No individual escape routes
With the newest IPCC assessment stoking climate anxiety, we must recognize that we can’t outrun the impacts of climate change
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report left a crater in my university’s student Facebook page. While many were surprised by how little publicity the newest climate revelations received, my college student Internet bubble panicked. What started out as an innocuous question on a Facebook group dedicated to polls — have you read the IPCC report? — quickly became a heated discussion about our planetary future. Where will it be safe to live? How will our lives change? And, most importantly, is there any way to make it through the ravages of global warming unscathed?
We shared projections for water levels, summer heat, drought and extreme winters. The page was abuzz with lists of the most habitable cities, the most uninhabitable cities, the best and worst jobs to fight climate change, and the deadliest natural disasters by city. Every few minutes, a new litany of articles were presented in the comments section offering reasons to move somewhere or do something.
Chicago is somehow among both the best and worst cities to live in as temperatures and water levels rise. We should all move to Manhattan to enjoy the city that never sleeps before it’s underwater, another story exclaimed, as it could be by 2100. That said, we should also avoid the aging infrastructure and more frequent tropical storms that turned New York City’s subway stations into Atlantis reincarnated earlier this summer. The “smartest” future looked different to everyone you ask. In the post-IPCC report panic, my university classmates attempted to study and prepare their way into safety, even though our study materials were nothing but listicles and conflicting interpretations of the same meteorological data.
We’ve seen climate change portrayed as the sum of individual decisions before: driving too much, eating too much meat, taking too many long-distance flights. We know to be critical of this rhetoric: sure, individuals are not faultless, but fossil fuel companies receive billions of subsidies and emit millions of tons of carbon dioxide each year.
Understanding that this is a systemic problem, we must realize that none of us can outrun climate change just by being strategic. The impossible calculus of figuring out which locale’s future is tenable under climate change is exactly that — impossible. What remains for us to do is not to plan the perfect escape route but to plan how we are going to push for climate change policy in the present.
From advocating for renewable energy to reducing methane-producing food waste, it’s much easier to retool your climate activism to fit your life than it is to build your life around whatever sea level predictions come next. If you are worried about Philadelphia or Miami or wherever your home city is surviving climate change, push your legislators to both adopt electric buses and end fossil fuel subsidies. Pressure your state or city to ban such single-use plastic products as plastic straws, bags, utensils and polystyrene foam — products made from petrochemicals and benefit fossil fuel companies vastly more than society. Make sure your utility companies are not blocking renewable energy infrastructure that helps the planet and homeowners. There are countless ways to take individual action against climate change that have huge collective resonance.
We don’t know which exact scenarios will unfold in the next decades. Although it’s tempting to imagine ourselves as the characters in a doomsday movie smart enough to stay ahead of a mounting disaster, those Nicholas Cage-style protagonists still leave most people behind to suffer consequences. The truest way to plan a climate-conscious future for everyone is not to simply move north or inland but to move legislation forward on the local, state and national level.
