"being proven "right" about an issue that threatens an impoverished and dangerous future for both our children our ecosystems alike is hardly reason for jubilation."
That works for me; I have a vested interest in being wrong. It's too bad we're not.
After the Climate Breakthrough: What Do We Do Now?
Alan AtKisson
February 7, 2007 5:39 AM
Many people in our line of work* are feeling a bit giddy these days. Some, myself included, are talking in terms of a "sea change," "tipping point," "the wave is breaking" and the like. There is a kind of electricity in the air, a sense that many things previously considered impossibly difficult and infeasible are now just around the political-and-economic corner. As one friend put it, "For years I have felt like Sisyphus, pushing the boulder up the hill only to have it roll down again. For the first time, the boulder seems not only to be staying on top, but even to be rolling down the other side."
And the reason for all this optimism? Climate change has hit the big time.
The fact that climate change is now a central focus of the world's attention, from Hollywood to Davos, and that even US President George W. Bush was forced to acknowledge it in his 2007 State of the Union Address, changes the climate for sustainability work in general. The recent release of the new IPCC report only solidified a growing feeling that "now is finally the time." More and more decision-makers -- whether they decide households or national economies -- are now actively looking for the solutions that many of us have been promoting for years.
But a number of my professional friends are not celebrating this sudden emergence of climate change onto the world stage and even the big screen. Instead, they express a wide range of emotions, from puzzlement about what to do next (now that major world leaders and institutions have gotten in the game, some of the early thought-leaders will effectively be pushed to the margins), to a kind of sadness that has always been there under the surface but which, in the press of the fight, rarely could be expressed. The latter is all too easy to explain: being proven "right" about an issue that threatens an impoverished and dangerous future for both our children our ecosystems alike is hardly reason for jubilation.
As one prominent colleague working on renewable energy noted to me privately, "People actually ask me if I'm happy now that climate change is finally getting all this attention. Of course I'm not happy; I'm grieving! I just want to weep! I want to tell them, 'Why didn't you listen to us ten years ago?'"
In November I gave a speech on climate change to Japanese business leaders in which I described a kind of "triple punch" that had changed the political and media playing field for good: Hurricane Katrina, Al Gore's film "An Inconvenient Truth," and the "Stern Review of the Economics of Climate Change."
Since then, I've noticed that several other folks in this line of work were all independently saying exactly the same thing. On Swedish television the other night, a news report on climate actually cut between experts in mid-sentence, to illustrate that they were practically uttering the same words about the same three milestones. Here is my version of those words:
First, Hurricane Katrina woke the world up to the fact the dangers of global warming are real. The flooding of New Orleans showed us what those dangers look like in visceral terms. Regardless of whether global warming can be specifically implicated -- and it never can be in the case of any specific event, even one like Katrina, which involved a small-ish hurricane growing to monster size over weirdly warm waters, and then destroying much of a major US city -- it is clear that things like Katrina are what we can expect to happen more and more, especially if nothing is done. Katrina helped make climate change "an undeniable fact."
Then came "An Inconvenient Truth," Al's Gore's astonishingly successful documentary film, which made the science of climate change accessible to nearly everyone. Gore assembled all the graphs and the history and the scientific explanations into a convenient package that could be absorbed in one sitting. Some criticized the film's animated sequences of a forlorn, homeless polar bear swimming in search of vanishing sea ice (and probably drowning) as alarmist; but it turns out that even this was just a representation of verifiable scientific facts, and the US government is moving polar bears toward the endangered species list for precisely this reason.
Finally, when the former Chief Economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, made a report to the government of the United Kingdom on the economics of climate change -- noting dramatically that failure to act now would likely result in a major global depression -- the last major chink in the wall of denial crumbled. Sir Nicholas was, by all reports, one of the most popular attractions at the World Economic Forum in Davos this year. His speech there made Page 1, above the fold, of the International Herald Tribune.
These three events were enough to push climate change, which was gaining political momentum for hundreds of other smaller reasons, over some kind of hump. Since then two more events have added to this feeling of a downhill race to action: the release of a statement by the previously secret "National Climate Action Partnership," a group of corporate CEOs who are publicly calling for a cap-and-trade system for carbon dioxide in the United States; and the release in Paris of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report, which should "remove the question mark" (as UNEP's director Achim Steiner put it) on whether global warming is happening, and whether humans are causing it.
So ... now what?
"We are Winning," wrote science-fiction-author-turned-green-design-guru Bruce Sterling in a recent post to his "Viridian" list-serve. Sterling created the "Viridian Movement" (viridian means "a cool shade of green") eight years ago. His goal was to recruit people, and especially designers of all kinds, to get serious about addressing the climate threat. He had planned for his movement to "expire" by 2012, partly because if serious change in product design, energy policy, and the like wasn't happening to address global warming by then, it wouldn't matter anyway: the world would be doomed.
But now Sterling is seriously considering ending his Movement early. "We Viridians have beaten that clock," he wrote in January. "There is no need to wait for distant 2012 to declare victory in our war to make green trendy and to create 'irresistible demand for a global atmosphere upgrade.' Green will never get any trendier than it is this year. The atmosphere upgrade is on the way. That process won't be pretty, but it's going to happen."
After cataloguing the many ways in which "We are Winning," Sterling notes that in this situation, "There are two choices. You can attempt to seize control, or you can get out of the way." With climate change engagement now essentially "everywhere" (even though it is not technically everywhere yet), and becoming the new normal, promoting the issue is no longer the place to be avant garde. His advice to activists under his second scenario ("get out of the way") is to take private pleasure in the victory and "vanish into the woodwork."
That's probably good advice for the prophets and Paul Reveres of this movement: they deserve a nap after years of sleepless nights, hollering for people to wake up.
As for Sterling's first scenario, "seizing control" is neither an option nor desirable -- even if he is just talking about seizing control of the agenda, with his usual dramatic flair. The climate change agenda is now exactly where many of us were trying to put it: into the machinery of political and economic decision-making. Those of who play in that arena can perhaps have some influence; but we certainly cannot control the agenda. Nobody can. Our planet's fate will now be determined by the sloppy process we call democracy, as national parliaments and boards of directors and international assemblies and city councils step up their deliberations about what to do. Now that climate change has secured a privileged position on the agenda of human affairs, nobody will ever have full control.
That's a very good thing, of course. One can at least hope, and these days even assume, that the deliberations of decision-makers will increasingly be informed by the latest research on what is actually happening. But the game of "what do we do now?" is a game of selection and prioritization among a wide range of options. Framing and making such decisions is the role of leadership, and even in the least democratic contexts, leaders do not have full control. Nature has firmly established that when it comes to defining the agenda, she has the last word.
That leaves another, tougher option as the only way forward for most of us who have dedicated careers to the vision of a more sustainable world: rolling up our sleeves, and working on scaling up implementation. Leadership and deliberative decision-making are best served by accurate analyses, clear proposals, good examples, case studies. We have many of these at the ready. Our collective storehouse of tried-and-tested ideas, prototypes and working models will be enormously useful in the next few years. But the world is likely to burn through these with astonishing rapidity, and ask for more, better, and faster. The most important thing that professionals in sustainability will have to offer in the future is not ready-made solutions, but an ability to improvise, adapt, innovate, and dream up still more visionary-yet-feasible ideas about how to transform a global civilization or rescue ecosystems in trouble. This is going to require even more exertion, more creativity, more risk; celebrating victory and going home is not an option.
Of course, while he seems to celebrating victory, prophet Sterling (who, with tongue resolutely in cheek, calls himself the "Pope-Emperor of the Viridian Movement") appears to be actually doing the opposite; and he certainly isn't "going home." Instead, he has put himself on the firing line where his wild creativity can serve a wildly acute need: this previously comfortable Texan is now living in Belgrade, and seeking to make a contribution to a better future for Serbia. If that's not a commitment to sustainable development, I don't know what is.
Here's the summary: In the next few years, people who have been working on sustainability, especially where it touches the climate-and-energy nexus, are going to be seriously tested -- not by resistance to their ideas, but by the ever-increasing demand for them.
* The phrase "our line of work" refers to people working in a professional capacity on the issues of sustainable development, or in training to do such work.
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