Jensen, the environmentalist who cofounded the radical group Deep Green Resistance, how he manages to stay hopeful when everything seems so grim. But he tells them he doesn’t — and that he thinks that’s a good thing. Hope is supposed to be “our beacon in the dark,” Jensen notes. But in reality, it’s a curse. To hope for a given outcome is to place your faith in something outside yourself, and outside the current moment — the government, for example, or God, or the next generation of activists, or just “the future” — to make things all right in the end… it means disavowing your own capacity to change things — which in the context of “Jensen’s field, environmental activism, means surrendering your power to the very forces you were supposed to be fighting.
“Many people say they hope the dominant culture stops destroying the world,” as Jensen puts it, but by saying that, “they’ve assumed the destruction will continue, at least in the short term, and they’ve stepped away from their own ability to participate in stopping it.”
To give up hope, by contrast, is to re-inhabit the power that you actually have. At that point, Jensen goes on, “we no longer have to ‘hope’ at all. We simply do the work. We make sure salmon survive. We make sure prairie dogs survive. We make sure grizzlies survive … When we stop hoping that the awful situation we’re in will somehow resolve itself, when we stop hoping the situation will somehow not get worse, then we are finally free — truly free — to honestly start working to resolve it”
Excerpt From
Four Thousand Weeks : Time Management for Mortals (9780374715243)
Burkeman, Oliver
This material may be protected by copyright.
It’s time to break free. To start the hard work of fixing this mess.
And it begins with less.
And for now, you can connect with other change makers whether you are just getting started or well on your way at www.theimpactful.com
Until next time,
Zach Weismann
Read original article on Medium:
https://medium.com/the-climate-climb/what-we-are-getting-very-wrong-about-climate-change-cb61a3de47f5
