Can We Keep Both Fascism and Climate Doom at Bay for Decades to Come?

Monthly dispatches by Stan Cox; art by Priti Gulati Cox

From CityLights Books

In Real Time: Chronicle of a Fate Unknown, Part 19

I’ve been arguing now for a year and a half that the enactment of bold new climate policies—bold enough to quickly drive US greenhouse-gas emissions down to zero—can succeed only if we defeat the looming threat of far-right authoritarianism. And today, the nation’s anti-democracy, fossil-fuel-loving political minority appears more determined than ever to gain enough power to turn us into a sweltering autocracy. We have just 11 months left to stop them.

But now, suppose for a moment that do succeed and thwart MAGA extremists’ attempt to gain power over the federal government’s three branches. The road from there to bold climate policies, and many other urgently needed measures, will remain as rough and twisty as ever. Groundswells of public pressure will still be required to convince the timid souls on Capitol Hill to defy corporate resistance and enact strong, effective policies. And even then, it will be a long, hard struggle. 

And it won’t be a one-and-done victory. Especially with a goal like eliminating greenhouse-gas emissions, laws will have to be protected from repeal for decades, and policies pursued with little or no interruption. That will require defeating anti-climate, anti-democracy forces in the Electoral College every four years while relegating them, through fair-and-square elections, to a permanent minority role in Congress. With that, we would essentially be living in a one-party state. Would we still be calling ourselves a democracy? 

Before addressing that question, let’s step back and have a look at why sweeping governmental intervention in the national economy is necessary in this greenhouse century, and what it will take to achieve it.

Drastic Measures

In the books The Green New Deal and Beyond and The Path to a Livable Future, I discussed in some detail the policies I believe will be essential to rapidly reducing carbon emissions while ensuring that society adapts well to diminishing inputs of fossil fuels. Reducing emissions will require ever lower caps on the extraction and use of oil, gas, and coal, along with deep transformation of our built environment and transportation systems. The phaseout of fossil fuels will have to be so rapid that the buildup of renewable energy capacity won’t be able to keep up: the country will have to operate on a much leaner energy diet. Therefore, adaptation will require the allocation of energy and material resources toward meeting society’s basic needs, rationing of fuels and electricity, provision of universal basic services, and other policies. 

Needless to say, such an array of policies would constitute a dramatic intervention of federal power into the economy and society—dramatic, but not unprecedented. From 1933 through 1945, Washington took actions just as drastic, and on a similar scale. Such steps were widely viewed as necessary in the face of the tandem existential emergencies the nation faced during those years: the Great Depression and World War II. 

The United States was able to enact and implement those policies partly because the government was under one-party control. Throughout those dozen years, President Franklin Roosevelt and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress generally accepted that drastic measures were necessary and carried them out. (Exceptions occurred on those occasions when Democrats representing states in the Jim Crow South killed labor and civil-rights bills that they felt would weaken their ability to oppress Black people. Most notorious were the numerous House and Senate votes on anti-lynching legislation in 1934–35, in which southern Democrats killed every bill.) 

The New Deal and wartime policies of the 1940s demonstrated the possibility of sweeping federal action under one-party governance. Today’s predicament is more . . . shall we say . . . complicated. In 2022, even with full control of the White House and Congress, Democratic lawmakers struggled to pass even the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act with its tepid provisions for a Green New Deal Lite (while shoring up voting rights was simply not possible). Passage of much bolder climate legislation, such as a fossil-fuel phaseout and planned resource allocation, will be possible only with stronger climate-friendly majorities in Congress, backed by a president who is prepared to take down the fossil-fuel industries once and for all. Even then, success is far from guaranteed. 

(Here, a caveat is needed. The New Deal years marked the US government’s last attempt to pursue social and environmental policies while enjoying freedom from the fiscal and moral constraints that come with being a military and imperialist superpower. In the 80 years that followed, under both Democratic and Republican administrations, militarism and imperialism have sapped our domestic resources and wreaked incalculable suffering abroad. Now we have bipartisan US endorsement of Israel’s war on Palestine, which, as of November 19, had killed almost 15,000 civilians (including more than 6,000 children). The New York Times finds that “the pace of death during Israel’s campaign has few precedents in this century”; 34 UN experts have labeled the war a “genocide in the making.” With its complicity in this catastrophe, Washington’s moral standing has reached a new low. Whatever our government claims, both its history and the $3 billion in warmaking funds that it continues to send Israel each year show that any support US officials may express for democracy and justice is only partial and applies only within the 50 states. The pursuit of pluralistic democracy, whether in the United States or worldwide, will continue to be left up to “We the People.”)  

Teetering Between Democracy and Autocracy

Far too many Americans remain actively opposed to acting on climate change. Approximately 30 percent of respondents to a recently published Pew Research Center poll oppose US efforts to become carbon-neutral by 2050 and would instead give priority to the expansion of US oil, gas, and coal production. Though far from a majority, they speak for tens of millions of people, and one of the two major political parties is enthusiastically advancing their cause. They would probably consider themselves disenfranchised under any future government that carries out a multi-decade, irreversible phaseout of fossil fuels. I confess that my heart wouldn’t bleed for them at all. Minorities who advocate regressive policies that have been rejected by the national majority do not and should not get their way. For example, I suspect that millions of Americans also would like to return to the days of racial segregation, but that’s not going to happen. 

That said, there’s the additional problem that we don’t live in the realm of individual issues anymore. In recent times, climate denial, Covid-19 denial, election denial, racial bigotry, attraction to authoritarian forms of power, and other dangerous stands are all closely aligned. If you buy into one, you probably buy into the whole package; you don’t want just the three-dollar burger; you get the $5.79 combo. 

Constituents and elected leaders who would work for an economy dedicated to controlling and eventually eliminating greenhouse gases would also promulgate lots of other policies that are anathema to the MAGA right—and, by extension, to the economic, social, and political segments of society that it dominates. In a way, the federal government under ecologically sound majority rule would become a photographic negative of notorious state governments like those in Florida and Texas that have come under one-party MAGA control. Where would such a government lie, then, along the spectrum from pluralistic democracy to autocracy? It’s not an easy question.

I’ve recently had the good fortune to contribute a chapter to Democracy in a Hotter Time, a volume edited by David Orr that was published in September by MIT Press. In the book, a wide range of authors propose policies for strengthening and expanding US democracy in the face of multiplying threats, while both curbing and adapting to climate change. But in Chapter 5, Ann Florini, Gordon LaForge, and Anne-Marie Slaughter provide a reality check, stressing the uphill battle that decisive climate action would face:

Even a healthy US democracy would struggle mightily to respond effectively to the
“wicked” problem of climate change. As humans, we would have to overcome innate cognitive limitations to accept the connection between everyday actions like driving and attenuated effects on climate. As voters, we would have to appreciate the importance of addressing a problem with limited immediate salience primarily for the benefit of future generations. Politicians would need the courage to fight for policies that would yield no visible benefits for voters in their political lifetimes. Change would have to occur over the tooth-and-nail opposition of the fossil fuel companies.  

Given those obstacles, authors of several chapters acknowledge that ambitious climate mitigation policies could be implemented more easily by an authoritarian state than by a pluralistic democracy. But all seem to agree that a healthy, multiparty democracy is necessary if we’re to build a society that operates within critical ecological limits while also guaranteeing justice, equity, and sufficiency to all people. 

Fascism’s Back in Fashion

There are precious few ideas today on which there’s broad agreement among politicians, media, and voters across the political spectrum. One of those rare points of bipartisan concurrence is the belief that democracy is at risk in the 2024 presidential election.  And it’s not just a social media meme. Our political system indeed appears to be teetering at the midpoint between democracy and fascism, and it could tip either way in coming years. 

Since 2017, the organization Protect Democracy has been tracking the ups and downs of the American polity with its Authoritarian Threat Index. The index, defined as a “score from 1 (healthy democracy) to 5 (total dictatorship),” is derived from surveys of academic scholars who study political institutions or democratic decline in countries around the world. In May 2017, the index stood at around 2, on the borderline between “low threat” and “significant threat” of authoritarianism or worse. It then increased steadily, month by month, until it rose above 3—into the “severe threat” zone—in September 2020. In February 2021, after a semi-peaceful transfer of presidential power, it fell back into the “significant threat” zone, but ominously, the index has once again been rising over the past year, threatening a return to “severe.”

It’s not only among right-wing officeholders and candidates that repudiation of democracy is endemic; it is also being expressed by a significant minority of voters. In a 2022 Ipsos survey of more than 8,600 US adults, 19 percent agreed either “strongly” or “very strongly” with the following statement: “Having a strong leader for America is more important than having a democracy.” Another 23 percent agreed “somewhat” with that statement. Those results, the authors noted, suggest that more than 100 million adults in this country would consider giving up on democracy and accepting authoritarian or even fascist rule—a petrifying prospect. 

Regarding a couple of one-word terms often applied to Trump’s and his followers’ vision, former US secretary of labor Robert Reich recently argued that “‘Authoritarianism’ isn’t adequate. It is fascism.” He pointed to five widely accepted core elements of fascism: rage against cultural elites; racist nationalism; subjugation of women and LGBTQ people; rejection of democracy, the rule of law, and equal rights in favor of a strongman; and glorification of brute strength and violence. All of these elements permeate MAGA politics.

Evidence of that last item in the list—what political philosopher Mark Reiff describes as fascism’s “commitment to a destructive and bloody rebirth of society”—is unfolding right now, day by day. A poll released last month by the Public Religion Research Institute found 23 percent of respondents agreeing with the statement that “true American patriots may have to resort to violence in order to save our country”—a frightening increase over the 15 percent agreement expressed just two years earlier. 

The real-world impacts of these inflamed attitudes are evident in a trend that Reuters has reported as “the biggest and most sustained increase in political violence since the 1970s” in the US. Robert Pape, the director of the University of Chicago’s Project on Security and Threats, told Slate last month, “What our data and analysis shows is that 2024 is going to be a very, very volatile year. That is, there is serious reason to be concerned about rising political violence in 2024.”

I agree with my fellow authors of Democracy in a Hotter Time that we need to achieve both pluralistic democracy and strong measures against greenhouse-gas emissions if we’re to have a livable future. But on both counts, trends are running against us. Reich’s five features of fascism essentially constitute the Republican Party platform. And climate action has become a casualty of the battle over the nation’s political future. To keep the hard right out of power by lawful means requires defeating it at the polls, soundly and consistently, into the long future—in effect, ensuring that the party they control becomes noncompetitive in national elections. 

Paradoxically, such total victory over an anti-democratic political movement would not necessarily be a triumph of democracy. So argue Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their recent book Tyranny of the Minority. Citing many historical precedents, they write, “Democracy at its heart is about competition, so short-circuiting it for too long can be self-defeating.” While accepting that conclusive defeat of malignant political forces is urgently necessary in emergencies like the one we face today, they argue that non-competitive democracy can’t be sustained for the long term. In this view, for example, the US would need a new party to emerge in the coming years, one committed to multiracial democracy and capable of competing with the Democratic Party in national elections.    

What does all this mean for the perfectly reasonable proposition that anti-democratic movements must be defeated if we are to preserve prospects for a livable Earth? I believe it’s more urgent than ever to prevail over the would-be autocrats. But how we should proceed if, sometime in, say, 2025, we see US democracy, warts and all, survive to fight another round? I have no answer to that question; I guess we’ll cross that bridge when we get there, should we be so lucky.

By then, we’ll be almost halfway through the 2020s, the very decade in which we were supposed to make dramatic progress in purging fossil fuels from US society but have not. Intense grassroots activism will be required if we’re to finally drag the federal government across the climate starting line—especially if we’re locked, politically, in a rearguard action to keep the fascists at bay for decades to come.

Scientists Pursue Climate Activism Despite Violent Threats

Monthly dispatches by Stan Cox; art by Priti Gulati Cox

From City Lights Books

In Real Time: Chronicle of a Fate Unknown, Part 18

Last month, 29 of the world’s prominent scientists published a paper in the journal Science Advances showing conclusively that given the worsening of climate change, biodiversity loss, and five other global emergencies generated by industrial society, “Earth is now well outside of the safe operating space for humanity.” It has been known for years that we are in big trouble, but this paper put an exclamation point on the massive trove of research showing that our species’ abuse of the Earth is causing ecological breakdown. And the world’s rich nations pretend nevertheless that everything is just fine.

I spent the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic writing a book about how the roots of the pandemic, the climate emergency, and systemic racism were entangled, and all three had to be dealt with together. In it, I speculated that we would be able take some lessons from the events of 2020—the early-pandemic spirit of care and mutual aid at the grassroots, the largest protests in U.S. history in response to the murder of George Floyd, the free-and-fair national election, with the highest turnout in history, carried out under extreme conditions—and apply them to the struggle for climate action.

Well, that hope had a pretty short shelf life, didn’t it? We all saw what happened. For political reasons, a large share of the U.S. population started pretending that it was Covid vaccines and masks, not the virus itself, that were deadly, and from there, the plague of upside-down science spread. Climate change eventually got swept up in it; in the far right’s collective imagination, Covid lockdowns were morphing into nonexistent “climate lockdowns,” and attempts to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions were the work of “woke CEOs.”

Leaders and influencers of the U.S. extreme right have continued to feed their followers a steady diet of what has come to be called “conspiracy theory,” much of it sounding more like bad science fiction (or maybe a better term would be “science-free fiction”). Tens of millions of Americans continue buying into these tall tales—not necessarily believing them, but very much believing in them as an effective means of fomenting political upheaval.

Deepening acceptance of science-free fiction by a large, fanatical segment of society is not just hurting prospects for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. It has become a more immediate menace to society, spurring an escalation of verbal attacks and violent threats against researchers who publish evidence that human-induced climate change is real. Growing numbers of scientists are braving this barrage of abuse, however. They’re turning to nonviolent climate protest, including civil disobedience, to demand that governments take bold action to snuff out the use of oil, gas, and coal.

Create Your Own Science Adventure!  

In August, a Washington Post-University of Maryland poll of U.S. residents who had been affected by extreme weather found that, among respondents who identified with the left portion of the political spectrum, hefty majorities—68 to 85 percent— believed that today, human-made climate change is a “major factor” contributing to various disasters, including heat waves, droughts, wildfires, severe storms, and flooding. Of those on the right, only 28 to 35 percent of respondents saw climate change as a major factor in such disasters.

This widespread rejection of science didn’t happen spontaneously. It was heavily fertilized by political propaganda. In one recent example, Media Matters for America recently described 24 different attacks that high-profile rightist media launched against climate science just between June 7 and 19. In the attacks, Fox News and Newsmax personalities, far-right radio hosts, oil- and gas-company flacks, and conspiracy theorists tied themselves into illogical knots arguing that record wildfires in Canada and unprecedented heat and humidity then afflicting much of the U.S. population had nothing to do with greenhouse gases.

Joining those longstanding sources of science-free fiction is one that would have been somewhat surprising as recently as a few years ago: Silicon Valley. The economist and New York Times opinion columnist Paul Krugman wrote recently, “If you regularly follow debates about public policy, especially those involving wealthy tech bros, it’s obvious that there’s a strong correlation among the three C’s: climate denial, Covid vaccine denial and cryptocurrency cultism.”

What explains the prevalence of these sorts of erroneous beliefs (or perhaps, knowingly false claims) among Silicon Valley’s plutocrats—people who have little or no background in climatology, epidemiology, or monetary theory? Krugman writes that the vast fortunes these folks have accumulated in the digital technology business induce in them a belief “that you’re smarter than anyone else, so you can master any subject without working hard to understand the issues.” This kind of arrogance “may be especially rife among tech types who got rich by defying conventional wisdom.”

The create-your-own-science attitude of the rich tech bros has increasingly infected the social networks that some of their own companies created. The Green New Deal heyday of 2018–19, in which climate denial finally appeared to be fading and demands for mitigation rising, seems far back in the mists of time today. In 2020, Covid-19 crowded global warming out of media and politics altogether, and for a while, neither climate change nor climate-change denial received much attention. But in the past year or two, a fresh epidemic of climate disinformation and denial has torn through the online world.

In July 2022, media watchdogs noticed that suddenly the denial hashtag #ClimateScam had become the top result when users of Twitter (now X) searched only for the single word “climate”. That was despite the fact that tags like #ClimateEmergency and #ClimateCrisis were enjoying far more activity and engagement than #ClimateScam. Then, last fall, with the approach of the COP27 climate summit, #ClimateScam and related propaganda surged even further. At the same time, the platform’s new owner, tech bro Elon Musk, was busy gutting his staff and their content-moderation practices. Few saw that as mere coincidence

Nor was it a fluke that in the run-up to COP27, fossil fuel-related groups bought $3 to $4 million worth of disinformation-filled advertising on Facebook and Instagram, according to the alliance Climate Action Against Disinformation (CAAD). Among the big spenders were two front groups for the American Petroleum Institute called Energy Citizens and Energy for Progress, along with the fossil-fuel pipeline company Enbridge and America’s Plastic Makers.

In late November, 2022, as soon as the COP27 conference wrapped up, the prominence of #ClimateScam and the spending on oily Facebook ads evaporated. But the overall flood of climate denial and science-free fiction has by no means subsided; instead, it has proliferated and grown far more menacing.

Racism, Misogyny, and Death Threats

Verbal assaults on the idea of anthropogenic climate change run through a spectrum, from polite but unfounded arguments against the global scientific consensus, to increasingly unhinged accusations of Deep State fabrication, on to aggressive personal, racist, and/or misogynist attacks on climate activists and researchers, and finally to threats of physical violence.

A few years ago, Scientific American reported this under the headline “As Climate Scientists Speak Out, Sexist Attacks Are on the Rise”:

Threats of death, rape and other forms of violence have left a number of researchers feeling concerned for their safety. They worry about opening envelopes with handwritten addresses and answering phone calls from unfamiliar numbers. Anonymous emails that try to entice a response cause agitation. One prominent researcher who has spoken about being harassed asked not to be quoted in this article. She worries it would trigger a new wave of trolling. Her concern goes beyond online attacks and hateful phone calls. She’s worried for her safety. The attacks aren’t new. But some scientists say the harassment they’re enduring is becoming more personal, increasingly sexist and less focused on their scientific conclusions.

Reporting for Guardian US last December, Oliver Milman noted that although Twitter had previously “proved a cherished forum for climate scientists to share research, as well as for activists seeking to rally action to halt oil pipelines or decry politicians’ failure to cut pollution,” it had recently become a swamp of “climate misinformation, spam and even threats” targeting climate researchers.

In a late-2022 survey of almost 500 climate scientists worldwide, the climate justice organization Global Witness found that almost 40 percent had been targeted with online harassment or abuse in response to their work, and 8 percent had received death threats. One of them reported, “The death (and rape) threats were extended to my children.”

Climate researchers are frequently quoted in the press these days, given the onrush of unprecedented climatic events, and that brings even more targeting. Among those who told Global Witness that they were appearing at least once a month in the media, almost three-fourths had experienced online attacks. The report added that

. . . this abuse is having serious detrimental impacts. Half (48 percent) of the 183 who had received abuse said it had made them less productive at work, 41 percent said they are less likely to post on social media about the climate, and over a fifth (21 percent) said it had made them dread work. Meanwhile one in five (21 percent) of those impacted by online hate said the attacks had made them fear for their personal safety.

Researchers reported explicitly racist attacks, and, of the women polled, 13 percent said they had been threatened with sexual violence. Helene Muri, a Norwegian climate scientist and co-author on IPCC reports, told Global Witness that in the worst attacks, “they say that they are going to hunt me down and do various things to me. And what I appreciate even less than that is when they are calling my father up and saying various things to him.”

The Science Media Center has published a guide titled, “Advice for Researchers Experiencing Harassment.” It urges scientists to continue speaking publicly despite being hounded online, because “if you stop engaging with the media you may struggle to reach out to the wider public, thereby creating a vacuum of information that those critical of your research can exploit.” The guide does, however, acknowledge the danger that researchers face. And on the question of whether they should engage directly with online attackers, the guide is emphatic: “The answer is almost always no. The advice from experts in this area, including the police, is to avoid engagement with these extreme critics.” (emphasis added)

Scientists Take the Initiative

Far from being cowed by online threats, increasing numbers of researchers are publicly supporting on-the-ground climate activism. In 2021, more than 400 climate scientists signed an open letter condemning the increased criminalization of nonviolent climate protest by governments around the world. One prominent signer of the letter, Julia Steinberger at the University of Lausanne in Switzerland, who works in ecology and ecological economics, toldthe Guardian, “As scientists, we have a duty to stand with the activists who are paying attention to the science, rather than these governments, who seem to be more swayed by powerful economic interests than by the life chances of their own citizens.”

Many scientists have concluded that they must go further, not only supporting protesters but also becoming climate activists themselves. Among hundreds of researchers who have helped write the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s massive, increasingly alarming reports, one in four reported having taken part in grassroots climate protests. But, noting that such action has so far had minimal effect, six scientists, including Steinberger, authored a paper last year in which they called on their colleagues around the world to up the ante with “carefully targeted and peaceful civil disobedience,” in which “scientists accept the risk of arrest for conscientious but potentially unlawful acts.”

The network Scientist Rebellion has taken the global lead in labcoat-clad protest and civil disobedience. In May, more than 1,000 scientists took to the streets, with protests in more than twenty countries across North America, Europe, Africa, Latin America, and Australia. A significant number of them were arrested for civil disobedience in at least five European countries: Portugal, Italy, Denmark, Norway, and France. Scientist Rebellion rightly takes the position that their activists in the Global North should take the lead in civil disobedience because the consequences of their being arrested are likely less severe; furthermore, their own home countries carry the bulk of responsibility for having created the climate emergency in the first place.

The climate movement as a whole, including its increasing numbers of scientists, is collectively brushing off online hatred and turning instead to vigorous confrontation with the sources of ecological breakdown. As UN Secretary-General António Guterres said in a press release announcing a frightening new IPCC report last year, “Climate activists are sometimes depicted as dangerous radicals.  But the truly dangerous radicals are the countries that are increasing the production of fossil fuels.”

A Future Generation Shows Up Ahead of Schedule

Monthly dispatches by Stan Cox; art by Priti Gulati Cox

From City Lights Books

In Real Time: Chronicle of a Fate Unknown, Part 17

The wording in Article IX, Section 1, of Montana’s constitution couldn’t be clearer: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.” Accordingly, in April, a district court judge in Yellowstone County voided a permit for a natural-gas-fired power plant under construction there. Over its lifetime, it would have released an estimated 23 million tons of planet-roasting carbon dioxide and that, ruled the judge, was incompatible with a “clean and healthful environment” in Montana or, for that matter, anywhere else.

Within a week, the state legislature had voted to reinforce a 2011 law barring the consideration of climate change in policymaking and so allowing the construction of the power plant to resume. But that wasn’t the end of the matter. Last month, the lawmakers were slapped down a second time when another district judge ruled in favor of a group of 16 youthful Montanans in a suit filed in 2020 seeking to strike down that very 2011 anti-climate legislation.

In her ruling, Judge Kathy Seeley wrote, “Montana’s climate, environment, and natural resources are unconstitutionally degraded and depleted due to the current atmospheric concentration of [greenhouse gases] and climate change.” She added that “every additional ton of greenhouse gas emissions exacerbates Plaintiffs’ injuries and risks locking in irreversible climate injuries.” The state, she made it abundantly clear, is obligated to correct such a situation.

The plaintiffs, who were all in their teens or younger when their suit, Held v. Montana, was filed three years ago, are represented by a nonprofit group, Our Children’s Trust. Since 2011, it has been pursuing climate action on behalf of this country’s youth in the courts of all 50 states. The Montana case was simply the first to go to trial. The second, a climate case against the Hawaii Department of Transportation, is scheduled to begin next summer.

Matt Rosendale, a Montana Republican serving in the House of Representatives, responded to the Held v. Montana decision with the worst sort of condescending bluster. “This is not a school project,” he insisted. “It’s a courtroom… Judge Seeley did a huge disservice to the courts and to these youths by allowing them to be used as pawns in the Left’s poorly thought-out plan to ruin our power grid and compromise our national security in the name of their Green New Fantasy.”

The only fantasy, however, was Rosendale’s characterization of the proceedings. The plaintiffs’ case was overwhelmingly persuasive, with extensive testimony from climate and pediatric health experts showing that people younger than 25 were going to be especially vulnerable to the many impacts climate change is going to have on physical and psychological health. In her ruling, Seeley summarized some of the damages to which the plaintiffs had testified.

All of the young people in the suit were afflicted with allergies and asthma (three especially severely) and had suffered significant health problems thanks to the unavoidable inhalation of smoke from North America’s ever-increasing wildfires. Much of that damage had occurred during Montana’s horrendous fire seasons of 2017 (when more than 2,400 fires burned across 1.4 million acres of the state) and 2021 (when more than 2,500 fires burned almost 1 million more), followed, of course, by the smoke from the devastating and ongoing Canadian wildfires of this spring and summer.

Three Indigenous plaintiffs testified that climate disruption has already ensured that their traditional sources of food and medicinal plants would become ever scarcer. As a result, it is preventing them from taking part in their usual cultural practices, including ones involving increasingly scarce snow. As the lawsuit put it, the changing planet has “disrupted tribal spiritual practices and longstanding rhythms of tribal life by changing the timing of natural events like bird migration.”

Testimony also showed that the extreme heat of recent summers, only expected to grow more severe in the coming years, is threatening the health of the plaintiffs, all of whom engage in extensive outdoor work or recreation. Those who participate in competitive sports have seen their training severely curtailed by summer heat (and for one of them, a Nordic skier, by lack of winter snow). The plaintiffs’ ability to hunt and fish, especially important in Montana, is being dramatically limited by drought and wildfire.

Some of the plaintiffs testified that increasing damage from storms, flooding, wildfires, and drought will make it ever more difficult, if not impossible, to keep their family’s property intact for coming generations. And backed by the testimony of several experts, the young plaintiffs explained how the increasing chaos brought on by climate change had left them with feelings of deep distress, despair, and loss.

Congressman Rosendale undoubtedly read none of their testimony, which made it so much easier for him to callously dismiss their plight, while accusing them of being witless “pawns” of far greater forces. How, after all, could anyone have been left unmoved by the poignant testimony of 20-year-old Olivia Vesovich? She told the court that, given the severe and ever worsening impact of climate change, she “would not want to make a child endure that. It is one of the greatest sadnesses of my life — and my family is one of the most important parts of my life — that I may not be starting a family of my own. It breaks my heart, it really does.”

Plaintiffs from the Future

From the 1990s through the first two decades of this century, academic discussion of “intergenerational climate justice” weighed the interests of the “current generation” that may or may not do what’s needed to end greenhouse gas emissions against “future generations” lacking any say in the matter. They will nonetheless suffer its increasingly severe consequences. (Of course, those of us in privileged societies have also largely ignored the billions of people globally with no say in the matter and so the functional equivalents of those “future generations.”)

Now, with heat waves, megafires, increasingly severe freak storms, and floods striking ever more often, those at-risk future generations are finally beginning to show up, well ahead of schedule. That, after all, is just what the Held v. Montana plaintiffs are, as are the young Global South activists who shook up the most recent world climate summits by refusing to accept the selling-out of their future.

Though it’s cited often enough in relation to climate change, there’s nothing magical about the year 2050. It’s just a nice, round, midcentury number. That’s undoubtedly why world climate negotiators have chosen it as the target year for national pledges to drive greenhouse gas emissions down to zero.

Come 2050, the Montana plaintiffs will only be in their thirties and forties. By that time, they should know whether the world acted boldly enough in the 2020s to turn the climate emergency around.

In court, the young plaintiffs expressed deep concern not only for their own health and well-being but for those of their potential children and grandchildren. What kind of future will they and their kids face? For one thing, those still living in Montana in 2050 can expect to deal with wildfire and smoke disasters far worse than the ones endured in 2017, 2021, or 2023. Predictions are that, without drastic action, between 2041 and 2070, much of Montana will see a 600% increase in the incidence of “very large wildfires” — those covering 20 square miles or more.

The fire risk will have been raised largely by intensifying global heat. Consider this warning from U.S. government scientists, should the world economy carry on with business-as-usual in the coming decades:

“[A] teenager in eastern Montana in 2075 might experience maximum summer temperatures that his or her grandparents would have had to travel to the Mojave Desert to see, [while] a child born in southern Texas in 2060 might experience as much as 6 weeks per summer when maximum temperatures are hotter than his or her grandparents experienced just once per year. And in this same future, a child in the southeastern United States can expect to spend more than half of his or her summer experiencing heat waves that would have occurred only 3 days per year for his or her grandparents.”

Unless there are steep reductions in global carbon emissions, Montana will be eternally burning, while much of the country to the south and east grows even hotter and more unbearably humid. So, should young Montanans migrate north to Canada? At one time, that seemed like a viable climate escape route. But in 2023, with a large share of the U.S. population inhaling smoke from the extraordinarily vast and intense wildfires burning across that country, month after month, northward migration could just be a jump from the frying pan into the all-too-literal fire.

A Constitutional Right to a Future

Such dire forecasts are based on worst-case “business-as-usual” scenarios, and that’s important. After all, catastrophe is not inevitable. If today’s youth find themselves facing such nightmares in the 2050s, it will be because our nation and the rest of the world didn’t act in a necessary fashion in this decade. Such conditions can indeed be prevented, but only if the climate struggle intensifies.

When the Montana 16 filed their suit in 2020, only two of them were old enough to vote in that fall’s election. But as Judge Seeley ruled, they all had standing to challenge the fossil-fuel juggernaut in a court of law. And so far, they’re winning.

Amber Polk, assistant professor of law at Florida International University, focuses her studies on new legal claims by the environmental rights movement. She recently wrote a short history of “green amendments” — constitutional provisions like the section of Article IX on which Held v. Montana relied. Hawaii, Illinois, Massachusetts, Montana, and Pennsylvania all added such provisions to their state constitutions in the 1970s, as environmentalism was surging. But in the 1980s and 1990s, legal cases based on green amendments foundered until, in 1999, the Supreme Court of — you guessed it! — Montana struck down laws that permitted water pollution, basing their decision on the constitutional “right” of state residents “to a clean and healthful environment.”

Fourteen years later, Pennsylvania’s Supreme Court relied on a similar green amendment to strike down a law permitting hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) statewide. Until Held v. Montana, though, green amendments had not been used to challenge laws explicitly affecting climate policy. Count on one thing, however: they will be widely tested in the coming years (though a conservative, anything-but-environmentalist Supreme Court could prove a problem in wielding them).

The Montana case, writes Polk,

“sets a groundbreaking precedent for climate litigation and demonstrates a new way in which green amendments can be invoked to elicit environmental change. It suggests that in other states with green amendments, state laws cannot forbid the consideration of greenhouse gas emissions and their climate impact during environmental review… In the states that have green amendments, climate advocates will certainly rely on the Montana youth case as they challenge state laws that promote climate change.

And expect ever more challenges in places where such green amendments exist. New York typically passed one last year and 13 other states — some red like Montana, some blue, some purple — are considering them, according to Polk.

Unfortunately, only limited reductions of greenhouse gases can be achieved via state-by-state challenges to bad laws. Congressional action would be needed to, for example, achieve the most essential policy of all: a rapid, mandatory phase-out of oil, natural gas, and coal nationwide. You would, however, need a very different Congress to have a hope in hell of passing such a bill. Still, such a phase-out is a goal of Juliana v. United States, another youth climate lawsuit, originally filed in federal court in 2015 and still pending after eight long years.

In that case, 21 plaintiffs, aged seven to 19 (at the time of its filing) and backed by Our Children’s Trust, allege that the federal government has permitted the continued extraction and burning of fossil fuels despite knowing that they cause “dangerous concentrations of CO₂ in the atmosphere and a dangerous climate system, and irreversible harm to the natural systems critical to Plaintiffs’ rights to life, liberty, and property.” These activities, it adds, “unconstitutionally favor the present, temporary economic benefits of certain citizens, especially corporations, over Plaintiffs’ rights to life, liberty, and property.”

In Juliana, the youthful plaintiffs are asking the courts to order the federal government to take wide-ranging, ambitious climate action, including “to prepare and implement an enforceable national remedial plan to phase out fossil fuel emissions and draw down excess atmospheric CO₂.”

Three administrations — Obama’s, Trump’s, and now Biden’s — have vigorously fought back against the youths’ case and, in 2021, it appeared doomed when an appeals court ruled that the plaintiffs lacked standing. This summer, however, Juliana came back from the dead when a federal judge in Oregon ruled that the plaintiffs could proceed to trial after amending their filing. It remains in limbo, however, thanks to continued fierce opposition from President Biden’s Department of Justice. As CNN reported, the DOJ “has argued there is no federal public trust doctrine that creates a right for a stable climate system for U.S. citizens.”

Such a refusal to take climate disruption seriously came even as the president was touring the country and bragging about energy and electric-vehicle projects related to the climate provisions in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act. Biden, it seems, is happy to take credit for limited green actions, but isn’t faintly ready to plan for truly phasing out fossil fuels and so keeping the world livable through this century and beyond. So, give some credit to the young who are pushing him, the courts, and Congress to ensure that they have a future worth living for. In truth, nothing matters more than that.

The Hubris of Plutocrats: They Can’t Escape the Heat That’s Coming

Monthly dispatches by Stan Cox; art by Priti Gulati Cox

From City Lights Books

In Real Time: Chronicle of a Fate Unknown, Part 16

The future is here. A study recently published by a team of British and Dutch scientists found that this summer’s horrific heat waves “would have been virtually impossible to occur in the US/Mexico region and Southern Europe if humans had not warmed the planet by burning fossil fuels.” More and more, it seems that heat waves, more than storms, flooding, or even wildfires, may finally be delivering the long-anticipated wake-up call that could rouse humanity from its lackadaisical attitude toward climate.

Like most of us, the world’s economic and political elites—the people who effectively have veto power over any vigorous response to global warming—have long been shielded from the worst impacts of heat waves by air-conditioning. Unlike most of us, though, they have also been protected from climate change writ large by their wealth and status—by what we might call “life-conditioning.” Now, global warming has become impossible for even them to ignore. But rather than demand reductions in greenhouse-gas emissions to protect future generations, they remain focused on reducing their own exposure to such hazards. Increasingly, they’re voting with their feet (or their private jets) in search of comfort and safety.

Flagstaff, Arizona, 7,000 feet above sea level and with summertime highs 25°F lower than those in Phoenix, has long been sought out as a haven from heat. In recent years, Flagstaff and environs have seen a surge of deep-pocketed house hunters seeking refuge from the dangerous 110°-plus urban heat islands of Phoenix and Tucson. The city’s mayor told the Guardian, “We don’t mind people moving to Flagstaff at all. But about 25 percent of our housing is now second homes. The cost of living is our number one issue. We don’t talk much about what climate change means for social justice. But where are low-income people going to live? How can they afford to stay in this city?” Such trends toward “climate gentrification” could well spike in the wake of this year’s heat waves. Other northerly cities, including Bangor, Maine, and Duluth, Minnesota, also are attracting seasonal climate migrants who are driving housing costs out of reach for residents with more modest incomes. Others are wandering farther afield, buying in Alaska or New Zealand.

Writing about Bangor’s new role as a cooling-off spot, Bloomberg columnist Conor Sen has pointed out an interesting non-climatic angle: “Historically, Florida and Arizona have welcomed winter travel from northerners, but the reverse may not necessarily be true. Jokes about ‘Florida man’ coming to town write themselves.”

Indeed, climate-induced migration waves are starting to merge with a growing trend of politically motivated relocation. Anti-government militia types and other political extremists have a long history of migrating to higher latitudes and higher elevations. Northern Idaho, for example, has always been a popular destination, especially for “preppers”: people and groups from various walks of life who, because they hate government or have a generalized fear of societal breakdown, make such out-of-the-way places home as they hunker down and prepare for whatever genre of cataclysm they think is coming. This year’s influx into the Idaho panhandle, reports the Washington Post’s Jack Jenkins, is notably heavy with white Christian nationalists.

Land Preservation for the Private-Jet Set

In a 2020 story headlined “Billionaire Cowboys Are Buying and Selling the Largest Ranches in America,” Jim Dobson reported in Forbes that the United States’ top private landowners possess, altogether, a total of almost 13 million acres, mostly in the West. They include tycoons in cable TV, other media, lumber, logging, sports, tobacco, military technology, and Subway sandwiches. Forbes also informed us that in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the land-loving rich flocked to higher, cooler ground, with “rentals and purchases, including vacation homes [increasingly] in Aspen, Colorado; Jackson, Wyoming; Park City, Utah; Big Sky, Montana; and Lake Tahoe, California,” all of which had already become heavily gentrified.

Jackson (colloquially, “Jackson Hole”) features prominently in a rip-roaring story on the “dissident right” by James Pogue in the February 2023 issue of Vanity Fair. The town and its surrounding landscape comprise the kind of place that highfalutin’ refugees have long been drawn to, given its climate and natural beauty, their own sense of privilege and apocalyptic beliefs, and, most recently, Covid-19:

Wealthy and well-connected preppers and back-to-the-landers have been moving west, many of them at least tangentially involved in the edgy online realm of thought known as the dissident right. Tech executives and crypto investors are creating secretive groups to help people “exit”—a term that has taken on almost mystical significance in some circles recently—from our liberal society, tech-dominated lives, and fraying system. And there are grander plans, for whole secessionist movements using crypto and decentralized autonomous organizations to build whole mini-societies.

Jackson is the seat of Teton County, where 80 percent of personal income is now derived from investment, and it shows. The colorful but often irritating cast of characters Pogue meets believe they are destined to become the founding parents of a new world, but they are mostly just doing regular rich-person stuff. By securing conservation easements, for example, the Jackson Hole Land Trust has protected 55,000 acres of private land from development, and this, writes Pogue, “has been very good for the surrounding ecosystems and very good for the private-jet class, who save millions in federal income tax.” But, he reminds us, a Jackson-style local economy couldn’t function without its “underclass of service workers, largely Latino, with little but cramped and irregular housing.”

A Jackson town council member told Pogue that the elite, distance-working interlopers had transformed the town, very much for the worse: “These people are getting paid a ton of money, they can get whatever services they want online, and they can have all these bodacious ski hills. . . . It’s just become another money pot to them.” The trend isn’t limited to Teton County. Pogue writes that it’s “unfolding across the expanse of the Greater Yellowstone region, the closest thing to a large, intact ecosystem left in the lower 48 states, which encompasses towns like Bozeman and Livingston, Montana, both undergoing their own upheavals.”

Float or Burrow?

Descending from the Mountain West to sea level, we find an even more outlandish prepping scheme for the rich: the libertarian “seasteading” movement, which aims to build floating settlements or even entire cities at sea, as refuges lying beyond any national jurisdiction. Choose your future home! Will it be “a floating world of interlocking hexagonal islands, where power is harvested from waves and the sun”? Or a SeaPod in Panama that “offers an affordable luxury experience, while minimizing its footprint, allowing you to float above the waves”? Or a “smart floating home . . . wrapped in an eco-restorative 3D-printed coral reef”? Check out the Seasteading Institute’s current projects for more possibilities, including a planned sea-floor habitat off Mississippi’s Gulf Coast, equipped with data centers and research labs.

Finally, for millionaires who’d rather burrow into terra firma than abandon it, there are opportunities to make one’s home in a hardened underground bunker. The Survival Condo Project, a converted nuclear missile silo on the Kansas prairie, features a saltwater swimming pool, plus a movie theater, rock-climbing wall, bakery, bar, and dog park. Despite being underground, the 12-unit complex also offers a choice of scenery via “digital windows” in each condo, as well as protection against volcanic eruptions, nuclear attacks, and, of course, Kansas twisters. The complex is designed and equipped to allow residents to stay inside for five years without leaving, if need be. The price? Up to $3 million for the larger units, plus a monthly condo fee of up to $5,000. Many such subterranean bunker homes have been built across the country and world in recent years, including the $17.5 million Luxury Underground Doomsday Bunker in south Georgia; the Subterra Castle—another Kansas silo, this one topped by a medieval-style turret—and Atlas Missile Silo Home in upstate New York.

Few of the overprivileged preppers buying up property in Wyoming, Montana, Idaho, Kansas, and elsewhere made their money in the industries that produce or provide us with necessities like water, shelter, food (no, selling Subway sandwiches doesn’t count), and utility services. Most have drawn their wealth from the digital economy. I wonder what they’re thinking. That even if the fossil-fueled capitalism that has always supported them in high style crumbles, their accumulated riches can continue to reap for them the countless goods and services to which they’re accustomed? Some of them may really think society can achieve an optimum combination of artificial intelligence, robotics, 3D printing, drones, and crypto trading that will seamlessly sustain the cornucopian flow of goods and services to those who can afford them. Their hubris is appalling. In the words of Douglas Rushkoff, author of Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, they “have succumbed to a mindset where ‘winning’ means earning enough money to insulate themselves from the damage they are creating by earning money in that way.”

Blindness to material realities, unfortunately, is not unique to Silicon Valley tycoons and billionaire cowboys. Today, all of us depend heavily on countless metaphorical “black boxes,” from phones to air-conditioning to municipal water systems, whose production and workings are mostly a mystery to us. Furthermore, writes Vaclav Smil in his 2022 book How the World Really Works, the material and energetic underpinnings of civilization are of much less interest to most people these days than “the world of information, data, and images.” Accordingly, he writes, the greatest economic rewards go to work that’s “completely removed from the material realities of life on earth.” Therefore, it’s only natural that Silicon Valley types “believe that these electronic flows will make those quaint old material necessities unnecessary,” and that “‘dematerialization,’ powered by artificial intelligence, will end our dependence on shaped masses of metals and processed minerals, and eventually we might even do without the Earth’s environment.” Let them go ahead and think that, because, as my late mother would have said, “they’ve got another think comin’.”

Wind Farms Aren’t Farms 

There persists a seldom-spoken assumption that by simply manipulating ones and zeroes, photons and electrons, humans can sustain and continuously reproduce the material world we see around us today—a world that would never have existed without extravagant burning of fossil fuels, extraction of minerals, and harvesting of biological mass. Pointing to critical activities such as food production and processing, energy generation and distribution, housing construction, and manufacturing, Smil argues that such “existential imperatives do not belong to the category of microprocessors and mobile phones.”

Consider the current hoopla over artificial intelligence. Despite raising the risk of human extinction—a very real threat, according to a recent statement signed by hundreds of technology experts—AI continues to be widely plugged as a climate cure. This dubious claim is based on expectations that the technology will do things like “optimize how freight is routed, lower barriers to electric-vehicle adoption,” and “nudge consumers to change how we shop.” Even if AI were to accomplish such goals, they would have only very slight effects on global warming, if any. To make matters worse, the vast data centers in which AI programs are trained and run are ravenous energy consumers and cause gargantuan amounts of carbon dioxide to be emitted. With a rapid expansion of AI widely anticipated, the energy demand and emissions would probably become unmanageable. (No coincidence that AI guru Sam Altman once said that he and tech billionaire Peter Thiel had agreed that when catastrophe strikes, they’ll bug out and take one of their jets to Thiel’s fortified compound in cool New Zealand.)

Artificial intelligence, the goal toward which Silicon Valley has long striven, is inseparable from the physical resources from which it’s created. But we should relax, say its boosters, because the energy infrastructure on which every technology, including AI, depends will soon be “decarbonized.” Oh, really? Smil in his book and science writer Alice J. Friedemann in hers, Life After Fossil Fuels(2021), beg to differ. They, as well as other experts, have demonstrated that electricity, whether generated by renewable sources or not, is not capable of powering all the functions now powered by fossil fuels, much less supporting indefinite industrial growth.

Sustaining vast, all-renewable electricity systems indefinitely through the future will be no walk in the park. Unlike green plants and the animals that eat them—converters of solar energy that have sustained humans throughout our species’ time on Earth—photovoltaic panels, wind turbines, power grids, and batteries don’t spontaneously reproduce. Wind and solar equipment must be replaced every couple of decades, batteries even more often.

It would be nice if, during their functional lifetimes, these devices could produce seeds or tubers or cuttings or a litter of offspring, so that by the time they wear out, we’d have raised new generations of solar and wind farms, ready to go. But they don’t. Into the long future, societies will be continuously starting from scratch, gathering increasingly scarce materials from mines or recycling plants and re-creating the energy system. As Friedemann puts it, what we call “renewable” energy sources are really just “rebuildable,” and much of the materials they contain—like the composites from which wind towers’ giant blades are made—are not recyclable.

In short, there’s no refuge from material facts. The only way that we humans can live within nature’s resource restraints and ecological boundaries is to redirect our economies toward meeting all people’s basic needs, and away from producing material overabundance. We have no choice but to converge on an equitable, modest level of energy and resource use that’s enough to provide a decent life for all. Material and ecological boundaries are an unbending reality, and if any of us think we can run, drive, fly, climb, float, sail, dig, code, invest, invent, grow, or buy our way out of them, we’ve got another think comin’.

Catching Heat from Big Brother: Education and Climate in MAGAland

Monthly dispatches by Stan Cox; art by Priti Gulati Cox

From City Lights Books

In Real Time: Chronicle of a Fate Unknown, Part 15

In recent years, almost half of US state legislatures have passed laws that directly undermine local communities’ efforts to curb climate change. More prominent in the headlines, though, have been bills targeting public education and violating a host of constitutional rights, many of them now signed into law. These “culture war” laws don’t directly address climate. But unless they are struck down, they could permanently limit society’s ability to deal with the climate emergency.

In June, 16 young, environmentally conscious plaintiffs asked a Montana judge to strike down a law of the first type, one that bars state agencies from taking greenhouse-gas emissions into account when considering whether to issue permits for fossil fuel–related projects. They alleged that because their quality of life was being degraded by climate change, the law in question violates a sentence in Article IX of the state constitution: “The state and each person shall maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations.”

Unfortunately, surging attempts to MAGAfy red-state education systems could lead future cohorts of young people to become less eager than the Montana 16 to challenge the fossil-fuel juggernaut. Anya Kamenetz recently reported for Griston an especially egregious effort now underway: a campaign to completely purge the subject of climate change from public school curricula. The story focused on a May 3 school board hearing in New Jersey at which activists raised a ruckus over a board policy (of a kind adopted in various forms by 20 states) to encourage teaching of climate in public schools. The arguments they put forward were very much in the vein of those against, for example, teaching the truth about US racial history: climate education, the activists argued, constitutes “indoctrination,” is too “divisive,” and scares children.

Among the objectors were groups with histories of opposition to abortion, interracial marriage, and the teaching of critical race theory (though it is not even taught in public schools). Now those groups had climate in their crosshairs as well. The effort to purge climate education from the classroom isn’t likely to succeed in New Jersey, but it continues to come under threat in red states. For instance, legislation proposed or passed in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana, Texas, and South Dakota requires that “both sides” of the assertion that humans cause climate change must be taught (though there is no valid “other side”).

These stories highlight two complications in the struggle to finally push national climate policy across the starting line. First, red-state governments across the country are hitting us with a hailstorm of laws and regulations to boost fossil fuels and suppress climate action. Second, right-wing politicians and lobbying groups are pushing for legislation that will tighten state governments’ control over education, the media, local governments, and other institutions. The word “climate” may not show up in these latter measures, but they can nonetheless erode US society’s ability to deal with ecological breakdown in the decades ahead.

Crushing Local Climate Action

In his 2021 book Laboratories of Autocracy, David Pepper catalogued a decade of red-state attacks on a wide array of constitutional rights. Additional heavy-handed repression by state legislatures has been reported in the past two years, with an increasing share aimed at climate and energy issues. In two intersecting bands of territory reaching from Idaho to Florida and from Texas to Ohio, states under full GOP control are denying state contracts to companies that show insufficient fealty to the oil, gas, and coal industries, overruling local regulation of fossil fuels, criminalizing protest against fossil fuels, violating land rights to build pipelines, limiting pollution enforcement, and denying environmental justice to marginalized communities.

Prominent among legislative measures that undermine climate action are so-called preemption bills, which prohibit certain actions by local governments. Until recently, such measures were narrowly targeted. For example, laws now on the books in 24 states nullify city ordinances that ban hookups for gas furnaces, stoves, and water heaters in new home construction. But now two states have escalated the preemption game with sweeping new laws that could tie city and county governments’ hands on just about any issue. One of the states (predictably, given its anti-democratic reputation of late) is Texas, where the state assembly passed and Gov. Greg Abbott signed into law a bill that forbids any local regulations that aren’t explicitly authorized in the state’s labor, natural resources, agriculture, or insurance codes. The effect will be to make it much harder for cities to stop companies from discharging pollution into the air, water, or ground, including greenhouse-gas emissions. The bill, drafted in part by the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB), was by no means a homegrown grassroots initiative.

Florida, too, has presented its business owners the gift of a new preemption law. Under it, a company can file in court to overturn any local ordinance that it considers “unreasonable,” which immediately blocks enforcement while the case is pending. Just about every business owner believes that just about every local ordinance they don’t like is unreasonable, so the flood of suits filed under this law could drown out most local regulation, particularly environmental rules.

Draining Knowledge from Schools and Libraries

As of this spring, more than half of US state legislatures were weighing restrictive education laws. There’s been ample discussion about state laws and rules that seek to purge from K–12 education anything that would not have been taught in the 1950s. For example, we’ve seen “Don’t Say Gay” bills, most infamously in Florida, that ban talk about sexuality and gender; prohibit teaching of anything that, according to the Georgia General Assembly, could make a student feel “anguish, guilt, or any form of psychological distress” because of their race or gender; and punish schools that, in the Arizona legislature’s disingenuous opinion, “usurp the fundamental right of parents to direct the upbringing, education, health care, and mental health of their children.” And Florida (again) in 2022 banned more than 40 percent of math textbooks that publishers had submitted for approval. Math books? Really? Governor DeSantis explained, surreally, “They took the ‘woke’ out and sent us back normal math books.”

Meanwhile, the American Library Association reports that—as in fascist or totalitarian societies and dystopian fiction—2022 saw the largest number of attempted book bans since they started tracking in 2001. The book-banning frenzy is having destructive consequences for libraries: staff resignations, board meetings collapsing under the weight of book-banners’ rage, deep cuts in funding, and outright closings. For fear of being caught distributing prohibited books, some county governments in Tennessee, Texas, and yes, Florida have taken the drastic step of cutting off online access to their libraries’ entire digital collections.

Many of these laws will deprive students of an effective, well-rounded education, circumscribing what can be taught or even discussed in public schools. The goal is to render future electorates incapable of seeing through rightist propaganda—a kind of thought control meant to impose ideological limits on society as a whole. If MAGA state governments manage to discourage critical thinking and wall off an entire generation (or two) from vast areas of knowledge in history and science, large segments of the US population will be ill equipped to even understand climate change, much less to support action that could prevent ecological meltdown.

Colleges Too Are on the Chopping Block

For Big Brother–style control of public colleges and universities, Florida is the “canary in the coal mine,” as the American Association of University Professors wrote this May in a blistering report. A 2022 law dubbed by DeSantis the “Stop WOKE Act,” which is currently blocked and under appeal in federal court, would, among other things, bar from the college classroom any subject matter that might make students “feel guilt, anguish or other forms of psychological distress because of actions . . . committed in the past by other members of the same race, color, national origin or sex.” Note the similar wording (“feel guilt, anguish . . .”) in this law affecting colleges and the aforementioned Georgia law for K–12 schools, which passed around the same time.

And consider another sprawling bill to overhaul higher education that the Florida legislature passed and DeSantis signed into law. Fabiola Cineas writes on Vox that under the law, which took effect July 1,

general education courses cannot be based on “theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege are inherent in the institutions of the United States and were created to maintain social, political, and economic inequities.” Relatedly, the law requires schools to provide students with an “economic security report,” to inform them of which degrees correspond with the highest and lowest annual earnings.

 “Ultimately,” notes Cineas, “the lawmakers want the state’s public colleges and universities to develop goals to ‘promote the state’s economic development’ by attracting tech firms and venture capital to the state.”

Florida’s campaign to focus higher education on moneymaking at the expense of actual education is increasingly echoed in the broader MAGA world. Some are outright claiming that too many people are getting too much education. The 29-year-old right-wing extremist and popular talk-show host Charlie Kirk has written a book called The College Scam. In it, he urges high school graduates to go to a trade school or enlist in the military rather than go to college. And on air, he has said, “Sending your child to four-year college is a big risk. You’re going to play Russian roulette with their values.” Now, Kirk need no longer worry about kids who attend college in some states, where they’ll be shielded from having to learn about the real world or develop critical thinking skills.

Replacing Journalism with Propaganda, Education with Indoctrination

The threat extends well beyond education. Attacks on press freedom will further restrict the public’s awareness and knowledge. And the stepped-up suppression of other First Amendment rights—especially the right to political dissent and protest—will have a chilling effect on climate action. The better informed a society is, and the better its grounding in critical thinking, the more likely it is to take the threat posed by fossil fuels seriously and act accordingly. Conversely, the substitution of propaganda for journalism, and indoctrination for education, in MAGA-ruled states will blow a hole in any national effort to curb the heating of the Earth.

It’s important to add that the ability of states to override local control can play a crucial positive role when used to foster democracy and justice. States must, for instance, block local governments from practicing racial discrimination or violating state restrictions on weapons. One of the most important uses of state preemption has been to override local zoning laws that discriminate. Preemptive zoning laws could also be highly effective for reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, by quashing local zoning regulations that permit only single-family housing across large areas. Such zoning rules are largely responsible for suburban sprawl, long work commutes, infrastructure building booms, and construction of fully detached houses with bloated square footage—all of which vastly increase the average household’s carbon footprint. To promote climate protection and enhance quality of life and social justice, legislatures in Oregon, Washington State, California, Connecticut, Virginia, Maryland, Nebraska, and Utah have considered or passed laws that bar local governments from mandating solely single-family housing, either broadly or in certainly areas.

Such sensible state governance, while heartening to see, is clearly not a panacea, when not only Texas and Florida, but almost half of our state legislatures are aiming to establish one-party rightist regimes. On July 4, in one of his periodic essays that address this unnerving prospect, Ron Brownstein gave a historical analysis:

The general trend in American life from the 1950s through the 2010s was to nationalize more rights and to restrict the ability of states to curtail those rights. Now, though, the red states are engaged in the most concerted effort over that long arc to roll back the “rights revolution” and restore a system in which people’s basic civil rights vary much more depending on where they live. . . . The chasm between the civil rights and liberties available in blue and red states has widened to the point where it will be highly explosive for either side to attempt to impose its social regime on the other.

For now, the answer to a central question that Brownstein asks in the essay—“Can the United States continue to function as a single unified entity?”—seems to be “No way.” In those states where information and educational systems are increasingly being used as tools for thought control, more and more people will be going through life ill equipped to understand how much ecological peril humanity faces, or how deep a transformation will be required of us.

Those of us who are living under such regimes, as well as those who are not, must confront and overcome this movement—call it our century’s counterpart to the 1850s Know-Nothing Party—that is hell-bent on stripping away our rights to read, teach, learn, dissent, and acquire the collective knowledge essential to achieving an ecological transformation.

Needed: Either Degrowth or Two Earths

Monthly dispatches by Stan Cox; art by Priti Gulati Cox

From City Lights Books

In Real Time: Chronicle of a Fate Unknown, Part 14

In a May 30 essay for the New York Times titled “The New Climate Law Is Working. Clean Energy Investments Are Soaring,” one of the architects of last year’s Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), Brian Deese, wrote, “Nine months since that law was passed in Congress, the private sector has mobilized well beyond our initial expectations to generate clean energy, build battery factories and develop other technologies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.”

There’s just one problem. Those technologies aren’t going to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The only way to reduce emissions fast enough to prevent climate catastrophe is to phase out the burning of oil, gas, and coal by law, directly and deliberately. If, against all odds, the United States does that, we certainly will need wind- and solar-power installations, batteries, and new technologies to compensate for the decline of energy from fossil fuels. There is no reason, however, to expect that the process would work in reverse; a “clean-energy” mobilization alone won’t cause a steep reduction in use of fossil fuels.

I think top leaders in Washington are using green-energy pipe dreams to distract us from the reality that they have given up altogether on reducing US fossil fuel use. They’ve caved. This month’s bipartisan deal on the debt limit included a provision that would ease the permitting of energy infrastructure, including oil and gas pipelines like the ecologically destructive Mountain Valley fossil-gas pipeline so dear to the heart of West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin. Meanwhile, the Biden administration has issued new rules allowing old coal and fossil gas power plants to continue operating if they capture their carbon dioxide emissions and inject them into old oil wells. And under the IRA, those plants that capture emissions will receive federal climate subsidies, even if they use the carbon dioxide that’s pumped into the old wells to push out residual oil that has evaded conventional methods of extraction. And the IRA did not even end federal subsidies to fossil-fuel companies, which could have saved somewhere between $10 and $50 billion annually. Taken together, these policies could extend the operation of existing coal and gas power plants much further into the future.

GDP Growth? . . . I’m Sorry, That’s Not Available in Green

The 20th century’s fossil-fuel bonanza, with its extension well into this century, has enabled an explosion of economic growth that dwarfs anything humanity had previously achieved. Not coincidentally, it has also empowered our species to cause ecological degradation on an unprecedented scale. Humanity’s industrial and agricultural activities have an impact on the Earth that now exceeds, by a whopping 75 percent, nature’s ability to endure them without lasting damage. In other words, we would need almost two Earths to sustain a world economy this size over the long term—more than two, if it continues growing.

This is an old story, long ignored. But no more. The enormous resource requirements of the “green” energy rush are drawing a lot of public attention to a disturbing phenomenon discussed in last month’s installment of “In Real Time”: the insupportable damage that will be done to humanity and Earth in the quest for the mineral resources needed to build new energy infrastructure.

The unfathomable quantities of ores that will be mined to manufacture batteries required by electric vehicles and vast new power grids, and the damage and suffering that will result, have been the subject of many recent headlines. But if countries keep pushing for new energy systems big enough to fully support 100 percent of the economic activity now made possible by oil, gas, and coal, they will not only fail to stop greenhouse gas emissions but will fail to prevent the violation of other critical planetary boundaries, including biodiversity loss, nitrogen and phosphorus pollution, and soil degradation. We’ve already crossed those red lines, and we’ve kept going. Nothing can grow forever. But the mere attempt to keep the world’s big, rich economies growing into the long future will crush any hopes we may have for that very future.

At the heart of industry’s claim that the world’s economies can expand without limit is the idea of “green growth.” Like the fabled economist’s can opener, the green-growth assumption allows us to believe that the impossible can be made possible. In this case, that means generating greater aggregate wealth year by year while emitting fewer tons of greenhouse gases, extracting fewer tons of resources, and causing less ecosystem destruction, biodiversity loss, and other damage to the Earth and our fellow humans.

Here’s one of the many research papers from recent years finding that economic growth has never been achieved over large geographical areas for extended time periods without having serious environmental impacts. The authors further find that “there are no realistic scenarios” for sustaining a 2 percent annual growth rate without excessive resource extraction and greenhouse-gas emissions, even with a “maximal increase in efficiency of material use.”

To hear a less technical takedown of green growth, one that even politicians can understand, enjoy this presentation by social scientist Timothée Parrique to the European Parliament’s recent “Beyond Growth” conference. Much has been made of the fact that in recent decades, Europe’s GDP has grown steadily without increasing carbon dioxide emissions. This has prompted giddy claims that “decarbonization” of economic growth is finally happening. But producing more wealth with the same quantity of climate-altering emissions is not the same as reducing emissions.

One of Parrique’s slides at the conference showed that over the past 30 years, as wealth accumulated on the Earth’s surface while carbon dioxide accumulated in the atmosphere and oceans, the European Union achieved no significant reductions in the rate of carbon dioxide emissions—except from 2008 to 2014, the Great Recession years. The EU managed to reduce emissions only when their economy didn’t grow!

Societies must decide: do we want a growing GDP or a livable future? We can’t have both.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the US makes the right decision and pulls back within ecological limits. For starters, that would require rapidly phasing out fossil fuels and building a modest renewable energy system that would only partially compensate for the diminishing supply of fossil energy. Under those conditions, the economy would shrink, and it would need to keep shrinking until it’s small enough to stop transgressing ecological limits. At that point, we would have achieved, in the late ecological economist Herman Daly’s words, a steady-state economy.

That period of shrinkage would not be a recession. A reversal of growth induced by a deliberate, well-planned reduction in the supply of energy and material resources available to the economy would have effects wholly different from the misery caused by recessions—if we establish policies to guarantee material sufficiency and equity throughout society. That is to say, if we ensure that everyone has enough while preventing excessive production and consumption.

“A Planned, Selective, and Equitable Downscaling”

Last month, The Economist expended 1,400 words belittling the EU’s Beyond Growth conference and treating its attendees as recession-loving misanthropes. Alluding to recent GDP stagnation in some European nations, The Economistasked, “For what is Europe, if not a post-growth continent already?” Parrique took on their rhetorical question with this pithy response:

In reality, degrowth differs fundamentally from a recession. A recession is a reduction in GDP, one that happens accidentally, often with undesirable social outcomes like unemployment, austerity, and poverty. Degrowth, on the other hand, is a planned, selective and equitable downscaling of economic activities. . . . Associating degrowth with a recession just because the two involve a reduction of GDP is absurd; it would be like arguing that an amputation and a diet are the very same thing just because they both lead to weight loss.

This distinction between the reductions in economic activity that happen during recessions and those that would occur in degrowth economies is important. But to gain popular support for degrowth, still more elaboration is going to be required. Those of us who’ve grown up in industrial societies have been taught our whole lives that GDP growth is essential to everyone’s well-being and quality of life. This quasi-religious belief in the goodness of growth persists despite numerous studies published over the past three decades demonstrating that once people’s essential needs have been met, further GDP growth does not increase life satisfaction.

This disconnect between a nation’s overall economic growth and its residents’ quality of life is hardly surprising when we look at the United States, where the bulk of the wealth generated in recent decades has been captured and accumulated by only a tiny minority. As of last year, the wealthiest 1 percent owned one-third of the nation’s total household wealth, while 50 percent of households in the lower half of the wealth scale held only about 3 percent. Many of those households had no net wealth at all, and growth is doing nothing to help them. Of the new wealth that’s been generated since the depths of the Great Recession in 2009, the richest 10 percent have accumulated 75 times as much per household as have those at the bottom 50 percent. (In this graph on the Federal Reserve’s website, you really have to squint to see the bottom 50 percent’s share, in pink.)

To restate the above more succinctly: in an affluent country, money can’t buy you happiness, but having a lot of money does help you acquire even more. And that’s always to the detriment of humanity, ecosystems, and our collective future.

Despite the fact that economic growth has plunged us into an ecological emergency, and even though half the US population does not share meaningfully in the wealth that it produces, almost anyone you ask will express a positive view of economic growth, and most people will recoil at even the mildest suggestion that the time has come for degrowth. To help dispel the ingrained perception that growth is good and degrowth bad, the economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has invoked an apt analogy:

Take the words colonization and decolonization, for example. We know that those who engaged in colonization felt it was a good thing. From their perspective—which was the dominant perspective in Europe for most of the past 500 years—decolonization would therefore seem negative. But the point is precisely to challenge the dominant perspective, because the dominant perspective is wrong. Indeed, today we can agree that this stance—a stance against colonization—is correct and valuable: we stand against colonization and believe that the world would be better without it. That is not a negative vision, but positive; one that’s worth rallying around. Similarly, we can and should aspire to an economy without growth just as we aspire to a world without colonization.

Hickel, Parrique, and other degrowth scholars stress that it is wealthy countries that need to undergo degrowth. What the rich nations are calling “growth,” he writes, is in reality “a process of elite accumulation, the commodification of commons, and the appropriation of human labor and natural resources—a process that is quite often colonial in character.” Those are the aspects of today’s economy that need to degrow, along with wasteful and superfluous production, not the essential goods and services that can ensure a decent life for all.

The obligation to reduce material production and ecological degradation rests with the rich nations, and with rich populations in the rest of the world. Parrique showed another graphic at the conference illustrating how economies with “unsustainable prosperity,” like that of the US, must shrink, while economically deprived economies should be guaranteed the means and opportunity to build and transform.

A degrowing society’s goals would not be just reverse images of growth goals. One would not see, for example, a degrowth counterpart to the Federal Reserve aiming for a 2 percent annual decline in GDP. The goal in a degrowing society, presumably, would be a good quality of life for everyone, within ecologically necessary limits. And just as the owning and investing classes saw the biggest increases in wealth and consumption in the age of growth, they would experience steep decreases in the age of degrowth. The economy could instead be dedicated to providing good quality of life for all, which would mean a big improvement for the estimated 140 million poor and low-income people in the US.

The most effective strategies for how to accomplish degrowth would doubtless differ from country to country, as would the intensity of political opposition to the very idea of degrowth. Bipartisan elite resistance would be especially strong in the US, I expect, but that would be no reason to drop the subject. In fact, it’s a good reason to get even louder.

I remain convinced that a phaseout of fossil fuels is a small but urgently needed first step that could lead to degrowth and eventually a steady-state society that lives within ecological limits. That, along with ecologically necessary restraints on renewable energy development, would trigger what many would see as a national crisis. But we can make it a fruitful crisis, one in which we’re all obliged to find our collective way into a new, equitable, society—based on an inalienable right to a good life and inalienable limits on material production and consumption.

The Old Future Is Gone, and Technology Won’t Bring It Back

Monthly dispatches by Stan Cox; art by Priti Gulati Cox

From City Lights Books

In Real Time: Chronicle of a Fate Unknown, Part 13

As we begin the second year of “In Real Time,” the future doesn’t look very promising. Almost one-third of US states have plunged into one-party authoritarian rule, and many are gripped by hostility to any form of climate action. Over the past year, voters and activists across the nation have managed to slow the anti-democratic slide, but nothing has altered the federal government’s stolid inaction when it comes to fossil fuels. And greenhouse gas emissions keep rising.

With the Earth heating up while governments remain frozen on climate policy, most of the action is happening in countless rebellious communities across the country. Through the past year, “In Real Time” has featured collective action at the grassroots, including from the Indigenous Environmental Network, the L.A. Bus Riders Union, the Poor People’s Campaign, Native peoples and farmersuniting to fight carbon pipelines, Start:Empowerment, the Environmental Justice Leadership Forum, Extinction Rebellion DC, Farmers for Climate Action, Defend the Atlanta Forest, and other groups. Even if the federal government were taking effective action on climate, local movements would be crucial to curbing capitalism’s assault on the Earth. Now, with leaders in Washington and other world capitals still letting us down, local and regional action will be more important than ever.

Cap and Scale Back

To start the second year, I’d like to look ahead to our long-term prospects for a livable future. For “In Real Time” the bottom line is twofold: that a rapid, nationally mandated phaseout of oil, gas, and coal is necessary to drive down US greenhouse-gas emissions at the required rate, and that the resulting decrease in the supply of energy and other resources will require equitable allocation of physical and economic resources to meet basic needs. Given the nature of our institutions and power structure, it’s becoming increasingly difficult even to imagine a scenario in which that sort of just, humane phaseout can be achieved. But it remains essential to push harder than ever for such policies, despite the long political odds they face.

This is no time to give up. The atmosphere’s average temperature is now destined to reach and surpass 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels within a decade. And if the world’s economies stay on their current track, the heat-up will blow through 2°C and approach or exceed 3°C by 2100. Such warming, say scientists, carries a “high” to “very high” risk of “catastrophic climate change”—bad enough to render much of the Earth hostile to human life.

There is still time to temper somewhat the ecological devastation and human suffering that will come with catastrophic heating. Deployment of technology alone, however, won’t suffice. History and research tell us that a buildup of new energy capacity won’t flush oil and fossil gas out of the system.  For example, electricity generation from wind, solar, and biofuel sources has soared 50-fold since 2000, but the share of the world’s primary energy provided by fossil fuels fell only slightly during that time, from 87 to 85 percent. Even then, most of that puny shift was due to an increase in production of hydroelectric power, a well-known source of ecological and humanitarian problems.

Assault and Batteries

Weaning the world’s rich economies off fossil fuels will require adaptation to a much smaller energy supply. Attempting to replicate the high-energy economies of the fossil-fuel era using non-fossil energy sources would require extensive plunder of the Earth’s resources, compounding the problems that are coming with climate change.

In transforming the face of the Earth, industrial civilization has already reached a remarkable milepost. In recent years, the global quantity of “human-made mass,”—that is, the total weight of inanimate solid objects manufactured or constructed by humanity and still intact (thus not including waste material)­—surpassed the total weight of all living plant, animal, and microbial biomass on Earth. This production of human-made stuff (the quantity of which has been doubling every 20 years or so) is triggering Earth-wide devastation, with climate disruption, mass species extinctions, and breakdown of entire ecosystems. To fully appreciate this grim juncture in human history, have a look at this mind-boggling graphic comparison between the current quantities of human-made and nature-made mass on Earth. Notice in the image that the “metals” portion of material production has been small relative to, say, concrete. But with the rise of the “green-energy” economy, a lot more metal will be coming out of the ground and into the human-made world.

The industrial world is violating ecological boundaries in countless ways, but here I’ll focus just on the metals that will be required by a non-fossil-fueled energy system. The now-prevalent vision for reducing oil and gas use, as embodied in last year’s Inflation Reduction Act, is to wholly convert the US economy to operate with electric vehicles, heat pumps, and other technologies that feed off power plants rather than directly combusting fuels. It also would feature an unprecedented boom in deployment of wind and solar farms across the nation’s landscape, along with a 60 percent expansion and sweeping overhaul of the national power grid. Countless wind turbines will be required, each with a generator containing 60 tons or more of metal. The grid upgrade will require huge quantities of copper for new power lines as well as  copper, lithium, cobalt, and nickel to produce hundreds of millions of tons of lithium-ion batteries for power storage. Many millions of batteries will also be needed to convert the national vehicle fleet to run on electricity.

Globally, mining and processing of metallic ores has doubled just since 2000 and is responsible for a whopping 10 percent of total world energy consumption. Now, if plans to “electrify everything” are carried out worldwide, the tonnage of metal extracted and processed in the next 15 years alone will exceed the tonnage that humans have produced during the 5,000 years since the start of the Bronze Age.

The Washington Post, citing International Energy Agency figures, predicts that by 2040, global demand for metals that go into batteries will balloon 20-fold for nickel and cobalt and 40-fold for lithium; demand for manganese, critical for wind turbines, will increase ninefold in just the next decade. Demand for aluminum, which is already produced in vastly larger quantities than any of those metals, will increase by yet another 40 percent, largely to produce lighter-weight electric cars and support solar arrays.

Forbes estimates that almost 400 new mines will be opened worldwide by 2035 just to keep battery factories supplied with cobalt, lithium, and nickel. This will create many more of what have come to be known as “green sacrifice zones”: localities across the world, from Congo to Guinea to China to Bolivia to the Pacific Ocean, that are bearing or will bear the human, environmental, and socioeconomic costs of the transition to non-fossil energy. And the deployment of wind and solar power plants across the world’s windier and sunnier regions will mean converting vast stretches of the Earth’s land surface and even seabeds into industrial energy farms.

If the world plows ahead with building this metal-clad energy empire and accepting its ecological and human impacts, it won’t be adequate to secure the future indefinitely. An analysis conducted for the Geological Survey of Finland found that the quantity of batteries required to electrify the world’s vehicles and also provide the world’s power grids with enough batteries for backup storage would exhaust all known lithium, cobalt, and nickel reserves several times over. A new, destructive surge in mineral exploration and opening of new mines around the world would be necessary. And the need for metal will never end. Decade after decade, billions of tons of batteries will go dead and need to be replaced. That’s just what batteries do, and we can’t count on recycling  to solve the problem.

In the quest for sufficient mineral resources to make green dreams come true, affluent societies will become more dependent on an even more technologically complex, even more physically vulnerable energy supply as they exploit the resources of the global South. Those promoting this quest are all too aware that we are bursting through our planet’s ecological and resource limits; that’s why companies are lining up to get NASA contracts for mining the moon and asteroids. (As a California entrepreneur involved in such efforts told Space.com, “Nobody wants to think about a future in which humans don’t thrive. So it’s time for us to go into space.”)

Holding onto Our Humanity

Even as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warns that efforts to prevent ecological meltdown are approaching a “rapidly closing window” for action, the nations of the North are holding back, discussing instead the color of the curtains.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The alternative to a voracious, high-energy, self-sabotaging economy would be one that provides for just enough material production to equitably ensure a decent, satisfying life for all. But the political (as in “of the polis,” i.e., of the people)obstacles would be formidable. Policymaking should reflect the will of the people, and the vast majority of Americans do want their world to remain green and livable. With our political and economic systems so broken and unjust, though, how can majority support for a smaller total energy supply and lower material consumption be marshaled for action? A new industrial policy designed to ensure that everyone’s needs are met, coupled with new distributive policies that guarantee equitable, adequate access for all (which, in fact, would improve access for many low-income households), could win over some voters, maybe even a sizable number—but probably not a majority. And even if it did, corporate America would not allow anything like that to go into effect.

We shouldn’t rule anything out. Who knows, maybe the governments of the world will come to their collective senses and undertake serious climate action sometime in this century, as author Kim Stanley Robinson envisions in his novel The Ministry for the Future. I expect, though, that such success will remain confined to the world of fiction. Some progress, much more modest, may still be possible if rising climate chaos and a groundswell of public clamor force governments to keep as much oil, gas, and coal in the ground as possible. That could succeed in shaving tenths of degrees from the temperatures that we and future generations will endure, with each tenth giving us a little more breathing room to prepare for life in a world that will become less and less recognizable. For a picture of what life on that kind of Earth might be like, you could check out the early chapters of The Ministry for the Future. But here, let’s turn to a different book, this one nonfiction. In An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity (Notre Dame Press, 2022), my longtime friends and colleagues, Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen, write,

The human species faces multiple cascading social and ecological crises that will not be solved by virtuous individuals making moral judgments of others’ failures or by frugal people exhorting the profligate to lessen their consumption. Things are bad, getting worse, and getting worse faster than we expected. This is happening not because of a few bad people or bad systems, though there are plenty of people doing bad things in bad systems that reward people for doing those bad things. At the core of the problem is our human-carbon nature, the scramble for energy-rich carbon that defines life. Technological innovations can help us cope but cannot indefinitely forestall the dramatic changes that will test our ability to hold onto our humanity in the face of dislocation and deprivation.

Invoking the singer-songwriter John Gorka, Jackson and Jensen write, “The old future is gone.” Whether by design or not, the new future will, in their words, be one of “fewer and less.” Along with individual and community action, they urge, a new, larger political process is needed “to deal with the dramatic changes coming. Being ready for a radically different life for everyone as part of a radically different ecosphere requires planning.” Along with creating new political and economic systems, it will also be necessary to “cultivate a more ecological vision to replace the dominant culture’s current linking of a good life to an industrial worldview, what in other writing we have called a ‘creaturely worldview.’”

As life becomes more difficult in more seasons and more places, local solidarity will become more and more essential—and maybe even more likely to emerge. Struggles by the environmental justice movement to end industrial assaults on marginalized communities, by Indigenous people against pipelines and mines, by Atlanta’s Black community to save the city’s largest forest from destruction by the police department, and other efforts are models for movements that, I hope, will multiply. In coming decades, it will be essential that communities across the nation and world find a way to sustain a decent life amid ecological breakdown, in a future they themselves didn’t create.