Pay attention to what’s already happeningĪnother oft-heard complaint is “nobody is doing anything about this”. The only obstacles are political and imaginative.Ģ. We know what to do, and that knowledge is getting more refined and precise, but also more creative, all the time. We still have time to choose the best rather than the worst scenarios, though the longer we wait the harder it gets, and the more dramatic the measures are required. These are excuses for doing nothing, and erase those doing something. Too many people like to spread their despair, saying: “It’s too late” and “There’s nothing we can do”. One of the curious things about the climate crisis is that the uninformed are often more grim and fatalistic than the experts in the field – the scientists, organisers and policymakers who are deep in the data and the politics. Sometimes these are responses to nothing more than a vague apprehension that we’re doomed. I run across a lot of emotional responses to inaccurate analysis of the situation. What follows is a set of tools I’ve found useful both for the inward business of attending to my state of mind, and for the outward work of trying to do something about the climate crisis – which are not necessarily separate jobs.īeware of feelings that aren’t based on facts. It’s best met, I believe, by both being well grounded in the facts, and working towards achieving a decent future – and by acknowledging there are grounds for fear, anxiety and depression in both the looming possibilities and in institutional inaction. The emotional toll of the climate crisis has become an urgent crisis of its own. Six months ago, the usually cautious International Energy Agency called for a stop to investment in new fossil-fuel projects, declaring: “The world has a viable pathway to building a global energy sector with net-zero emissions in 2050, but it is narrow and requires an unprecedented transformation of how energy is produced, transported and used globally.” Pressure from activists pushed and prodded the IEA to this point, and 20 nations committed at Cop26 to stop subsidies for overseas fossil fuel projects. As the ever-acute David Roberts put it: “Whether and how fast India phases out coal has nothing at all to do with what its diplomat says in Glasgow and everything to do with domestic Indian politics, which have their own logic and are only faintly affected by international politics.” Those people who in many cases hardly deserve the term “leader” were pulled forward by what activists and real leaders from climate-vulnerable countries demanded they were held back by the vested interests and their own attachment to the status quo and the profit to be made from continued destruction. The climate summit that just concluded in Glasgow didn’t get us there, though many good and even remarkable things happened.
The Covid-19 pandemic is proof that if we take a crisis seriously, we can change how we live, almost overnight, dramatically, globally, digging up great piles of money from nowhere, like the $3tn the US initially threw at the pandemic. We must remake the world, and we can remake it better.
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