Assume Your Agency, Now.
There appear to be four main types of response among the ordinary population to the recognition that civilisation and planetary life-support systems face the possibility of collapse.
- Obstructing Climate Action: A far-right, populist (even fascist) denunciation of climate action backed and stoked by fossil fuel interests, primarily among the elites (climate denial is no longer a viable tactic; delaying is the new approach).
- Quiet Denial: A quiet, timid sort of cognitive dissonance among those who find it too colossal, too alien a reality to wake up to. They want to believe life will go on as it always has or that their leaders or technology will save them.
- Hopelessness: Not seeing a way out of this crisis, these people are paralysed into passivity. They believe that action is futile, and, usually without intending to, they spread the contagion of passivity and despair to others, worsening our chances of affecting meaningful change.
- Agency: Ultimately, this is the best place to be, practically (in terms of affecting the transformation we need to see in society) and psychologically. They see themselves as protagonists in their own lives, not passive victims. Underlying their active approach is hope and a sense of self-efficacy.
People may fall squarely within these categories or lie somewhere in between them. Where do you lie?
A Campaign of Disempowerment
Feel assured that those who believe that climate change is not a global emergency are in the minority, according to a poll carried out across 50 countries by the UN Development Programme (UNDP). Two-thirds of respondents believe that climate change is a global emergency.
Group 1, the Obstructionists, as vocal as they may be, do not pose the democratic obstacle to change that you might gather after taking a few wrong turns on the internet. They are in the minority.
But their tactics have changed, and now the target is not belief in climate change but action to mitigate it.
Group 4, including figures such as Greta Thunberg, are weaponized by those who seek to undermine climate action. By decrying her and other activists as “doomers”, they distract us from the message that such activists and scientists have been trying to get across to us for decades: that we must act now.
Similarly, they detract from the urgency for action by:
- … stirring up in-fighting in the environmentalist community,
- … accusing individuals of hypocrisy for their imperfect lifestyles, thereby getting us to focus on our personal carbon footprints to the exclusion of systemic change (this is a false dichotomy — both are critical),
- … or propagating the belief that it is too late for action, and so, expanding Group 3, the Hopeless and the Passive.
All these tactics work in the favour of the fossil fuel industry, which continues to expand its extractive projects when the existing infrastructure already has us on a path to overshoot the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold [read the latest IPCC report here.]
The Obstructionists are the unwitting flunkeys of fossil fuel power (as are the global leaders who do their bidding). But they are also among the victims.
For 50 years, we have been duped by the fossil fuel industry through a disinformation campaign meant to scupper action on climate change. First, they accomplished this through denial of the science; now, they utilise deflection and doom-mongering.
But here’s the nub, and part of the reason why climate despair and doomism are so misinformed. The only reason they’ve gone to these lengths is…
With Us Lies Power
Power to build the fossil fuel titan. Power to tear it down.
Why else funnel billions upon billions into PR campaigns, and lackey politicians, and shill scientists, and shill think tanks for decades, with all of them working to deny or deflect from the issue of climate change and fossil fuel’s central role in it? Because…
We fund the billionaires.
We endow democratic leaders with power.
We fund the fossil fuel companies.
I say this not to incriminate you. This was never your fault. We were lied to. It was in their interests that we go on believing that we were powerless. We were sold a fantasy that could never be sustained. Now that the façade of that fantasy is crumbling, we have the chance to reclaim our power.
Do not fall for the defeatist rhetoric.
According to the IPCC summary report, it is not too late to halt global warming below 1.5 degree Celsius. There are multiple options for how we can save civilisation. There is sufficient capital.
If we act quickly now on reducing emissions, the composition of the atmosphere will change in only a few years. Warming will start to reverse in only two decades.
However, it is also true that, if we do not act now, humanity and all life on Earth will face the consequences for millennia.
Humans have a negative attention bias that served us in our evolutionary past by keeping us alert to threats in our environment. Now the threat is to the environment itself.
In hearing the urgency of this warning — no less than existential threat — some of us have gotten stuck fixating on the bad news without proceeding to the next logical step: doing what needs to be done to survive.
This is the window of opportunity. The question is not “Can we stop climate change?” Rather, it is “Will we stop it?” This is our choice.
Hope Is the Only Rational Choice
1.5 Celsius above pre-industrial levels is the point beyond which natural systems spiral out of control and the changes become irreversible. That is why that goal is so important.
But suppose for a moment that we do not stop warming at that critical threshold. What do we do then? Give up? Keep pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere until we make a second Venus? (We would not be able to as, were we to continue past 1.5 degrees Celsius with our current profligacy, the devastation reaped on the biosphere would certainly wipe us out first).
Please don’t misunderstand me. We MUST aim for 1.5 degrees Celsius to avoid the world becoming unrecognisable. That being said, there are gains to be made — albeit smaller the longer we procrastinate — from all emission reductions, even beyond 1.5 degrees on the timeline. The situation is not black and white. There is no point beyond which we should stop trying to limit warming.
The time for despair is over. Now is the time for protectiveness towards everything you love, righteous anger, collective action, courage, and hope. It is time for reclaiming power.
Those with the financial means must divest from ecologically damaging industries. We must demand that our institutions do so too.
We can demand that fossil fuel companies transition to clean energy now or face being nationalised. We have the power to revoke their social license. We can demand that politicians who fail to fulfill the necessary actions to mitigate climate change step down and be replaced by those who will act.
Political action is of utmost importance, but do not forget that, collectively, our money funds actors who would go on destroying this planet to line their own pockets in the short term.
Demand-side strategies could reduce 40 to 80 percent of heat-trapping gas emissions across all sectors by 2050. Our position as consumers afford us enormous power that we must tap into alongside political action. For example (and this is not to divert attention away from the biggest emitters), it is self-contradictory to require that policies be introduced to prevent certain carbon-intensive activities if you yourself are unwilling to reduce your participation in them.
All of these actions may seem Sisyphean, but you cannot know what you are capable of until you attempt it. The same is true collectively. Taking action increases one’s sense of agency, which, in turn, increases the likelihood of your taking action (as well as reducing the stress of disempowerment).
You do not have to feel like the weight of the future is on your shoulders, alone. The future will be achieved through accumulative action, “collective agency”, if you like. And yet, it will not require everybody’s participation.
Harvard scientist Erica Chenowith, in her review of hundreds of campaigns over the past century, discovered a pattern of success — the ‘3.5% rule’. She found that this was the threshold percentage of the population whose active participation in a campaign appeared to “guarantee” its success. Of the hundreds of campaigns she studied, not one nonviolent campaign that was actively supported by this minimum percentage of the population ever failed to attain its goal.
You are not alone. But it matters enormously that you make yourself one of the history-making 3.5%.
The pandemic woke us up to our vulnerability. The war in Ukraine woke us up to our dependency on rogue nations to feed our fossil fuel addiction. The youth movement is waking us up to the fate of our children. The growing frequency of extreme weather events and the consequent disruptions to our food supply chains compound all of the above.
Many people have been feeling hopeless. But once we were clueless. Understanding the gravity and urgency of our times puts us in a much better position than ignorance and denial did. Now, actions that were once seen as ludicrous are not only conceivable, they are the only rational path forward.
In his books On Time and Water, Andri Snaer Magnason titles his first chapter “May you live in interesting times”. It is a reference to the apocryphal Chinese curse used ironically to mean you wish that someone would live in times of trouble.
But there is something to be gained from the unironic interpretation.
Trouble just begs for agency. Our generation has been presented with the opportunity to save civilisation and the biodiversity of our planet. This could not be a more defining moment for us. We have the power to make these times, not bereft of hope, but interesting, in the sincerest sense.
Will people of the future (and what will remain of them is up to us) look back with anger and confusion at our paralysis in this pivotal moment? Or will we be seen as The Greatest Generation 2.0? The generation who decided to safeguard the future for our children?
Will you lie down and let the floods wash over you, or will you rise now and join those who would stop the coming waters?
