Overcoming Climate Change
Introductory Series — #5
In previous posts I have stated that our vision, purpose, and Major Goal can all be rolled up into 18 words:
To overcome climate change by creating a just and prosperous sustainability that enhances wellbeing for everyone and everything.
I hope you like the sound of this. I hope you are excited about the possibility. I hope you are ready to join. I hope you can sense that there’s lots of great stuff in this vision.
But you also may be wondering what it all means, exactly. Sounds good, but you want to hear more.
In this post I’m going to start to describe the first concept: overcoming climate change.
What are we doing? We are overcoming climate change.
I didn’t say solving, as if what we are doing is solving a problem. We are not solving a math problem or a puzzle. Climate change is more than a problem. It’s more, even, than a big problem.
I also didn’t say addressing. We aren’t simply addressing an issue.
Solve a problem? Address an issue? Let’s be honest. In our context these can be avoidance words. Detached words. Reserved words. Even sometimes running scared words.
What are they avoiding? Emotion. Suffering. Loss.
To overcome climate change we will need the greatest and most long-lasting social change movement in the history of the world. And we cannot become that if we are avoiding mentioning the reason most of us want to do something: our emotional response, which comes from both understanding and experiencing climate consequences.
To understand is to begin to recognize all of the loss that has come and will come from climate change. With such understanding, such recognition, comes all of the emotions we experience as the brutal magnitude begins to dawn on us.
That is not the fullness of it, of course. Every person and every creature on this planet will experience loss from climate consequences. But these experiences will not all be equal. Some will experience much greater suffering and loss than others.
So the words “solving” or “addressing” simply will not do.
Instead, I use the word overcome as an intentional echo of the Civil Rights Movement in the United States, where “We Shall Overcome,” a labor movement folk song derived from spirituals, became an anthem of the cause. Spirituals were born in suffering, but they recognize that suffering does not have the final word. The use of this anthem recognizes that great loss, great suffering has occurred, but “We shall overcome.” Those in the movement, working together, shall overcome.
The Civil Rights Movement has struggled and continues to struggle against a profound injustice.
And that is exactly what climate change is at its core.
To overcome climate change is to understand and recognize the profound injustice inherent in it. It is what struck me to the heart back in 1991 when I decided to dedicate my adult life to this cause. It was then that I first understood that climate impacts, both now and in the future, would hit the poorest around the world the hardest, those who have done next to nothing to cause it, those least able to cope with its consequences, whereas the rich countries, and more particularly the big profiting producers of pollution, the ones most responsible, would be just fine, better than fine with their wealth and profits. I understood that the poorest, the innocent, would experience and suffer the greatest loss from this injustice, and my experience of this understanding has been at the core of my climate work ever since.
Emotionally at the heart of it all is this simple truth: this is a wrong that must be made right. That is why the Climate Movement is a moral movement.
To overcome this profound injustice resulting from climate change, to create justice, we must do three basic interrelated things.
Stop bad stuff.
Set wrong right.
Make things better.
These are the three actions of justice.
With the climate crisis, what does it mean to stop the bad stuff, the stuff that is causing it, climate pollution or greenhouse gas emissions?
Usually this is what most people think of when they think about climate change. We solve this problem by stopping the bad stuff, the climate pollution.
Why do we want to stop the bad stuff? To avoid really bad consequences.
Early on in 1992 the Rio Climate Treaty —known officially as the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) — gave us a succinct formulation: “to prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.” That’s what nearly all the nations of the Earth have agreed to do.
Ok, but what does that mean in more concrete terms? How can we measure this?
It took over two decades for the follow-up meetings of the UNFCCC, called Conferences of the Parties to the treaty or COPs, to make this measurable, starting 10 years ago with the Paris COP in 2015 and continuing to this day. How did they decide to measure it? By temperature change. Since climate change is driven by global warming, let’s keep such warming to a level that helps us avoid the really bad stuff or dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system. And since such anthropogenic or human-caused interference started with the Industrial Revolution, let’s use preindustrial as our baseline, as what we will consider normal or not interfered with by human beings.
Guided by the science, Paris said the temperature goal should be 2 degrees Celsius (or 2C) above preindustrial levels, but that to have an even better chance to avoid dangerous anthropogenic interference we should work towards a stretch goal of 1.5C with minimal overshoot. Subsequent COPs have kept 1.5C at the forefront, and this is what I take to be stopping bad stuff.1
So here is my formulation. In the climate space stopping bad stuff means:
to keep warming to 1.5C above preindustrial levels, or with minimal overshoot that is quickly brought back down; we then continue to reduce beyond 1.5C to a level that is natural for our time.
When people are tempted to despair it is because they aren’t sure we can stop the bad stuff in time to avoid the really bad consequences, the run-away, tipping-point consequences, the ones that will turn our planet into something outside the range of human experience.
I will be making the case for why we can.
But we cannot be so captured by fear and despair and loss we miss seeing the fact that as we stop bad stuff we can and must set wrong right and make things better. And when we do this, we create vision-hope. And as we turn vision-hope into action-hope we overcome despair. We fight back fear.
To set wrong right means to make amends for past injustices from climate consequences. Making amends contributes to making things better.
But making things better is more than just making amends. Even without the need for making amends, justice calls for making things better.
The classic definition of justice, going back at least to Plato, is to give each their due. And we know in our hearts that we owe today’s children and subsequent generations a better world. As I will discuss in my next post, this Better Future Assumption gives rise to the Better Future Covenant.
Just like with beauty, hope has a symbiotic relationship with justice. Indeed, the three of them together are a triune symbiosis. We hope for justice, and such hope helps us create justice, which is beautiful. And because it is what we hope for, justice creates hope and beauty. When we overcome climate change, when we stop bad stuff, set wrong right, and make things better, hope and beauty spring forth like an inexorable law of the Universe.
We will explore this glorious relationship between hope and justice in a whole series of forthcoming posts. But for now take hope from the fact that in working together to overcome climate change we will be achieving the three actions of justice: stopping bad stuff, setting wrong right, and making things better for everyone and everything. With each step on this journey of overcoming climate change we get stronger together, and this gives us hope as we make our future come faster and our world more beautiful.
Scientists have become concerned that the consequences of an overshoot of 1.5C could be more impactful and longer lasting than they had hoped. However, these concerns arise in part from projections into the future that don’t include change at the speed and scale necessary brought about by what I call the Catalytic-4, the four catalytic sources of transformation, to be discussed in my 8th Introductory post.