Everything’s Coming Together While Everything Falls Apart (2014)

The most thrilling bureaucratic document I’ve ever seen was exciting for exactly one reason: it was dated the twenty-first day of the month of Thermidor in the Year Six. Written in sepia ink on heavy paper, it documented a land auction in the center of France in what we would call late summer 1798. But the date written on the first page meant that the document was created when the French Revolution was the overarching reality of an everyday life in which things as fundamental as the distribution of power and the nature of government had been reborn in astonishing ways. In 1792, a new calendar starting with the Year One was created to start society itself over again.

In the little junk shop on a quiet street in San Francisco, I held a relic from inside one of the great upheavals of the last millennium. It made me think of a remarkable statement by the great feminist fantasy writer Ursula K. LeGuin a few weeks earlier. In the course of an awards speech she noted, “We live in capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings.” The document I purchased for five dollars was written a few years after the French got over the idea that the divine right of kings was inescapable, executed their king for his crimes, and tried out some other forms of government. It’s popular to say the experiment failed, but France never regressed to absolutist monarchy or the belief in its legitimacy, and its experiments inspired other liberatory movements around the world (and terrified monarchs and aristocrats).7

Americans are good at the mingled complacency and despair that says things cannot change, will not change, and we do not have power to change them. You’d have to be an amnesiac or at least ignorant of history and even current events to fail to see that our country and our world have always been changing, are in the midst of great and terrible changes, and are occasionally changed through the power of the popular will and idealistic movements. Climate now demands we summon up the force to leave behind the Age of Fossil Fuel (and maybe with it some of the Age of Capitalism).

How to Topple a Giant

To use Le Guin’s language, physics is inevitable: if you put more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the planet warms, and as the planet warms, various kinds of chaos and ruin are loosed. Politics, on the other hand, is not inevitable. For example, not so many years ago it would have seemed inevitable that Chevron Corporation, currently the third biggest corporation in the country, would run the refinery town of Richmond, California, as its own private fiefdom. You could say that the divine right of Chevron seemed inevitable. Except that people refused to believe that, and this town of 107,000 mostly poor nonwhite people pushed back.

In recent years, a group of progressives won election to the city council and mayor’s seat, despite huge expenditures by Chevron, the corporation that also brought you gigantic oil spills onshore in Ecuador and offshore in Brazil, an oil platform explosion off the coast of Nigeria, and Canadian tar-sands bitumen sent by rail to the Richmond refinery. Mayor Gayle McLaughlin and the others had a little revolution in a town that had mostly been famous for its crime rate and for Chevron’s toxic refinery emissions, which periodically create emergencies requiring everyone to shelter in place (and pretend that they were not being poisoned indoors).

As McLaughlin put it, in her era as mayor,

We’ve accomplished so much, including breathing better air, reducing the pollution and building a cleaner environment and cleaner jobs, and reducing our crime rate. Our homicide number is the lowest in thirty-three years and we became a leading city in the Bay Area for solar installed per capita. We’re a sanctuary city. And we’re defending our homeowners to prevent foreclosures and evictions. And we also got Chevron to pay $114 million extra dollars in taxes.

For the November 2014 election, the second-largest oil company on earth officially spent $3.1 million to defeat McLaughlin and other progressive candidates and instate its own. The sum works out to $180 per voter, but my brother David, who’s long been involved in Richmond politics, points out that if you look at all the other ways they spend to influence local politics, it might be ten times that. Chevron lost. None of its candidates were elected, and all the grassroots progressives it fought with billboards, mailers, television ads, websites, and everything else the lavishly funded smear campaign could think of, won.

If a small grassroots coalition can win locally against a corporation valued at $228.9 billion, a global coalition could win against the fossil-fuel giants. It wasn’t easy in Richmond; it won’t be easy on the largest scale, but it’s not impossible, either. Richmond progressives won by imagining that the status quo was not inevitable or eternal and showing up to do the work to make it so. The billionaires and the fossil-fuel corporations are intensely engaged in politics and count on us staying on the sidelines. If you look at their response to various movements you can see that they are afraid of us, if we wake up, if we show up, if we exercise our power to counter theirs.

We need to end the age of fossil fuel the way the French ended the age of absolute monarchy. We can’t say it’s impossible, or possible, and what is possible has been changing rapidly.

Three Kinds of Hero

If you look at the energy-technology engineers—and this may be an era in which engineers are our unsung heroes—the future is tremendously exciting. Not very long ago the climate movement was only hoping technology could save us; now, as one of the six great banners carried in the four-hundred-thousand-strong September 21, 2014, climate march said, “We have the solutions.” Wind and solar and other technologies are spreading rapidly, with better designs, lower costs, and many extraordinary improvements that will, undoubtedly, continue for some time.

Clean energy is in many parts of the country and the world cheaper than fossil fuel (though the sudden drop in oil prices may scramble that for a little while, but has the nice side effect of pushing some of the more farfetched and filthy extraction schemes below the cost-effective point for now). The technology has gotten so much better, cheaper, and more widespread that sober financial advisors are calling fossil fuels and centralized conventional power plants a bad investment and talking about the carbon bubble (which is a sign that the divestment movement has worked in calling attention to the practical as well as the moral problems of the industry). The technology front is encouraging.

That’s the carrot for action; there’s also a stick.

If you listen to the scientists—and scientists are another set of heroes for our time—the news keeps getting scarier. You probably know already know the highlights: chaotic weather, broken weather records, this year’s several hottest months on record, 355 months in a row of above-average temperatures, more ice melting, more ocean acidification, extinction, the spread of tropical diseases, drop in food productivity with consequent famines. So many people don’t grasp what we’re up against, because they don’t think about Earth and its systems much or they don’t grasp the delicate, intricate reciprocities and counterbalances that keep it all running as well as it has since the last ice age ended and an abundant, calm Earth emerged. It’s not real or vivid or visceral or even visible for most of us.

It is for a great many scientists whose fields have something to do with climate. In many cases they’re scared, they’re sad, and they’re clear about the urgency of taking action to limit how disastrous climate change is for our species and for the systems we depend upon. Many people outside the loop think that it’s too late to do anything, which, as premature despair always does, excuses us for doing nothing. Though there are diverse opinions quite a lot of insiders think that what we do now matters tremendously, because the difference between the best and worst case scenarios is vast, and the future is not yet written.

After that four-hundred-thousand-person-strong climate march in September of 2014, I asked my friend Jamie Henn, a cofounder of and communications director for 350.org, how he viewed this moment, and he said, “Everything’s coming together while everything’s falling apart,” a beautiful summary of the heartening engineering and activist news in the shadow of the terrible scientific reports. This brings us to the third group of heroes, the one that, unlike science and engineering, doesn’t require special qualifications: activists.

The new technologies are only solutions if they’re implemented and the old ones—the carbon-emitting ones—are phased out or shut down. We need to keep the great majority of fossil fuel in the ground and move away from the Age of Petroleum. That’s the conclusion of a relatively recent calculation made by scientists and publicized and pushed by activists (and maybe made conceivable by engineers designing replacement systems). The goal is to keep warming to 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 degrees Fahrenheit), and even that goal, established years ago, is being questioned as too lenient by scientists alarmed by what 1 degree Celsius of warming is already doing and will continue to do.

Dismantling the fossil-fuel economy might have the nice side effect of dismantling a lot of the warping power that oil has had in global and national politics. Of course those wielding that power will not yield it without a ferocious battle—and that is the very battle the climate movement is engaged in now, on many fronts, from the divestment movement to the fight against fracking to the endeavor to stop the Keystone XL pipeline and others like it, from the tar sands to the quite successful movement to shut down coal-fired power plants in the United States and prevent others from being built.

What Did You Do During the War?

If everyone who’s passionate about climate, who truly gets that we’re living in a pivotal moment, found their place in the movement, amazing things could happen. What’s happening now is already remarkable, if not yet adequate to the crisis. A few years ago there was no fossil-fuel divestment movement; it is now active on hundreds of college campuses and at other institutions, and while the intransigence of bureaucracy remains a remarkable force, there have been notable victories. The Rockefeller Foundation—made fat upon the wealth of John D. Rockefeller’s founding role in the rise of the petroleum industry—pledged to divest their $860 million in assets from fossil fuels in late September, one of more than eight hundred institutions—church denominations, universities, cities, pension funds, foundations—to commit to do so globally so far, from Scotland to New Zealand to Seattle.8

The KXL pipeline could have been up and running years ago with little fanfare had activists not taken it on.⁹ It became a profoundly public, hotly debated issue, the subject of demonstrations at nearly every presidential appearance in recent years. In the course of this ruckus, a great many people (including me) were clued into the existence of the giant suppurating sore of sludge, bitumen, and poison lakes that is the Alberta Tar Sands. Canadians, particularly indigenous Canadians in surrounding regions, have done a remarkable job of blocking other pipelines to keep this landlocked stuff from reaching any coast for refining and export. Some of it is now shipped by rail, but trains cost significantly more than pipelines, and, with the dramatic drop in the price of oil, lack of pipelines means a lack of profit for many of the tarsands projects, effectively cancelling them.

The climate movement has come of age. And it has achieved many things that had been pronounced impossible not long ago. (2016 update: in Canada, newly elected prime minister Justin Trudeau banned oil tankers on the country’s northwest coast, effectively killing another oil pipeline route for the Alberta Tar Sands. The news came amid other landmark decisions, including presidential bans on drilling in the Arctic and on new coal leases on public land; a halt to new oil and gas leases in Utah; a ban on new fossil-fuel infrastructure in Portland, Oregon, that may become a model for other local climate legislation; introduction of a Senate bill [presumably doomed but indicative of changing perspectives] to ban all new oil and gas leases on public land and some coastal waters; and two landmark victories in New York State. New York activists, who’d won a historic ban on fracking in that state in 2014, got their governor to veto a natural gas port, and investigative journalism that had led to revelations that Exxon possessed, and suppressed, accurate information about the coming impact of climate change prompted the New York attorney general to issue subpoenas that could lead to a criminal investigation of the world’s largest oil corporation.)

Really, the climate movement is bigger and more effective than it looks, because most people don’t see a single movement; if they look hard, they see a wildly diverse mix of groups facing global issues on one hand and a host of local ones, such as fracking, on others. Domestically, that can mean the city of Denton, Texas, banning fracking in November 2014 or the amazing work by antifracking activists in New York State, which resulted in a statewide fracking ban, the first of its kind in the United States. It can mean people working on college divestment campaigns or on rewriting state laws to address climate by implementing efficiency and clean energy.

It can mean the British Columbia activists who, for now, prevented a tunnel being drilled for a tar-sands pipeline to the Pacific Coast with a months-long encampment, civil disobedience, and many arrests at Burnaby Mountain, near Vancouver. One of the arrested wrote, in the Vancouver Observer, “But sitting in that jail cell, I felt a weight lift from my shoulders. One that I was only partially aware that I have been carrying for years now. I am ashamed by Canada’s withdrawal from the Kyoto treaty and our increasingly contemptible position on climate change. If these are the values of our society then I want to be an outlaw in that society.”

Making the Future

The climate movement has grown remarkably—but it must grow far more to be adequate to the crisis. Which is where you come in, if you haven’t yet. The quiet chorus of the everyday can drown out the voice of history, calling us to action in the moment for the big future. I can barely remember what seemed so pressing when I didn’t participate in great historical moments, but I know that the same kind of things seem pressing now, and that I have to push some of them aside.

Just before the climate march I began to contemplate how human beings half a century or a century from now will view us, who lived in the era when climate change was recognized and there was so much that could be done about it, so much more than we have done. They may hate us, despise us, see us as the people who squandered their patrimony, like drunkards gambling away the family fortune that, in this case, is everyone’s everywhere and everything, the natural world itself when it was in good working order. They will regard us as people who rearranged the china when the house was on fire.

They will think we were insane to worry about celebrities and fleeting political scandals and whether we had nice bodies; they will think the newspapers should have had a gigantic black box above the fold of the front page every day saying “Here are some stories about other things BUT CLIMATE IS BIGGER THAN THIS” and every news broadcast should have opened with the equivalent. Every day. They will think that we should have thrown our bodies in the way of the engines of destruction, raised our voices to the heavens, stopped everything until the destruction stopped. They will bless and praise the few and curse the many.

There have been heroic people in every country and some remarkable achievements. The movement has grown in size, power, and sophistication, but it needs to grow a lot more to be commensurate to what is required. I realized that this included me and realized that it was time to shift my priorities, to make my mild engagement with climate something larger and fiercer.

This is the time to find your place in it, if you haven’t yet. And for the climate organizers to do better at reaching out and offering everyone a part in the transformation, whether it’s the housebound person who writes letters or the twenty-year-old who’s ready for direct action in remote places. There’s a role for everyone, and it’s everyone’s most important work right now. So many other important matters press upon us—human rights and justice work, the care for the most vulnerable—but it has to be part of what you do. It is the big perspective from which everything else must be seen (and the Philippines’ charismatic former climate negotiator Yeb Sano notes, “Climate change impinges on almost all human rights. Human rights are at the core of this issue.”)

Many people believe that personal virtue is what matters in this crisis. It’s a good thing, but it’s not the key thing. It’s great to bicycle rather than drive, eat plants instead of animals, put solar panels on your roof, but it can give you a false sense you’re not part of the problem. You are not just what you personally do or do not consume but part of a greater problem if you are a citizen of a country that is a major carbon emitter, as is nearly everyone in the English-speaking nations and the global north. You are part of the system, and you need, we all need, to change that system. Nothing less than systemic change will save us.

The race is on. From an ecological standpoint, the scientists advise us that we still have a little bit of time, a closing window, in which it might still be possible, by a swift, decisive move away from fossil fuel in particular, to limit climate change to two degrees Celsius of warming. Which will be considerably less devastating than some of the higher numbers we will slide toward if we don’t reverse course.

The pressure on nations comes from within, not from each other. Here in the United States, long the world’s biggest carbon-emitter (until China outstripped us, partly by becoming the manufacturer of a high percentage of our products), we have a particular responsibility to push hard. The pressure works. The president is clearly feeling it, and it’s reflected in the recent US–China agreement on curtailing emissions—far from perfect or adequate, but a huge step forward.

How will we get to where we need to be? No one knows, but we know that we must keep moving in the direction of reduced carbon emissions, a transformed energy economy, an escape from the tyranny of the oil companies, and a vision of a world in which everything is connected. We need change on a colossal scale, and we don’t know if we can achieve that unless we try. The story of this coming year is ours to write, and it could be a story of the Year One in the climate revolution, of the watershed when popular resistance changed the fundamentals as much as the people of France changed their world more than two hundred years ago.

May, two hundred years hence, someone hold a document from 2019 in their hand, in wonder, because it was written when the revolution had taken hold and all the old inevitabilities had been swept aside, when we seized hold of possibility and made it ours. “Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings,” said LeGuin. It’s the hardest and the best work we could ever do. Now, everything depends on it.

7. David Graeber writes in a 2013 essay, “Already by the time of the French Revolution, [Immanuel] Wallerstein notes, there was a single world market, and increasingly a single world political system as well, dominated by the huge colonial empires. As a result, the storming of the Bastille in Paris could well end up having effects on Denmark, or even Egypt, just as profound as on France itself—in some cases, even more so. Hence he speaks of the ‘world revolution of 1789,’ followed by the ‘world revolution of 1848,’ which saw revolutions break out almost simultaneously in fifty countries, from Wallachia to Brazil. In no case did the revolutionaries succeed in taking power, but afterward, institutions inspired by the French Revolution—notably, universal systems of primary education—were put in place pretty much everywhere. Similarly, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was a world revolution ultimately responsible for the New Deal and European welfare states as much as for Soviet communism. The last in the series was the world revolution of 1968—which, much like 1848, broke out almost everywhere, from China to Mexico, seized power nowhere, but nonetheless changed everything. This was a revolution against state bureaucracies, and for the inseparability of personal and political liberation, whose most lasting legacy will likely be the birth of modern feminism.”

8. More than $3.4 trillion was divested or committed to divestment from fossil fuels by the end of 2015.

9. In early November 2015, Obama vetoed plans for the northern stretch of the KXL pipeline, a huge victory for the climate movement after six years of presidential waffling and activist campaigning.