Michael Mann The New Climate War CH 9 Meeting the Challenge

Michael E. Mann  The New Climate War

the fight to take back our planet

SCRIBE, Melbourne. London

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Backcover

 ONE OF THE OBSERVER'S 

'THIRTY BOOKS TO HELP US UNDERSTAND THE WORLD'

Recycle. Fly less. Eat less meat. These are some of the ways that we've been told we can save the planet.

But are individuals really to blame for the climate crisis?

Seventy-one per cent of global emissions come from the same hundred companies, but fossil-fuel companies have taken no responsibility themselves. Instead, they have waged a thirty-year campaign to blame individuals for climate change. The result has been disastrous for our planet.

In The New Climate War, renowned scientist Michael E. Mann argues that all is not lost. He draws the battle lines between the people and the polluters - fossil-fuel companies, right-wing plutocrats, and petro-states and outlines a plan for forcing our governments and corporations to wake up and make real change.

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'Provides hope and a roadmap for all of us to address the systemic issues fuelling climate change:

LEONARDO DICAPRIO

'Engaging, approachable, and ultimately deeply uplifting. Mann outlines a hopeful vision of the transformation we must undertake in order to create a better, brighter future on this planet:

SASHA SAGAN, author of For Small Creatures Such As We

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'Skillfully explains the complicated dynamics of global warming and vividly portrays the sophisticated and coordinated campaign by polluters to block the policies and solutions needed to solve the climate crisis:

AL GORE

'[Mann] sees what we really can and will do. Read his book, and let's get to work:

BILL NYE

'Few have fought longer and harder for a basic, rational approach to dealing with this greatest of crises:

BILL MCKIBBEN, author of Falter: has the human game begun to play itself out

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168 I THE NEW CLIMATE WAR The Non-Solution Solution 1169

Michael E. Mann on THE NUCLEAR OPTION

All reasonable options should be on the table as we debate how to rapidly decarbonize our economy while continuing to meet society's demand for energy. There is no easy solution, and there are import­ant and worthy debates to be had in the policy arena as to how we accomplish this challenging task.

There is a good-faith argument to be made, for example, that nuclear energy should be part of the solution, and I have colleagues whom I deeply respect who are bullish on the role it might play as part of a comprehensive plan to tackle climate change. I myself re­main skeptical that nuclear energy should play a central role in the required clean, green energy transition. Let me explain why.

There are a number of major obstacles, first of all, to safe, plen­tiful nuclear power. There is the risk of nuclear proliferation, and the danger that fissile materials and weapons-applicable technology could make it into the hands of hostile nations with militaristic intentions or terrorists. There is the challenge of safe long-term dis­posal of radioactive waste. And there are some profound examples of the acute environmental and human threat posed by nuclear power, most recently highlighted, for example, by the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster north of Tokyo in March 2011.

Hitting closer to home—for me, literally—was the historic Three Mile Island nuclear disaster of March 1979. It took place in my home state of Pennsylvania on a long, narrow island in the Susque­hanna River near Harrisburg, less than a hundred miles southeast of the Happy Valley, in which I currently reside. I'm reminded of the incident—a partial meltdown that led to the release of harmful radi-ation—every time I fly into the Harrisburg Airport over the plant's eerily iconic cooling towers. (The plant is now closed but not yet decommissioned.)

No means of energy production is without environmental risk, but nuclear power carries with it unique dangers. As noted by Rob­ert Jay Lifton and Naomi Oreskes in a 2019 Boston Globe op-ed, improvements in design cannot eliminate the possibility of deadly meltdowns.60 Nuclear power plants will always be vulnerable to natural hazards such as earthquakes, volcanoes, or tsunamis (like the one that triggered the Fukushima meltdown), or technical failure and human errors (like the ones responsible for Three Mile Island)..

Climate change itself, ironically, increases the risk As Lifton and Oreskes pointed out, extreme droughts have led to reactors being shut down as the surrounding waters become too warm to provide the cooling necessary to convey heat from the reactor core to the steam turbines and remove surplus heat from the steam circuit.6' Some of my own research has shown that climate change is lead­ing to less reliable flow for the very river—the Susquehanna—that supplied the Three Mile Island nuclear plant with needed cooling water.62 A similar threat looms for many other active plants.

Some have argued in favor of a role for small modular reactors (SMRs), which, as the name implies, are considerably smaller than the massive reactors in Fukushima or Three Mile Island. They also require less up-front capital, and arguably they allow for better se­curity of nuclear materials. Energy experts, however, have raised serious concerns about SMRs, including "locating sites for multiple reactors, finding water to cool these reactors, and the higher cost of electricity generation.1163 SMRs, in short, are not an obvious nuclear power "magic bullet."

Still others argue that the answer is so-called "next generation" or "generation IV" nuclear power plants, such as molten-salt reactors that automatically cool down when they get too hot, or very-high-temperature reactors (VHTR), which could be coupled to a neigh­boring hydrogen production facility for significantly reduced cost.64 But as University of California, Berkeley, energy expert Dan Kammen noted, it "could easily take the advanced nuclear projects 30 years to get through regulatory review, fix the unexpected problems that crop up. . . and prove that they can compete." In the meantime, we could see a breakthrough in other technologies, such as elec­tric storage and fusion. Kammen added that while "ultimately on a planet with 10 billion people, some amount of large, convenient, affordable, safe baseload power—like we get from nuclear fission, or fusion—would be just hugely beneficial," there are "other competi­tors in view on the straight solar side that 10 years ago sounded like science fiction—space-based solar, transparent solar films on every window. That world works, too.1165

Some would argue that our energy choices amount to balancing different risks. True, nuclear energy has risks, they acknowledge, but they are worth it in the balance. They would say that though nuclear accidents are acute, they are rare. And while the damage can be fatal and long-lasting, it is regionally localized. Compare that to the risks posed by climate change, which are pervasive, global, and slowly but steadily growing. If we are forced into a choice between one risk or the other, a reasonable argument could be made that there's a significant role to be played by nuclear energy. The problem with this argument is that it buys into the fallacy that nuclear power is necessary for us to decarbonize our economy. Although it may well make sense to continue with the operation of existing nuclear power plants until they are retired (after twenty to forty years, their typical lifetime), given that the embodied carbon emissions associated with their construction is a "sunken" carbon cost, it makes little sense to build new ones.

As we have already seen, electrification of the various energy sectors in conjunction with decarbonization of the grid can already be achieved using renewables such as residential rooftop solar and solar plants, onshore and offshore wind farms, wave energy, geother­mal energy, and hydroelectric and tidal energy. Researchers have shown how these existing renewable energy technologies could be scaled up to meet 80 percent of global energy demand by 2030 and 100 percent by 2050. To those who argue that nuclear is a cheaper option, the numbers indicate otherwise. As Lifton and Oreskes noted, the average nuclear power generating cost is about $100 per megawatt-houri, compared with $50 for solar and $30 to $40 for on­shore wind. Renewable energy costs are now competitive with fossil fuels—even with the incentives that are currently skewed against them—and much lower than for nuclear.66

So if the math and logic don't obviously favor a nuclear solution, why do advocates fight so fiercely for it? For some, no doubt, it's a matter of principle. As I mentioned earlier, I have colleagues whom I respect deeply who are convinced that nuclear energy is critical to solving the climate crisis.67 But for many, alas, it appears to be all about ideology and political tribalism. "Hippie punching"—establishing one's conservative bona fides by opposing perceived leftist environ-mentalists—has become de rigueur, as a common target for attack serves to unite conservatives in the climate arena. Consider, for ex­ample, the attacks on global-warming icon and conservative punching bag Al Gore. My friend Bob Inglis, a former Republican congressman from South Carolina, has said, "In my first six years in Congress from 1993 to 1999, I had said that climate change was hooey. I hadn't looked into the science. All I knew was that Al Gore was for it, and therefore I was against it.1168

Support for nuclear energy has become a shibboleth for conserva­tives in the climate policy arena. It's easy to understand why. It was the left, after all, that protested nuclear power in the 1970s. While I was growing up in Massachusetts, and protests of the Seabrook nuclear plant were taking place in nearby New Hampshire, it was all granola-crunching tree-huggers, scruffy college students and aging flowerchildren.

"The enemy of my enemy is my friend" might not be a very sat­isfying explanation for the unusual amount of support for nuclear energy among conservatives, but it's difficult otherwise to explain it. Solar should be the preferred solution for conservatives: it can be deployed locally, and if installed privately it can help liberate users from dependency on overly regulated centralized utilities. Mean­while, nuclear power plants require huge up-front capital invest­ments and are not viable without governmental subsides, so they are hardly the free-market solution conservatives purport to favor.69 Bob Inglis is of course famous as a conservative climate crusader. He is all about free-market solutions to the climate crisis. He also happens i-cs l-ve a nuanced view of the role of nuclear energy as a climate enviros for why we're not building nuclear power plants," he told a reporter, "but if we update our rhetoric to the actual facts, what we find is it's more a question of economics. 1170

Inglis is the exception to the rule. Conservatives (and "conservative liberals" such as CNN commentator Fareed Zakaria) love big fixes like nuclear energy and geoengineering.71 'What do these "solutions" have in common? They divert resources and attention away from the more obvious solution—renewable energy. Indeed, a cynic might wonder whether some who staunchly advocate for these options are more interested in dampening enthusiasm for a renewable energy revolu­tion than in actually solving the climate problem. The Breakthrough Institute promotes both nuclear energy and geoengineering. So do the "ecomodernists."72 Former Democratic presidential candidate Andrew Yang promoted nuclear energy and geoengineering as well, as he sought, during his campaign, to thread the needle of maintain­ing credibility on climate while courting conservative Democrats. 13

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CHAPTER 9 Meeting the Challenge

The darkest hour is just before the dawn.

-THOMAS FULLER

Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things, and no good thing ever dies.

-ANDY DUFRESNE (in The Shawshank Redemption)

DESPITE THE CHALLENGES DETAILED IN THIS BOOK, I AM CAUtiously optimistic—that is to say, neither Pollyannaish, nor dour, but objectively hopeful—about prospects for tackling the climate crisis in the years ahead. The reason for that optimism is a confluence of developments, a "perfect storm," if you will, of eye-opening events that are helping to prepare us for the task ahead. 

• First, there have been a series of unprecedented, extreme weather disasters that have vivified the climate-change threat. 
• Second, a global pandemic has now taught us key lessons about vulnerability and risk. And 
• finally, we've seen the reawakening of environmental activism, and, in par­ticular, a popular uprising by children across the world that has framed climate change as the defining challenge of our time.

The thesis of this book is that these developments—along with the collapse of plausible climate-change deniability—have provided us with an unprecedented opportunity for progress. 

The inactivists have been forced into retreat from "hard" climate denial to "softer" denial: downplaying, deflecting, dividing, delaying, and despair-mongering. These are the multiple fronts of the new climate war. Any plan for victory requires recognizing and defeating the tactics now being used by inactivists as they continue to wage war.

With immensely powerful vested interests aligned in defense of the fossil fuel status quo, it won't come without a fight. We will need the active participation of citizens everywhere aiding in the collec­tive push forward. And we need to believe that it is possible. And it is. We can win the battle for our planet.

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• 1] THE DENIAL DEATH SPIRAL
• 2] TIPPING POINTS—THE GOOD KIND
• 3] THE REAL PANDEMIC
• 4] THE WISDOM OF CHILDREN
• 5] THE FINAL BATTLE

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1] THE DENIAL DEATH SPIRAL

When Washington Post editorial cartoonist Tom Toles and I published our book The Madhouse Effect in the early fall of 2016, colleagues criticized us for writing a book about climate-change denial.1 The age of denial, they said, was over. The discussion from here on out would be all about solutions.

But subsequent history did not cooperate. 

Climate-change denier Donald Trump was then elected leader of the world's most powerful country. 

• During his administration we've seen the United States go from a leader in worldwide efforts to combat climate change to the only country threatening to withdraw from the 2015 Paris Agree­ment. 
• We saw a veritable dismantling of fifty years' worth of envi­ronmental policy progress in the United States. 
• The intransigence of the United States gave other polluters, such as China, an excuse to ease off on their own efforts. 
• As a result, after flatlining for several years, and appearing to be poised to decline, carbon emissions rose for several years instead.

Something else happened around the same time. 

• We witnessed unprecedented climate-change-fueled weather disasters in the United States and around the world. They came in the form of record floods, wildfires, heat waves, droughts, and superstorms. Damaging, deadly weather extremes drove home the fact that climate change is no longer theoretical and distant. It's here and now. 

The damaging impacts of climate change had arrived. We know the litany by now: Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico; flooding in Houston and the Caroli­nas; wildfires in California; historic drought, flooding, and plagues of locusts in Africa; flooding, heat, drought, and bushfires in Australia. The list goes on. And on. And on.

To quote Groucho Marx, "Who ya gonna believe, me or your lying eyes? 112 Denial simply isn't viable when people can see the unprec­edented impacts playing out in real time on their television scenes, their newspaper headlines, their social media feeds, and their back­yards. And as a result, we are now seeing the last gasps of hard cli­mate denial. We see it in the virtual disappearance of "false balance" in the mainstream media—the practice, widespread in the past, in which climate-change deniers were treated on a par with mainstream climate researchers when it came to journalistic climate coverage.'

Hard denial, today, is mostly confined to the media outposts of the fringe right, shoved to the edges of our discourse by a sliding "Overton window" driven toward reality by the stark facts on the ground. Climate denial operations are waning as fossil fuel interests and plutocrats reject their services in favor of the "kinder, gentler" forms of inactivism that make up the new climate war. The conser­vative Cato Institute, for example, closed up its climate-denial shop in 2019.

The climate-denying Heartland Institute is increasingly ignored and unable to garner mainstream coverage.' Their 2019 "confer­ence," held at the Trump International Hotel in Washington, DC, was reduced from the sprawling three days of its earlier incarna­tions to just a single-day affair. While it had attracted more than fifty sponsors in past years, it drew just sixteen in 2019—fifteen if you account for the fact that one was fake. 

Attendance was limited to a couple hundred attendees—predictably, given that the declin­ing demographic of denialists is mostly older white men. Despite holding their "conference" at a Trump property and in Washington, DC, "no one from the Trump administration" was in attendance, a fact bemoaned by Heartland's "science director" (and convicted criminal) Jay Lehr .6 Lehr insisted that this was "a huge loss" for the administration, since the conference would "reveal that neither science nor economics back up the climate scare." Heartland was forced to lay off staff in 2019.1

Even soft denial no longer seems to be getting the traction it once did. In June 2020, Michael Shellenberger, cofounder of the Breakthrough Institute, published a commentary titled "On Behalf of Environmentalists, I Apologize for the Climate Scare." Adopting the schtick of self-styled "Skeptical Environmentalist" Bjorn Lomborg, the piece engaged in the usual inactivist tropes of down‑playing climate-change impacts and dismissing renewable energy, all out of alleged "concern" from an ostensibly reformed erstwhile "alarmist." The commentary was panned by the expert evaluators at Climate Feedback, who gave it an average credibility score of —1.2 (between "low" and "very low").' 

Shellenberger originally published the piece at Forbes, but they removed it within hours for violating their policies on self-promotion (he was essentially plugging his new book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts Us All). The commentary was subsequently republished by Murdoch's Australian. Shellenberger received coverage from the usual nexus of inactivism-promoting organizations and outlets (the Heartland Institute, Glenn Beck, Breitbart News, Russia Today, the Daily Tele­graph, and the Wall Street Journal). But other than a critique by The Guardian, he got little mainstream coverage.9

Shortly thereafter; in mid-July, Bjorn Lomborg published his own book, False Alarm, once again offering up the same tired tropes. Nobel Prize—winning economist Joseph E. Stiglitz wrote a blistering review of the book for the New York Times, which ends thusly: "As a matter of policy, I typically decline to review books that deserve to be panned. . . . In the case of this book, though, I felt compelled to forgo this policy. Written with an aim to convert anyone wor­ried about the dangers of climate change, Lomborg's work would be downright dangerous were it to succeed in persuading anyone that there was merit in its arguments. This book proves the aphorism that a little knowledge is dangerous. It's nominally about air pollution. It's really about mind pollution." There now seems to be little appe­tite for inactivist diatribes.

Republican communication experts recognize a sinking ship when they see one. Frank Luntz, the GOP messaging guru we encountered earlier, who coached climate-change-denying Republicans and fossil fuel interests on how to undermine public belief in human-caused climate change, has now flipped. In the summer of 2019 he testified to the US Senate's Special Committee on the Climate Crisis that "rising sea levels, melting ice caps, tornadoes, and hurricanes [are] more ferocious than ever. It is happening." He told the committee that he was "here before you to say that I was wrong in 2001"; now, he hoped to put "policies ahead of politics." He proceeded to advise the senators, based on wisdom derived from his polling and focus groups, on how best to frame the climate crisis to get buy-in from the electorate.'°

Luntz is hardly alone. Douglas Heye, a former communications director at the Republican National Committee, warned of the threat to Republicans who continue to deny the climate crisis: "We're defi­nitely sending a message to younger voters that we don't care about things that are very important to them.. . . This spells certain doom in the long term if there isn't a plan to admit reality and have legis­lative prescriptions for it."'

Republican policymakers seem to be getting the message, too. Inside Climate News noted that "an increasing number of Republican politicians have sought to distance themselves from climate denial."

It cited the examples of House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy of California, who recently "introduced a package of bills to promote carbon capture and sequestration technology," and Alaska senator Lisa Murkowski, who "has been attempting to lead a bipartisan ef­fort to pass energy efficiency and technology investment."2

Even the fossil fuel industry has turned a corner; no longer de­nying that its product is warming the planet and changing the cli­mate. In 2018, the cities of San Francisco and Oakland sued the oil companies BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil, and Shell for the damages (due to sea-level rise) that they've caused, indirectly, through the extraction and sale of planet-warming fossil fuels. Citing the reports of the IPCC, a lawyer for Chevron, Theodore Boutrous Jr., assented unambiguously to the strength of the underlying science: "From Chevron's perspective, there is no debate about the science of climate change." The oil companies had admitted, in court; that, as Grist put it, "fossil fuels are the problem. "13

You may have already guessed what came next. As Grist described it, Boutrous "twice read a quote from the IPCC that climate change is caused 'largely by economic and population growth' Then, [he] added his interpretation. 'It doesn't say that it's the production and extraction that's driving the increase,' he said. 'It's the way people are living their lives." If you thought you heard a "ping" sound, that's because of the massive deflection we just witnessed.

If these proceedings were a bellwether, and I surely think they were, deniers have essentially thrown in the towel. When it comes to the war on the science—that is, the old climate war—the forces of denial have all but conceded defeat. But the new climate war—the war on action—is still actively being waged.

2] TIPPING POINTS—THE GOOD KIND

There is reason to be optimistic on the political side as well. The 2018 midterm elections in the United States resulted in a historic swing toward Democrats, ushering in prominent political "rock star" newcomers like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who ran on a Green New Deal platform. Significantly, during the first climate-change hearing held by the House of Representatives' Science Committee under fresh new Democratic leadership, Republicans—seemingly aware of the dramatic shift in public perception—no longer sought to challenge the basic scientific evidence behind human-caused cli­mate change. T

hey instead argued for policy solutions consistent with their political ideology. We can argue over whether they are optimal solutions, but they go beyond the diversionary and deflec­tive proposals we've seen from Republicans in the past, including mechanisms such as carbon pricing. There does now seem to be real political movement toward meaningful action on climate.

House Democrats put forward a bold climate plan in June 2020 that included incentives for renewables and support for carbon pricing. Given an even modestly favourable shift in political winds, one could envision this passing the House and moving on to the Sen­ate with a half dozen or more moderate conservatives crossing the aisle, joining with Senate Democrats to pass the bill within the next year or two. Indeed, it is a well-kept secret in Washington, DC, that many Republicans are quietly supportive of climate action but have been afraid to "come out of the closet" for fear of retribution from powerful ideological purists such as the Kochs and Mercers. 

New York Times columnist Justin Gillis met with one highly placed Re­publican operative who, requesting anonymity, acknowledged that "we are going to have to do a deal with the Democrats. We are wait­ing for the fever to cool."" I have also had amicable and produc­tive anonymous meetings with prominent conservatives, including a well-known columnist for a Murdoch-owned Australian newspa­per. That numerous Republican politicians and conservative opinion leaders would support climate action if they felt they were granted the license to do so by party power brokers adds to the notion that a climate-action tipping point could be looming in our near future.

This is not to say that it will be easy to pass climate legislation. Fossil fuel interests, ideologically driven plutocrats like Charles Koch, members of the Mercer and Scaife families, and the global Murdoch media empire are still doing all they can to muddy the waters and block progress. But, as we have seen, there are dramatic demographic shifts underway that favor action on climate. 

Frank Luntz's recent polling shows that Americans in general support carbon pricing by a four-to-one margin, and Republicans under the age of forty by an amazing six-to-one margin. 16 In short, climate denial is increasingly a liability, while the promise of climate action is an opportunity to win over younger voters.

History teaches us that social transitions are often not gradual but instead sudden and dramatic, and they don't even require a majority in support of change. A committed vocal minority can potentially push collective opinion past a "tipping point." A 2018 study sug­gested that "opinion of the majority [can] be tipped to that of the minority" once the latter reaches about 25 percent of the pubiic.7 We appear to have witnessed this phenomenon in action with the rather sudden, dramatic increase in support for marriage equality by Americans during the Obama years. According to Pew Research, public support for same-sex marriage rose from under 40 percent when Obama was elected to over 60 percent when he left office. 18

Triggered by the horrific killing, captured on video, of a forty-six-year-old black man, George Floyd, by Minneapolis police, a similar tipping point on attitudes toward racial justice seems to have taken place in early summer 2020. One poll showed that the percentage of Americans who think that police are more likely to use excessive force against African Americans jumped from 33 percent to 57 per­cent. Public awareness and outrage led to massive demonstrations over the unjustified killing. Pollster Frank Luntz commented, "In my 35 years of polling, I've never seen opinion shift this fast or deeply. We are a different country today than just 30 days ago."9

It is not unreasonable to speculate that we might be close to such a tipping point on climate as well. 

According to a Pew Research poll in 2019, 67 percent of the public thinks we're doing too little to reduce the effects of climate change.20 That, of course, doesn't mean that they prioritize it, or that they're actively pushing for action on climate. But another 2019 poll, conducted by CNN, found that "82 percent of registered voters who identified as Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents consider climate change a 'very important' top priority they'd like to see get the focus of a pres­idential candidate. 1121 

Let us account for the fact that roughly 80 percent of eligible citizens are registered, and that 40 percent of voters are Democrats and about 30 percent independent (which we'll conservatively assume split equally into 15 percent and 15 percent when it comes to which direction they lean).22 

That yields at least 36 percent of American citizens (0.80 x 0.55 x 0.82) who reasonably define the "issue public" for climate action—that is, the set of people who prioritize the issue. That percentage exceeds the 25 percent theoretical threshold required for generating a societal tipping point. It is comparable to the percentage of the American public that supported marriage equality at the beginning of the Obama era, just before that tipping point was reached.

In other words, there's reason to believe that we are currently primed for a marriage-equality-like tipping point with climate ac­tion. There is still opposition, but the opposing forces in this case—which include the world's most powerful industrial sector, fossil fuels—are considerably stronger and better funded than those that opposed marriage equality (the religious right). That means that the forward push to get us past the tipping point has to be all that much harder. Fortunately, the forces of progress appear to be aligning in a favorable manner: the visceral evidence of a climate crisis is now before us; we are seeing the demise of denial and the rise of climate activism, particularly from the children's climate movement; and we are learning critical lessons even now from another global crisis, the 2020 coronavirus pandemic.

One group of climate experts has in fact published a set of "con­crete interventions to induce positive social tipping dynamics." They propose, as key ingredients, 

1. "removing fossil-fuel subsidies and in-centivizing decentralized energy generation,
2.  building carbon-neutral cities, 
3. divesting from assets linked to fossil fuels, 
4. revealing the moral implications of fossil fuels, 
5. strengthening climate education and en­gagement, and 
6. disclosing greenhouse gas emissions information .

1121 A lot of these basic ingredients indeed seem to be in place, or close to being in place.

First of all, as we have already seen, the fossil fuel industry is start­ing to "feel the heat." Oil-rich Saudi Arabia has "shifted its strategy in the era of decarbonization" by lowering the price of oil exports in a desperate attempt to maintain demand .24 Coal, the most carbon-intense fossil fuel, is in a death spiral. 

The state of New York, for example, has retired its last coal-fired power plant.25

The Canadian mining giant Teck Resources has withdrawn plans for its $20 billion tar sands project.26 Natural gas is increasingly being recognized not as a "bridge to the future," but as a liability to local communities.27

And now, the banking and finance industry is rethinking its role in funding new fossil fuel infrastructure. The primary reason is what is known as transition risk. 

As we choose to decarbonize our economy, demand for fossil fuels will wane. That makes fossil fuel extraction, production, refining, and transport all bad investments. The finance and investment community increasingly fears a bursting of the so-called carbon bubble.

As Guardian correspondent Fiona Harvey explained, "investments amounting to trillions of dollars in fossil fuels—coal mines, oil wells, power stations, conventional vehicles—will lose their value when the world moves decisively to a low-carbon economy. Fossil fuel reserves and production facilities will become stranded assets, having absorbed capital but unable to be used to make a profit." Harvey also pointed out that "this carbon bubble has been estimated at between $1 tn and $4tn, a large chunk of the global economy's balance sheet. Investors with high exposure to fossil fuels in their portfolios will be hurt, as those companies and assets cease to be profitable." Especially worrying, "If the bubble bursts suddenly, as [experts suggest] it might, rather than gradually deflating over decades, then it could trigger a financial crisis. 1128

There is another reason investors are rethinking their fossil fuel investments, however. It is a generalized notion of fiduciary respon­sibility, which can be defined as "the legal and ethical requirement [of a financial adviser] to put your best interest before their own.1129 An expansive view of this responsibility would require that portfolio managers not make decisions that will mortgage the planet for their clients' children and grandchildren.

Under Australian law, such an expansive view of fiduciary respon­sibility already applies to pension (or so-called superannuation) fund managers.30 And it turns out that this has broad international impli­cations, because Australia is home to the world's third-largest net pension holdings, worth just under $2 trillion (a consequence also of Australian law, which requires employers to contribute at least 9 percent of a worker's salary to a superannuation fund 31). That means that the decisions of Australian "superfund" managers substantially leverage global investment. If Australian superfund managers choose not to invest in fossil fuel companies, it will have reverberations for the fossil fuel industry writ large.

I participated in meetings with several groups of Australian su-perfund managers in Sydney and Melbourne during my sabbatical in Australia in early 2020. Repeatedly they told me that they now view their investment decision-making through the lens of their larger responsibilities to their clients—in particular, their responsibility not to laden them with risky long-term fossil fuel investments, and their responsibility not to invest in an industry that threatens future live­lihood and livability. 

These audiences were as hungry for detailed facts, figures, and assessments of risk as any I've ever encountered. I left those meetings with the sense that "it may be banking & finance, rather than national governments, that precipitate a climate action tipping point.1132

There is considerable evidence to support that conjecture. Inves­tors are already taking preemptive actions. According to Axel We­ber, the chairman of Swiss multinational investment bank UBS, the finance sector is on the verge of "a big change in market structure" because investors are increasingly demanding that the sector ac­count for climate risk and embed a price on carbon in their portfo­lio decisions.33 Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England, said in early 2020 that because climate change could make fossil fuel financial assets worthless in the future, he is considering imposing a "penalty" capital charge on them .34

Insurance giant The Hartford, Sweden's central bank, and Black-Rock, the world's largest asset manager, have indicated they will stop insuring or investing in Alberta's carbon-intensive tar sands oil pro-duction.35 BlackRock has gone even further, announcing it will no longer make investments that come with high environmental risks, including coal for power plants.36 Goldman Sachs, Liberty Mutual, and the European Investment Bank—the largest international public bank in the world—are among the numerous banks and investment firms that are now pulling away from fossil fuel investments.37 In the space of a few days in early July 2020, three multibillion-dollar oil and natural gas pipeline projects in the United States—Atlantic Coast, Dakota Access, and Keystone XL, were at least temporarily halted due to what the Washington Post characterized as "legal de­feats and business decisions.1138 The carbon bubble sure appears ready to pop.

Younger investors, who are far more likely to prioritize action on climate, are playing a particularly vital role here. Consider the ac­tions of twenty-four-year-old Mark McVeigh, an environmental sci­entist who works for the Brisbane City Council. McVeigh has sued his pension fund for failing to account for climate-change-related damages in its investment decisions. The case is currently working its way through the court system.39

While we're talking about the role of young folks, let us consider the impact of fossil fuel divestment, a college-student-led move­ment. I think back to my first semester at UC Berkeley in the fall of 1984. I had not been politically active in high school. My choice to matriculate to Berkeley had nothing to do with its legacy as a fount of political activism. It had nothing to do with the role it played in the protests of McCarthyism in the 1940s and 1950s, in the civil rights and free-speech movements in the 1960s, or in the Vietnam War protests of the late 1960s and early 1970s. As an aspiring young scientist, I was attracted to UC Berkeley because of its reputation as one of the leading institutions for scientific education and research.

The mid-1 980s marked the "Reagan Revolution." Shortly after my arrival that fall, on the night that Ronald Reagan was elected to his second term as president, I watched the Berkeley College Republi­cans march triumphantly across campus. Complacency had replaced activism even at Berkeley. But activism wasn't dead. It was simply dormant. The anti-apartheid movement—opposing the South Afri­can government's brutal and violent policy of discrimination against nonwhites—however, was brewing.

It came to a full boil in 1985. The UC Regents had nearly $5 billion invested in the South African government, more than any other university in the country, helping prop up this system of dis­crimination. UC Berkeley students demanded the university divest of its holdings. When the Regents resisted, the students held increas­ingly large and well-publicized sit-ins and protests on famous Sproul

Plaza, the very place where Berkeley students before them had pro­tested in decades past. The students were unrelenting. And in July 1986, under great pressure from the student body, the Regents fi­nally agreed to divest of holdings in the apartheid government and companies doing business with them. That triggered a nationwide divestment movement, and by 1988, 155 institutions of higher learning had chosen to divest.40 In 1990, five years after the pro­tests had begun at Berkeley, South Africa initiated the dissolution of apartheid. Students at Berkeley—and all across the nation—had helped "change the world .1141 I was part of it.

In 2014, more than two decades later, Berkeley students would once again stage protests in Sproul Plaza. This time it was to demand that the UC Regents divest of fossil fuel holdings. The argument was twofold. First, fossil fuel companies, through the extraction and sale of their product, were causing dangerous planetary warming. Therefore, as with apartheid, there was an obvious moral argument to be made—that the university shouldn't be encouraging harm­ful activities with their investments. But there was another, more pragmatic reason the student protest made sense: simply put, fossil fuel companies are now bad, risky investments. Their main assets—known but as yet untapped fossil fuel reserves—must ultimately be left stranded.

Fossil fuel divestment has now spread across the country. More than a thousand college campuses and other institutions throughout the United States (accounting for more than $11 trillion in hold­ings) have divested of fossil fuel stocks.42 The UC Regents are among them. In September 2019, roughly thirty-three years after their fate­ful decision to divest from the South African apartheid government, they announced they were divesting of fossil fuel holdings .41 If past is indeed prologue, we might just speculate that perhaps we're just a few years from the bursting of the carbon bubble. It has been said that "the stone age didn't end for want or stones. Nor is the fossil fuel age ending for want of fossil fuels. It's ending because we recognize that the burning of fossil fuels poses a threat to a sustainable future. But it's also ending because something better has come along: renewable energy. As we have seen, even in the ab­sence of widespread carbon pricing or adequate subsidies, renewable energy is surging owing to the fact that people are embracing clean sources of energy that are ever more competitive with dirty fossil fuel energy.

There is increasingly a sense of inevitably now, in the clean energy revolution. The International Energy Agency, as we learned earlier; reported that "clean energy transitions are underway." The TEA at­tributed the fall in power-sector carbon emissions and the flattening of overall carbon emissions in 2019 to a combination of wind, solar, and other renewable energy sources. Clean energy collectively saved 130 Mt of carbon dioxide from being emitted that same year .41 This global picture is encouraging.

What we see at the national level is no less promising. In the United States we've crossed a critical milestone. Renewable energy capacity has now reached 250 gigawatts (a gigawatt is a billion watts), amounting to 20 percent of total power generation, a consequence of growth in installed wind and solar voltaic capacity, enhanced energy storage, and an increase in electric vehicle sales.46 Renewables, for the first time, outcompeted coal in power generation during the first quarter of 2020. In Australia a similar story is underway. Tesla's big batteries are now outperforming fossil fuel generators on both per­formance and cost.48 South Australia is now on its way to 100 per­cent renewable energy.49 Similar success stories can be told around the world. We are ready to turn the corner. We are approaching a tipping point of the good kind.

3] THE REAL PANDEMIC the COVID-1 9 

Opportunity can arise from tragedy. Such seemed to be the case with the COVID-1 9 outbreak of early 2020. Nature had afforded us a unique teaching moment. Watching the pandemic unfold, both the impacts and the response, was like watching a time lapse of the climate crisis.50 Was this a climate-change practice run?

Though the climate crisis is playing out considerably more slowly than the pandemic, there is much to be learned about the former from the latter. These important lessons have to do with the role of science and fact-based discourse in decision-making; the dangers of ideologically driven denial, deflection, and doomism; the roles played by individual action and government policy; the threats posed by special interests hijacking our policy machinery; the fragility of our societal infrastructure; and the distinct challenges of satisfying the needs of nearly eight billion (and growing) people on a finite planet. Will we take away the right lessons?

What can we learn, for example, about the role of science? As with climate change, scientists had warned of the threat of a pandemic many years in advance.51' They had designed theoretical models for just that scenario that proved essential for anticipating what would happen with the novel coronavirus. The initial spread occurred at an exponential rate, just as models predicted. 12 This meant we could anticipate that more and more people would become infected in the weeks and months ahead, which they did. We knew that the major­ity of those infected by COVID- 19 would experience mild or no symptoms while remaining highly contagious, and we knew that for others, COVID-19 would create the need for emergency medical supports that are not available in sufficient supply.

A popular Internet meme is that "every disaster movie starts with the government ignoring a scientist." And the coronavirus pro­vided some striking examples. Prime Minister Boris Johnson in the United Kingdom initially disregarded what the world's scientists were telling him and instead advocated for "herd immunity"—that is, simply letting the disease spread rampantly among the popula­tion, building collective resistance in the remaining population but needlessly sacrificing lives in the process.53 This decision was based on what turned out to be a faulty analysis by his advisers. 14 Johnson then not only contracted COVID- 19 himself but likely spread it to others through irresponsible personal behavior; becoming a poster child for the dangers of disregarding scientific predictions.55 The coronavirus outbreak also taught some important lessons about the cost of delay. The United States paid a terrible price by not acting quickly and decisively enough to avoid danger—more than 200,000 deaths at the time this book went to press. It is beginning to dawn on many that we are paying a similar price with the climate crisis. If we had acted decades ago, when a scientific consensus had been reached that we were warming the planet, carbon emissions could have been ramped down gently and much of the damage that we are now seeing could have been avoided. Now they must be lowered dramatically to avert ever more dangerous warming. With COVID-1 9, there is a two-week delay between intervention actions and changes to the rate of growth in transmissions and deaths. Both the United States and the United Kingdom were slow to take mean­ingful preventive measures. Whereas deaths had plateaued in most industrial countries by early April 2020, they continued to climb for these two countries.56 For both climate change and coronavirus, tak­ing appropriate action pays future dividends. Conversely, the slower we are to act, the higher the cost, as measured by both economic losses and deaths.

The parallels weren't lost on other observers. "By the time the true scale of the problem becomes clear, it's far too late," wrote Patrick Wy­man in Mother Jones. "The disaster—a crisis of political legitimacy, a coronavirus pandemic, a climate catastrophe—doesn't so much break the system as show just how broken the system already was."" The Guardian's Jonathan Watts weighed in, too, with a headline reading, "Delay Is Deadly: What Covid-1 9 Tells Us About Tackling the Cli­mate Crisis."58

As with climate change, unwarranted doomism reared its head. Jem Bendell sought to connect the two phenomena explicitly, blam­ing the coronavirus on rising temperatures. Saijel Kishan at Bloomberg News reported, "Bendell is . . . willing to make the connection be­tween coronavirus and climate change. He says that a warmer habitat may have caused the bats to alter their movements, putting them in contact with humans. 1159 I know of no scientific evidence for that claim.

Lessons about the dangers of ideologically driven denial were of course in great abundance. The same individuals, groups, and organi­zations that have for years served as purveyors of climate-change de­nial were quick to attack and undermine public faith in the science of the coronavirus crisis. This strategy makes sense, given the common underlying ideology and politics. Climate-change denial serves the agenda of powerful corporations and the Trump administration. COVID-1 9 denial did the same, with corporate profits, near-term economic growth, and Trump's reelection prospects all threatened by large-scale lockdowns.

So we saw the standard denialist modus operandi in play. Russian trolls early on promoted disinformation and conspiracy theories.60 Right-wing organizations pumped out anti-science propaganda. A dark-money-funded group called the Center for American Great­ness published a commentary mocking the hockey-stick-like projections of coronavirus cases by epidemiologists, comparing them to the supposedly "widely refuted"—you guessed it—climate-change hockey-stick graph that my coauthors and I published more than two decades ago.61 Even the subtitle of the article ("There's Still Time to Find a Balance Between Public Health and the Economy") cried false dilemma.

The usual denialist suspects were rounded up. Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford—two climate-change deniers—were given substantial real estate on the editorial pages of Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal to insist that "scary" coronavirus projections were based on "bad data" and that we must not take "draconian measures" that might harm the economy.62 As it was published on April 1, you could be forgiven for thinking it was an April Fool's joke. At that very moment, coronavirus cases in New York were surging toward their peak, as subsequent weeks would prove. The climate-change-denying Heartland Institute insisted that social-distancing measures should be lifted .63 Online, meanwhile, a rogues' gallery of climate-change contrarians, including Judith Curry, Nic Lewis, Christopher Monck-ton, Anthony Watts, Marcel Crok, and William Briggs, all joined in on the frenzy.64

242 243

Trump himself emerged early on as a leading source of disin­formation. As with climate change, he initially dismissed concerns about COVID-19 as a "hoax.1165 With both COVID-19 and climate change, "Trump. . . employed similar tactics—namely cherry-picking data, promoting outright falsehoods and using anecdotal experi­ence in place of scientific data," reported Energy and Environment News.66 And in both cases Trump depended upon agenda-driven anti-science contrarians to justify his course of inaction.67 Writing for Pulitzer Prize—winning Inside Climate News, Katelyn Weisbrod described "6 Ways Trump's Denial of Science Has Delayed the Response to COVID-19 (and Climate Change)," with a subtitle noting that "Misinformation, Blame, Wishful Thinking and Making Up Facts are Favorite Techniques. 1168

Fearing a slowdown of the economy and threat to his reelection hopes, Trump repeatedly dismissed the public threat and discour­aged people from taking the actions recommended by health ex­perts, such as social distancing and mask-wearing. Jeff Mason wrote, in an article for Reuters, "Early on he said that the virus was under control and repeatedly compared it to the seasonal flu," and in late March "he argued the time was coming to reopen the U.S. economy, complaining that the cure was worse than the problem and setting a goal of economic rebirth by Easter on April 12." In early April, furthermore, Dr. Deborah Birx, leading the White House task force on the pandemic, told Americans they needed to "do better at social distancing." But, as Mason put it, "President Donald Trump didn't like the message.1169

As time went on, and Trump's desperation with the lockdown grew, his anti-scientific and pseudoscientific response to the COVID-1 9 crisis itself constituted a mounting public health threat. There were his entirely unfounded and irresponsible suggestions that the virus could be cured by ultraviolet light or disinfectants. After having ini­tially issued an emergency authorization in March 2020 for the use of two antimalarial medications, hydroxychioroquine and chloro-quine, in response to pressure from Trump, the US Food and Drug Administration reversed that decision in June 2020, noting that the medications "were unlikely to be effective" for treating COVID- 19, and that any potential benefits were outweighed by safety risks, in­cluding heart problems. 70

Trump discouraged the use of face masks, a simple measure known to greatly reduce transmission of coronavirus. In June 2020, he held dangerous indoor political rallies in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Phoenix, Arizona, that defied all public health measures (masks were not encouraged, and staff were even ordered to remove the social-distancing stickers on chairs in Tulsa). And he held a crowded "4th of July" event at Mount Rushmore that represented not only a public health threat but an environmental one as well, featuring a fireworks display that experts warned posed a severe fire hazard due to climate-change-fueled heat and drought conditions.7'

Other conservatives aided and abetted Trump's efforts. At times, it would have been almost comical if it were not so dangerous. In­deed, the Daily Show was compelled to compile a "best of" reel it called the "Heroes of the Pandumic."72 It featured assorted right-wing personalities, Republican talking heads, and politicians dismiss­ing the threat of the virus. On Fox News, Sean Hannity complained that the "media mob" wanted people to think the pandemic was "an apocalypse," and Rush Limbaugh dismissed it as "hype," insist­ing that "the coronavirus is the common cold folks." Lou Dobbs on Fox warned, "The national left-wing media [is] playing up fears of the coronavirus." Commentator Tomi Lahren, also on Fox, mocked those who were concerned as crying, "The sky is falling because we have a few dozen cases," adding that she was "far more concerned with stepping on a used heroin needle."

The disdain for science and public health concern went on and on. Fox News personalities Jeanine Pirro, Dr. Marc Siegal, and Ger-aldo Rivera all dismissed coronavirus as no worse than the flu in what could readily be seen as a coordinated Fox News talking point. Other Fox personalities insisted they were not "afraid" of the virus, that it was "very difficult to contract," and that it was "milder than we thought." A Fox panel told viewers, "It's actually the safest time to fly."

244  245

Fox News and other right-wing media even resorted to orches­trated character attacks against the nation's top infectious disease expert, simply because he refused to act as a rubber stamp for Trump's most misguided coronavirus policy gambits. Media Mat­ters described the phenomenon: "Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for the past 36 years, is awidely respected immunologist and major public face of the Trump administration's response to COVID-19. De­spite his credibility established over decades as a public health of­ficial, right-wing media have begun to launch attacks against [him], blaming the medical expert for allegedly harming the economy and undermining President Donald Trump."" In what might sound all too familiar, the Trump administration even went so far as to circulate an opposition research document cherry-picking and mis­representing Fauci's statements to try to discredit him as a scientist and as a messenger.

14

Republican politicians followed suit, too. Trump's most loyal, fiercest bulldogs in Congress treated the pandemic like it was a joke. Congressman Devin Nunes (R-CA) told viewers to "just go out and go to a local restaurants." Matt Gaetz (R-FL) wore a gas mask on Capitol Hill to mock concern about coronavirus. When a reporter questioned James Inhofe (R-OK), the leading climate-change denier in the US Senate, about what precautions he was taking, Inhofe ex­tended his arm and dismissively asked, "Wanna shake hands?" Eight governors—all Republicans—collectively ignored the words of Dr. Anthony Fauci, who had expressed concern about the lack of adequate lockdown. -

Conservative coronavirus denial turned ever more deadly as a co­ordinated effort emerged among Republican politicians and talking heads to convince the elderly to "take one for the team." Texas lieu­tenant governor Dan Patrick said on Fox News that grandparents should be willing to die to save the economy for their grandchil-dren.75 Conservatives doubled down on this talking point, with other leading personalities, like Fox News's Brit Hume, arguing that it was an "entirely reasonable viewpoint" for the elderly to risk their lives

to help the stock market. 16 One right-wing talk-show host took this progression to its logical extreme, insisting that "while death is sad for the living left behind, for the dying, it is merely a passage out of this physical body.""

Herein we see yet another remarkable parallel with climate-change inactivism: the transition over time from denial to false solutions, and then, eventually, to "it's actually good for us." This transition took more than a decade with climate inactivists; with the coronavirus deniers it happened in a matter of weeks.78 Climate scientist Mike MacFerrin explained, "The right wing's instantaneous flip from 'it's a hoax' to 'let millions die in service to the "market" is the same script they play with climate change, to a tee. They want you to do nothing."79 And former CBS News anchor Dan Rather put it this way: "After years when we should have learned of the dangers of 'false equivalence' it baffles me that we are seeing a framing that pits the health of our citizens against some vague notion of getting back to work."80 I noted, in turn, that it's "not unlike the false equiv­alence . . . that pits the health of our entire planet against some vague notion of economic prosperity.""' The right-wing response to coronavirus was, indeed, a précis of the climate wars.

While it took years for the threat of climate change to crystallize, with the impacts of epic storms, floods, and wildfires, it took only weeks for the reality of the coronavirus to set in as people witnessed colleagues, friends, and loved ones contract the disease, and sadly, in some cases, perish from it. Under such circumstances, the con­sequences of denial and inaction became readily apparent to the average person on the street (or, more aptly, safely self-quarantined in their home).

The coronavirus pandemic thus provided an unexpected lesson on the perils of anti-science. As I told Energy and Environment News, the pandemic "exposes the dangers of denial in a much more dra­matic fashion. We may look back at the coronavirus crisis as a critical moment where we were all afforded a terrifying view of the dan­gerous and deadly consequences of politically and ideology-driven science denial. We looked into the abyss, and I hope we collectively decide that we don't like what we saw. 1182 Tweeted Steve Schmidt, former presidential campaign co-adviser for the late senator John McCain, "The injury done to America and the public good by Fox News and a bevy of personalities from Limbaugh to Ingraham will be felt for many years in this country as we deal with the death and economic damage that didn't have to be. 1113

There were other key lessons to take away from the pandemic that had broad implications for the climate crisis. We were provided with more examples of the concept of a "threat multiplier"—that is, the compounding nature of multiple simultaneous threats. The damage already wrought by climate change in some places affected their ability to respond to the coronavirus threat. So extensive was the damage to Puerto Rico's health-care infrastructure after Hurri­cane Maria that vital equipment was lacking when coronavirus came along. A thirteen-year-old named Jaideliz Moreno Ventura was just one of the resulting casualties: she died because Vieques, where she lived, lacked the medical equipment to treat her. 84 Many others were similarly affected, and the tragedy was a legacy of the devastating, climate-change4ueled impacts of Hurricane Maria, along with the insufficient federal support for Puerto Rico under President Trump and his failure to send aid for hurricane recovery, including for criti­cal public health infrastructure. 81

The pandemic also crystallized the dual roles played by both indi­vidual action and government policy when it comes to dealing with a societal crisis. While containment required individuals to act re­sponsibly by practicing social distancing, using masks, and following other advice regarding mitigative behavioral actions, it also required government action in the form of policies (like stay-at-home orders, restrictions on public gatherings, and so on) that would incentivize responsible behavior.

The coronavirus crisis, in fact, underscored the importance of gov­ernment. The need for an organized and effective response to a cri­sis, after all, is one of the fundamental reasons we have governments in the first place. Crises, whether in the near term like COVID- 19 or in the long term like climate change, remind us that government has an obligation to protect the welfare of its citizens by providing aid, organizing an appropriate crisis response, alleviating economic disruption, and maintaining a functioning social safety net.86

Citizens, in turn, have a responsibility to hold politicians ac­countable whenever government fails to uphold its end of the "social contract." In a democratic society, political action and indi­vidual action are inextricably linked. We need to deal with problems such as COVID-1 9 and climate change, and we need competent, science-driven leaders to do that. Consider the contrast between the United States and the United Kingdom, under Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, respectively, on the one hand—two politicians who dismissed the need for lockdown and social distancing—and, on the other hand, New Zealand and Germany, which saw limited impact under their respective leaders Jacinda Ardern and Angela Merkel, who instead embraced such measures.

As I'm writing, we don't yet know the outcome of the upcoming presidential election that will determine the fate of climate policy in the United States, and indeed the world, for years to come. But is seems plausible that voters will recognize the shortcomings of a president who had "received [his] first formal notification of the out break of the coronavirus in China" at the beginning of January 2020, including "a warning about the coronavirus—the first of many—in the President's Daily Brief;" and "yet. . . took 70 days from that initial notification . . . to treat the coronavirus not as: a .distant threat or harmless flu strain . . . but as a lethal force . . . poised to kill tens of thousands of citizens. 1117 It seems equally plausible that an administration that exploited the pandemic by stripping away environmental protections at the behest of big polluters, greenlighting the construction of controversial new fossil fuel infrastructure, and criminalizing climate protests while the public was distracted will see a reckoning come the election.88

The most important question of all, though, is this one: Can an event like the coronavirus crisis become a turning point, an oppor­tunity to bring needed focus to an even greater crisis—the climate crisis? The climate crisis is, after all, the greatest long-term health threat we face. Even as we battled the pandemic, climate change continued to loom in the background. "Earth Scorched in the First 3 Months of 2020," reported Mashable.89 In Australia, where I was residing in early 2020 when the COVID-lI 9 epidemic was just be­ginning to unfold, Australians were still recovering from the calamitous bushfires of the summer of 2019/2020. Meanwhile, the Great Barrier Reef was beginning to suffer the third major bleaching event in five years, an unprecedented and foreboding development.90

The COVID-1 9 pandemic spoke to the fragility of our expanding, resource-hungry civilization and our reliance on massive but fragile infrastructure for food and water on a planet with finite resources. Some argued that this crisis might be sounding the death knell of resource-extractive neoliberalism.91 I myself am not so sanguine. 92 But I do think it has generated a long-overdue discussion about the public good and environmental sustainability.

Some ecologists believe that our resource-hungry modern life-style—in particular, the destruction of rain forests and other natu­ral ecosystems—may be an underlying factor favoring the sorts of pandemics we .have just witnessed.93 That raises some disturbing possibilities, but to appreciate them, we must take a brief scientific digression into the concept of Gaia, the ancient Greeks' personifica­tion of Earth herself.

Put forward by scientists Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock in the 1970s, the Gaia hypothesis says that life interacts with Earth's physical environment to form a synergistic and self-regulating sys-tem.94 In other words, the Earth system in some sense behaves like an organism, with "homeostatic" regulatory mechanisms that main­tain conditions that are habitable for life. Although the concept has often been taken out of context and misrepresented—for example, to depict Earth as a sentient entity—it is really just a heuristic device for describing a set of physical, chemical, and biological processes that yield stabilizing "feedback" mechanisms maintaining the planet within livable bounds. There is no consciousness or motive. It's sim­ply the laws of physics, chemistry, and biology at work in a fascinat­ing and fortuitous manner.

There is evidence that the hypothesis holds within the range of its assumptions. Earth's carbon cycle, which governs the amount of CO2 greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, is heavily influenced by life on Earth. Photosynthetic organisms, such as cyanobacteria (blue-green algae) and plants, for example, take in CO2 and produce oxy­gen, which is needed by animals like us. There is evidence that as the Sun has become brighter over Earth's lifetime of the past 4.5 billion years, the carbon cycle has intensified, decreasing atmospheric CO2 levels and helping keep Earth from becoming inhospitably hot. A specific example is the famous Faint Young Sun Paradox—the sur­prising finding that Earth was habitable to basic lifeforms more than 3 billion years ago despite the fact that the Sun was 30 percent dimmer—which we encountered back in Chapter 1. Readers may recall that the great Carl Sagan proposed an explanation: namely, there must have been a considerably larger greenhouse effect at the time. (Incidentally, Sagan and Margulis were married for about seven years. I often wonder what other scientific synergies must have emerged in their daily dinner-table conversations.)

250  251

During the height of the COVID- 19 crisis, air traffic, transpor­tation, and industrial activity greatly diminished, and pollution, including carbon emissions, was reduced. I couldn't help but pose a rhetorical question.95 Are pandemics such as coronavirus, meta­phorically speaking, acting like Gaia's immune system, fighting back against a dangerous invader? Aren't we—through the damage we are inflicting on the planet, its forests, its ecosystems, and its oceans and lakes, actually the metaphorical virus? 96 I wasn't the only one asking such questions.97 My question was intentionally provocative, and I was sensitive about even asking it, since such thinking can easily be misconstrued and abused for misanthropic and ecofascist purposes.98

Here's the point, though. Unlike microbes, human beings have agency. We can choose to behave like a virus that plagues our planet, or we can choose a different path. It's up to us. Our response to the coronavirus pandemic shows it's possible for us to change our ways when we must. The COVID crisis was acute and immediate, and the penalty of inaction was swift. Climate change may seem slower than coronavirus and farther away, but it is very much here, and it requires many of the same behavioral changes. In this case our com­mitment must be sustained rather than fleeting. We must flatten the curve—of carbon emissions—to get off the climate pandemic path.99

While the coronavirus pandemic was truly a tragedy, we must consider the opportunities it has brought along in its wake as we at­tempt to work our way back to normal life and governments imple­ment economic stimulus plans to jump-start their economies. The pandemic has given us an opening to get off the path of climate distress and onto a healthier path. We must work even harder to de­carbonize our economy and minimize our environmental footprint. There are clear side benefits to an economy that is less vulnerable to disruptions in the production and transport of fuel. Regardless of what else happens, the sun will still shine, and the wind will still blow. Renewable energy is both safer and more reliable than fossil fuels. We were already seeing the decoupling of our global economy from fossil fuels before the pandemic. (We had substantial economic growth in 2019 without a rise in carbon emissions.) Why not take this opportunity to accelerate the transition from fossil fuels to re­newable energy?

The good news is that this seems to be happening, despite the Trump administration's best efforts to impede this transition by seeking to fast-track the further dismantling of climate and environ­mental protections.100 Inside Climate News reported in July 2020 that two of the world's largest oil companies, Shell and BP, were lowering their outlooks for demand for their products and slashing the value of their assets by billions, saying the coronavirus pandemic could accelerate a shift to clean energy.101 In early April 2020, a group of state officials from agencies such as the California Energy Commission, collectively representing more than 25 percent of to­tal US power generation, announced a new coalition dedicated to 100 percent clean energy. In doing so, they explicitly acknowledged both the challenges and the opportunities for change in the wake of the pandemic.102 New York State, the world's eleventh-largest economy, put forward a COVID-1 9 recovery plan centered on re­newable energy.103 ClimateWorks Australia had a stimulus-ready plan already in place for Australia to move toward net-zero carbon emissions. 104 It appears we may, indeed, be turning a corner. That's just one reason to be optimistic. There are others.

ClimateWorks Australia - Sustainable Development Institutehttps://www.monash.edu › initiatives

ClimateWorks Australia. ClimateWorks Australia is a not-for-profit founded by Monash University and the Myer Foundation to bridge the gap between research ...

4] THE WISDOM OF CHILDREN

The Bible prophesied that "a little child shall lead them" (Isaiah 35:9). And such has been the case with climate action. Over the past few years, we have witnessed the rise to prominence of Greta Thun-berg, a teenager from Sweden, who achieved by the age of sixteen an iconic global cultural status typically reserved for pop stars and Hollywood celebrities. She has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize and was featured on the cover of Time magazine. Thunberg has been diagnosed as having Asperger syndrome, but instead of seeing it as a liability, she calls it her "superpower."' 01 Now seventeen, she possesses a remarkable ability to speak truth to power in strong, laser-focused, perfectly delivered language.

In 2018, at age fifteen, she began protesting outside the Swedish parliament to raise awareness about the threat of climate change Her efforts garnered increasing levels of media attention. She went on to speak at the 2019 United Nations Climate Change Summit, to the British and European Parliaments, and, perhaps most famously, to the attendees of the 2019 World Economic Forum in Davos, where she chided the politicians and other influential individuals gathered there for their failure to address the existential challenge of our time, warning them "our house is on fire."

Thunberg's efforts have been infectious. She has sparked a global youth movement called "Fridays For Future," with literally millions of children around the world marching, striking, and protesting for climate action weekly. Kids in the United States wear T-shirts bearing her likeness. Adults are now mobilizing to support the movement, too. Inactivists have become so worried that they've even manufac­tured and promoted an "anti-Greta," a teenager who dismisses the climate crisis, in a desperate and feeble attempt at distraction and misdirection. 106

They should be worried. In response to this popular uprising, the UK and Irish parliaments have now both declared a "climate emergency."07 The majority of UK voters now support dramatic action to lower greenhouse gas emissions to nearly zero by 2050 regardless of cost.108 There is clearly a sense of urgency. But there is also recogni­tion of agency—a sense that action is possible, that our future is, to a great extent, still in our hands.

While Thunberg has garnered the lion's share of attention, there are other leaders of this movement. Among them is Alexandria Vil-laseñor, who, beginning in December 2018, at the age of fourteen, skipped school every Friday to protest against lack of climate ac­tion in front of United Nations Headquarters in New York City. She cofounded the US Youth Climate Strike and Earth Uprising youth climate activist groups. Then there's Jerome Foster, who as of 2020 was eighteen years old. An activist from Washington, DC, he is founder and editor in chief of The Climate Reporter. I joined Villaseñor and Foster in Easthampton, Long Island, in August 2019 in a panel event called "The Youth Climate Movement Could Save the Planet —a sentiment with which I agree. Arterwarct, tne two even inducted me "officially" into the youth climate movement after I was able to demonstrate competency in Instagram technique.

It was a light moment, but the topic couldn't be more serious. The local paper, summarizing the discussion, said of the youth lead­ers, "Despite little meaningful movement to address a growing emer­gency, they have hope. Their generation, they said, is mobilizing to preserve a livable world."110 These kids have helped accomplish what seemingly nobody else could. They've helped place climate change on the front page of the papers and at the center of our public dis­course. They are the main reason I'm optimistic that we're finally going to win this battle.

In solidarity with these youths, a group of just under two dozen climate scientists, myself included, published a letter in Science mag­azine that was ultimately cosigned by thousands of other scientists around the world. The letter offered support to them for their ef-forts.'1' It read, in part, "The enormous grassroots mobilization of the youth climate movement. . . shows that young people understand the situation. We approve and support their demand for rapid and forceful action. We see it as our social, ethical, and scholarly respon­sibility to state in no uncertain terms: Only if humanity acts quickly and resolutely can we limit global warming. . . and preserve the . well-being of present and future generations. This is what the young people want to achieve. They deserve our respect and full support."

They deserve not only our respect and support but our protec­tion as well.' 12 We saw earlier, back in Chapter 4, how leaders of the youth climate movement like Greta Thunberg and Alexandria Vii-iaseñor have been targeted by trolls and bots and even heads of state, including Donald Trump and Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro.

The attacks on Thunberg reached fever pitch in the lead-up to the high-profile, high-stakes events of September 20119: the Global Youth Climate Strike and the UN Climate Change Summit in New York City. Andrew Bolt, the Australian climate-change-denying propagandist at Murdoch's Herald Sun, attacked Thunberg, then sixteen, as "strange" and "disturbed.""' Christopher Caldwell, a Se­nior Fellow and contributing editor for the right-wing Scaife-funded Claremont Institute, was granted space in the New York Times to attack her in a piece titled "The Problem with Greta Thunberg's Climate Activism: Her Radical Approach Is at Odds with Democracy.11114 

Patrick Moore, chairman of the board of directors of the CO2 Coalition, a climate-change-denying Koch brothers front group that is the modern-day successor to the infamous George C. Marshall Institute we encountered back in Chapter 2, went so far as to tweet "Greta = Evil."115

The Eye of Sauron is focused upon these kids. The most powerful industry in the world, the fossil fuel industry, sees them as an existential threat and has them firmly in its sights. Consider the recent actions of the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC), a trillion-dollar international organization founded in 1960 by five petrostates—Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, and Venezuela. It now consists of fourteen oil-exporting countries that own 80 per­cent of the world's proven oil reserves.

In July 2019, OPEC's secretary general, Mohammed Barkindo, referred to the youth climate movement as the "greatest threat" the fossil fuel industry faces. He expressed concern that the pressure being brought to bear on oil producers by the mass youth move­ment was "beginning to . . . dictate policies and corporate decisions, including investment in the industry." Barkindo acknowledged that even the children of OPEC officials were now "asking us about their future because . . . they see their peers on the streets campaigning against this industry.""'

Unintimidated, members of the youth climate movement actu­ally welcomed the comments "as a sign the oil industry is worried it may be losing the battle for public opinion." The criticism, as The Guardian characterized it, "highlights the growing reputational con­cerns of oil companies as public protests intensify along with extreme weather" (emphasis added)."' Note, by the way, the acknowledg­ment here of the role played by a synergy of underlying factors—in this case both the youth climate movement and mounting weather disasters. It is indeed no single factor—but a convergence of them—that has led both to intensified attacks by inactivists and an unprec­edented opportunity for change.

The kids are at the center of it all. And they are being attacked simply for fighting for their future. It is morally incumbent upon the rest of us to do more than just pat them on the back. Commu­nication expert Max Boycoff expressed the worry, in a September 2019 op-ed, "that we adults, who got us into this mess, are not doing enough.... Adult utterances about 'legacies' and 'intergenerational' generally ring hollow when the scale of engagement and action pales in comparison to the scale of the ongoing challenge."' 8

The children have created an opportunity that didn't exist be-fore—they've gained a foothold for the rest of us. It is time for us to take the opportunity we've been given as we prepare for battle—the battle to preserve a livable planet for our children and grandchildren.

5] THE FINAL BATTLE

Though they are on the run, the forces of climate-change denial and inaction haven't given up. Nor are they, as Malcolm Harris wrote in New York Magazine, "planning for a future without oil and gas." "These companies," Harris observed, after attending a fossil-fuel-industry planning meeting, "want the public to think of them as part of a climate solution. In reality, they're a problem trying to avoid being solved."' '9

Climate inactivists are now engaged in a rear-guard action as their defenses start to crumble under the weight of the evidence and in the face of a global insurgency for change. But let us also recognize that they are still in possession of a powerful arsenal as they wage the new climate war. It includes an array of powerful Ds: disinformation, deceit, divisiveness, deflection, delay, despair-mongering, and doom-ism The needed societal titmina ooint will not easily be reached as long as these immensely powerful vested interests remain aligned in defense of the fossil fuel status quo and in possession of these formi­dable weapons. It will only happen with the active participation of citizens everywhere aiding in the collective push forward.

256 257

It is the goal of this book to inform readers about what is taking place on this front and to enable people of all ages to join together in the battle for our planet. With that goal in mind, let's revisit the four-point battle plan outlined at the very start, reflecting now on everything we've learned:

Disregarding the Doomsayers: We have seen how harmful doom-ism can be. It is disabling and disempowering. And it is readily exploited by inactivists to convince even the most environmentally minded that there's no reason to turn out for elections, lobby for cli­mate action, or in any other way work toward climate solutions. We must be blunt about the very real risks, threats, and challenges that

climate change already presents to us. But just as we must reject dis­tortions of the science in service of denialism, so, too, must we reject misrepresentations of the science—including unsupported claims of runaway warming and unavoidable human extinction scenarios—that can be used to promote the putative inevitability of our demise. - Unfortunately, doom sells That's why we've seen a rash of high-profile feature articles and best-selling books purveying what I call "climate doom porn"—writing that may tap into the adrena­line rush of fear but actually inhibit the impulse to take meaningful action on climate. It's why we see headlines with an overly doomist framing of what the latest scientific study shows (or at least plays up the worst possible scenarios). 120

Feeding doomism is the notion that climate change is just too big a problem for us to solve. Especially pernicious in this regard is the dismissal of climate change as a "wicked problem." 'While definitions vary, what's relevant here is how it is defined in common parlance. Wikipedia defines a wicked problem as "a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and chang­ing requirements that are often difficult to recognize" (emphasis added) .121

The idea thatthe climate problem is fundamentally unsolvable is itself deeply problematic. Jonathan Gilligan, a professor in earth and environmental science at Vanderbilt University, agrees, explaining, in a Twitter thread, "There are profound problems with the 'wicked problem' idea, that tend to produce a sense of helplessness because wicked problems are, by their definition, unsolvable."22

Others weighed in on how the "wicked problem" framing can constitute a form of soft denial. Paul Price, a policy researcher in Dublin City University's Energy and Climate Research Network, explained, "Social science use of 'wicked' & 'super-wicked' too of­ten seems a form of 'implicatory denial,' a rhetorical fence to avoid physical reality."123 Atmospheric scientist Peter Jacobs added, "There is almost literally no environmental problem that one couldn't suc­cessfully reclassify as 'wicked' at the outset if one wanted to, even topics where we've successfully mitigated much of the harm (ozone depletion, acid rain, etc.)."124

In any case, the "wicked problem" framing is convenient to polluting interests, which have worked hard to sabotage action on climate. And it's wrong. The truth is, if we took the disinformation campaign funded by the fossil fuel industry out of the equation, the climate problem would have been solved decades ago. The problem is not hopelessly complicated. 121

Nevertheless, the forces of doomism and despair-mongering re­main active, and we must call them out whenever they appear. In March 2020, as I was writing the final section of this book, social me­dia was abuzz: Bernie Sanders had dropped out of the Democratic presidential primaries, leaving Joe Biden the presumptive nominee.

Some Sanders supporters were particularly aggressive in insisting that this spelled climate Armageddon. A commenter tweeted at me, "If we don't reduce carbon output by 50% of 2018 by 2030 climate change becomes a run away [sic] process that cannot be stopped."26

I responded, "That's false.. . . Climate-change deniers distort the sci­ence. Let's not resort to their tactics."27 The commenter continued, "Biden's plan doesn't come close to accomplishing that. There is no reason to vote in this election because it's apocalypse either way." 28

258 259

It was a perfectly toxic brew of misguided thinking, Consisting of distortions of the science in the service of doomist inevitability and false equivalence—between a president who has done notable darn-age to international climate efforts and a candidate whom Politifact calls "a climate change pioneer."129 The cherry on top is the overt and cynical nihilism—the notion that there is nothing we can dc so we might as well simply give up. It would be easy to dismiss this as a one-off comment. But in fact it is reflective of a hostile online atmosphere that has been fueled by bad state actors. Bernie Sanders had said just a month earlier, "In 2016, Russia used Internet propa­ganda to sow division in our country, and my understanding is that they are doing it again in 2020. Some of the ugly stuff on the Inter­net attributed to our campaign may well not be coming from real supporters."30

This sort of propaganda may be more harmful now than climate-change denial itself It must be treated as every bit as much of a threat to climate action. Those who promote it should be called out in the strongest terms, for they threaten the future of this planet. When you encounter such doomist and nihilistic framing of the climate crisis, whether online or in conversations with friends, coworkers, or fellow churchgoers, call it out.

Don't forget, once again, to emphasize that there is both urgency and agency. The climate crisis is very real. But it is not unsolvable. And it's not too late to act. Every ounce of carbon we don't burn makes things better. There is still time to create a better future, and the greatest obstacle now in our way is doomism and defeatism. Jour­nalists and the media have a tremendous responsibility here as well.

A Child Shall Lead Them: Back in 2017, I coauthored a chil­dren's book, The Tantrum That Saved the World, with children's book author and illustrator Megan Herbert. 131 It told the story of a girl, Sophia, who is frustrated by the animals and people—including a polar bear, a swarm of bees, a Pacific Islander, and oth-ers—who continue to show up at her door. They've been displaced from their homes by climate change. Sophia becomes increasingly frustrated by this disruptive activity and throws a tantrum. But she ultimately redirects her anger and frustration—and the tantrum itself—in an empowering way. She becomes the change she wishes to see in the world, starting a whole movement that demands ac­countability by the adults of the world to act on the climate crisis. Less than a year later, Greta Thunberg would rise to prominence and the youth climate movement would take the world by storm. Yes, life does indeed sometimes imitate art—in this case, in a most profound way.

The children speak with a moral clarity that is undeniable to all but the most jaded and cynical. It is a game-changer. But, as we've seen, that's what makes them such a threat to vested interests—the heads of petrostates and the fossil fuel industry itself. They have at­tacked the children because the children pose a serious threat to the industry's business-as-usual model. Fossil fuel interests rely on that model continuing for record profits.

Some colleagues of mine blithely dismiss the notion that we are, even if involuntarily on our part, in a "war" with powerful special in­terests looking to undermine climate action. Ironically, they are en­gaged in a form of denial themselves. The dismissiveness of soothing myths and appeasement didn't serve us well in World War II, and it won't serve us well here either. Especially when we are dealing with an enemy that doesn't observe the accepted rules of engagement. To carry the analogy one step further, the attacks on child climate activists most surely constitute a metaphorical violation of the Ge­neva Conventions. So yes, we are in a war—though not of our own choosing—and our children represent unacceptable collateral dam­age. That is why we must fight back—with knowledge, passion, and an unyielding demand for change.

This problem goes well beyond science, economics, policy, and politics. It's about our obligation to our children and grandchildren not to leave behind a degraded planet. It is impossible now not to be reminded of this threat whenever I have an opportunity to share the wonders of this planet with my wife and fourteen-year-old daughter.

In December 2019, before I began my sabbatical in Australia, I trav­eled with my family to see the Great Barrier Reef Within a month after our visit the third major bleaching event of the past five years, the most extensive yet, was underway. Some experts fear that the reef won't fully recover.132260 261

It fills me with an odd sort of "survivors' guilt" to have seen the reef with my family just in the nick of time. The next stop on our vacation was no less sobering. We went to the famous Blue Moun­tains of New South Wales. Unfortunately, the majestic vistas were replaced by a thick veil of smoke from the unprecedented bushfires that were spreading out across the continent.

I feel some wistfulness about the fact that my daughter; when she grows up, may not be able to experience these same natural wonders with her children or grandchildren. It's appropriate to feel grief at times for what is lost. But grief about that which is wrongly presumed to be lost yet can still be saved—and which is used, under false pretenses, in the service of despair and defeatism—is perni­cious and wrong. Since I have already used at least one Lord of the Rings metaphor in this book, you'll forgive me if I use another. I'm reminded of the Steward of Gondor, who wrongly presumes his son to be dead and his city to be lost, telling the townspeople to run for their lives, and his assistants to take his still-living son off to be burned. Fortunately, Gandaif whacks him upside the head with his staff before his orders can be carried out. Sometimes I feel that way about doomists who advocate surrender in the battle to avert cata­strophic climate change.

Educate, Educate, Educate: As we have discussed, the battle to convince the public and policymakers of the reality and threat of climate change is largely over. The substantive remaining public de­bate is over how bad it will get and what we can do to mitigate it. So online, don't waste time engaging directly with climate-change-denying trolls and bots. And where appropriate, report them. Those who seem to be victims of disinformation rather than promoters of it deserve special consideration. Try to inform them. When a false claim appears to be gaining enough traction to move outside the denialist echo chamber and infect honest, well-meaning folks, it should be rebutted.

You have powerful tools at your fingertips. A personal favorite resource of mine is Skeptical Science (skepticalscience.com), which rebuts all the major climate-change-denier talking points and pro­vides responses that you can link to online or via email. Inform yourself about the latest science so you are armed with knowledge and facts, and then be brave enough to refute misinformation and disinformation. Online there are Twitter accounts you can follow that provide up-to-date information about the science, impacts, and solutions. A few personal favorites of mine are @ClimateNexus, @TheDailyClimate, @InsideClimate, and @GuardianEco. Feel free to follow yours truly (@MichaelEMann), too, if you don't mind the occasional cat video

Climate-change deniers constantly complain about language and framing. Don't fall for it. Don't make concessions to them. In sports parlance, they're trying to "work the refs." The classic example is the shedding of crocodile tears over use of the term "climate-change denier" itself In point of fact, it's an appropriate, accepted term to describe those who reject the overwhelming evidence. The goal of the critics in this case is to coerce us into granting them the unde­served status of "skeptics," which actually rewards their denialism. Legitimate skepticism is, as we know, a good thing in science. It's how scientists are trained to think. Indiscriminate rejection of evi­dence based on flimsy, ideological arguments is not.

When we falsely label climate-change denialism as "skepticism," it legitimizes disinformation and muddies the climate communica­tion waters. It makes concessions to those who have no interest at all in good-faith engagement, are unmovable in their views, and are in­tentionally trafficking in doubt and confusion. What is so pernicious is that at the same time it actually hinders efforts to convince and motivate the "confused middle"—those who are liable to throw up their hands in frustration when presented with the apparent predic­ament of a debate between two ostensibly legitimate camps.

But enough about climate-change deniers. They are increasingly a fringe element in today's public discourse, and our efforts to educate are best aimed at those in the confused middle. These folks accept the evidence but are unconvinced of the urgency of the problem and are unsure whether we should—or can—do anything about it.262 263

My advice is to spend your time on those who are reachable, teachable, and movable.133 They need assistance. As we have seen, far too many have fallen into climate despair, having been led astray by unscientific, doomist messaging, some of it promoted by the in-activists in a cynical effort to dispirit and divide climate activists.

Others are victims of other types of climate misinformation. When you encounter, for example, the claim that it's too expensive to act, point out that the opposite is true. The impacts of climate change are already costing us far more than the solutions. And indeed, 100 percent green energy would likely pay for itself134

Call out false solutions for what they are. We've seen that many of the proposed geoengineering schemes and technofixes that have been proposed are fraught with danger. Moreover, they are being used to take our eye off the ball—the need to decarbonize our soci­ety. Even some of the fiercest climate hawks are sometimes way off base here. Elon Musk, for instance, has suggested that nuclear bombs could be used to make Mars's atmosphere habitable. While such proposals seem almost amusingly flippant, they are dangerous—not because we might expose little green men to nuclear radiation, but because they offer false promise for a simple escape route, providing fodder for those who argue "we can just find another planet if we screw up this one."

Climate change is arguably the greatest threat we face, yet we speak so little about it. Silence breeds inaction. So look for opportu­nities to talk about climate change as you go about your day—that's the gateway to all of the solutions we've discussed. Unlike corona-virus, we cannot look forward to a literal vaccine for the planet. But in a metaphorical sense, knowledge is the vaccine for what currently ails us—denial, disinformation, deflection, delayism, doomism, you know the litany by now. We must vaccinate the public against the efforts by inactivists to thwart climate action, using knowledge and facts and clear, simple explanations that have authority behind them. That's empowering, because it means we can all contribute to the cure.

Changing the System Requires Systemic Change: Inactivists, as we have seen, have waged a campaign to convince you that climate change is your fault, and that any real solutions involve individual action and personal responsibility alone, rather than policies aimed at holding corporate polluters accountable and decarbonizing our economy. They have sought to deflect the conversation toward the car you drive, the food you eat, and the lifestyle you live.

And they want you arguing with your neighbor about who is the most carbon pure, dividing advocates so they cannot speak with a unified voice—a voice calling for change. The fossil fuel industry and the inactivists who do their bidding fear a sober conversation about the larger systemic changes that are needed and the incentives they will require. And it's for one simple reason: it means the end of their reign of power.

Make no mistake. Individual action is part of the solution. There are countless things we can do and ought to do to limit our personal carbon footprint—and indeed our total environmental impact. And there are many reasons for doing them: they make us healthier, save us money, make us feel better about ourselves, and set a good exam­ple for others to follow. But individual action can only get us so far.

We were recently afforded a cautionary tale about the limits of behavior change alone in tackling the climate crisis. The dramatic re­duction in travel and consumption brought about by the global lock-down response to the coronavirus pandemic reduced global carbon emissions by only a very modest amount.135 Referencing this fact, Glen Peters, research director on past, current, and future trends in energy use and greenhouse gas emissions at the Center for Interna­tional Climate Research (CICERO), posed a question: "If such radi­cal social change leads to (only) a 4% drop in global emissions, then how do we get a 100% drop by '-2050? Is #COVID19 just going to show how important technology is to solve the climate problem?"136 It's a valid point. 

The answer is that there is no path of escape from climate-change catastrophe that doesn't involve polices aimed at societal decarbonization. Arriving at those policies requires intergovernmental agreements, like those fostered by the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), that bring the coun­tries of the world to the table to agree on critical targets. The 2015 Paris Agreement is an example. It didn't solve the problem, but it got us on the right path, a path toward limiting warming below dan­gerous levels. To quote The Matrix, "There's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path." So we must build on the initial progress in future agreements if we are to avert catastrophic planetary warming.

The commitments of individual nations to such global agreements can only, of course, be met when their governments are in a position to enforce them through domestic energy and climate policies that incentivize the needed shift away from fossil fuel burning and other sources of carbon pollution. We won't get those policies without politicians in office who are willing to do our bidding over the bid­ding of powerful polluters. That means that we must bring pressure to bear on politicians and polluting interests. We do that through the strength of our voices and the power of our votes. We must vote out politicians who serve as handmaidens for fossil fuel interests and elect those who will champion climate action. That brings us full circle, because we are now back to talking about the responsibility of individuals—but now, it's about the responsibility to vote and to use every other means we have to collectively influence policy.

Herein we have encountered a new challenge. Opposition to key policy measures is now coming not just from the right, as tradition­ally expected, but from the left, too. 'While a vast majority of liberal democrats (88 percent) support carbon pricing, there is a movement underway, as we have seen, among some progressive climate activists to oppose it. Their opposition is based on the perception that it vio­lates principles of social justice (though there's no reason that needs to be the case), or that it buys into market economics and neoliberal politics. 117 Others insist that it can't pass because it's unpopular with voters (the opposite is actually true), or that it could too easily be reversed by a future government (which one could say of any policy that isn't codified as a constitutional amendment)."'

Some climate opinion leaders are in denial of this development. In early April 2019, I complained that "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was getting progressives to oppose carbon pricing." I was referring not to the majority of self-identifying progressives, but to the small number of progressive climate activists who now oppose such measures. 139

The often vituperative pundit David Roberts defensively tweeted in response that "the number of progressives who outright oppose carbon pricing is tiny & utterly insignificant in US politics. Just an­other example of phantom leftists against when [sic] Reasonable People can define their own identities."140 This argument ignores the most prominent progressive in modern American politics, Ber­nie Sanders, who, in response to direct questioning by the Wash­ington Post in November 2019, indicated he didn't support carbon pricing. 141

It's not just Sanders. Roberts was immediately contradicted by Twitter users who came out of the woodwork to demonstrate my very point. 142 One self-avowed Unitarian Universalist (a religion known for its progressive philosophical and political outlook143) re­sponded to Roberts, "I'm an advocate for climate action thru [Citi­zens Climate Lobby] & other groups. Almost ALL progressive folks I encounter (friends, Twitter, EJ) reflexively oppose carbon price of all sorts. They generally retreat to 'just ban FFs' as more likely & better. There's a lot of work to do."144

This opposition to carbon pricing seems to be tied to a larger trend on the left against "establishment" politics. This development has been fueled at least in part by state-sponsored (Russian) trolls and bots looking to sow division in Democratic politics in an effort to elect fossil-fuel-friendly plutocrats like Donald Trump to power. That tactic was successful in the 2016 presidential election and was very much still in play during the 2020 election, as detailed by the Washington Post in a February 2020 article. 145

266 267

The same witches' brew that helped bring Donald Trump to power in 2016—interference by malevolent state actors, cynicism, and outrage, including among some on the progressive far left—appears, as this book goes to press, to be a potent threat to climate action today.

Let's recognize, though, that while some of the outrage has been manufactured by bad actors who have magnified and then weap-onized divisions, some legitimate underlying grievances have also played a role. Some environmental progressives profess a distrust of neoliberal economics. And why not? It's gotten us into this mess. Some prominent figures, such as Naomi Klein, have openly chal­lenged the notion that environmental sustainability is compatible with an underlying neoliberal political framework built on market economics. It's entirely conceivable she's right.

Some progressives feel that current policies don't do enough to address basic societal injustices. At a time when we see the greatest income disparity in history, along with a rise in nativism and intoler­ance, surely they have a point. They argue that any plan to address climate change must address societal injustice, too. But I would argue that social justice is intrinsic to climate action. Environmental crises, including climate change, disproportionately impact those with the least wealth, the fewest resources, and the least resilience. So simply acting on the climate crisis is acting to alleviate social injustice. It's another compelling reason to institute the systemic changes neces­sary to avert the further warming of our planet.

yes, we have other pressing problems to solve. And climate change is just one axis in the multidimensional problem that is environmental and societal sustainability. I don't purport to propose, in this book, the solution to all that ails us as a civilization. I do, how­ever, offer what I see as a path forward on climate.

As we pass the milestone of the fiftieth anniversary of the very first Earth Day (April 22, 1970), I believe that we are at a critical juncture. Despite the obvious political challenges we currently face, we are witnessing an alignment of historical and political events—and acts of Mother Nature—that are awakening us to the reality of the climate crisis. We appear to be nearing the much-anticipated tipping point on climate action. In a piece titled "The Climate Crisis and the Case for Hope" published in September 2019, my friend Jeff Goodell, a writer for Rolling Stone, posited that "a decade or so from now, when the climate revolution is fully underway and Miami Beach real estate prices are in free-fall due to constant flooding, and internal combustion engines are as dead as CDs, people will look back on the fall of 2019 as the turning point in the climate crisis."46 We can debate the precise date of the turning point. But I concur with Jeff's larger thesis.

It is all of the things we have talked about—behavioral change, incentivized by appropriate government policy, intergovernmental agreements, and technological innovation—that will lead us forward on climate. It is not any one of these things, but all of them working together, at this unique moment in history, that provides true reason for hope. To repeat one of the epigraphs that began this final chap­ter, "Hope is a good thing, maybe the best of things." Alone it won't solve this problem. But drawing upon it, we will.

-------------------------------------

index

disinformation campaigns, 2-3, 255

acid rain, 13-115

cap and trade and, 1011-102

climate change, 25, 29-30, 32, 41-42

"Climategate," 37-41

education as tool against, 260-261

history of, 9-10

hockey stick curve and, 34-35

lead pollution, 12-13

from the left, 118

ozone depletion, 16-17

pesticide manufacturers and, 11-13

Planet of the Humans as, 136

renewable energy and, 128-132

Strategic Defense Initiative, 19

tobacco industry, 10-11

See also deflection campaigns;

wedge campaigns

divestment movements, 66, 107-108, 1201233,236-237

Dobbs, Lou, 243

Dolman, Joseph, 48

doomism, 5, 66-6711781182-1871 255-256

alarmism and, 218-222

alleged financial gain and, 219