‘Climate change isn’t an “issue” to add to the list of things to worry about, next to health care and taxes. It is a civilizational wake-up call.’
—Naomi Klein, This Changes Everything
‘If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.’
—Paul Hawken
‘We’re in the early stages of a global “Sustainability Revolution” that has the magnitude of the Industrial Revolution, and the speed of the Digital Revolution.’
—Al Gore
Last night I woke in fear at 3 a.m. My hair was pasted with sweat to the back of my neck, and I physically jolted because in my dream I’d been falling. Don’t you hate that? It takes you a moment to right yourself, to realise that you didn’t fall anywhere; the mattress is still beneath you. I’d dreamt I was climbing a mountain, and I had this very clear sense of elation, of reaching or conquering something. It was quite easy, this dream-climb, I was sprinting through it, but as I approached the summit, I realised there was none—the top of the mountain had been removed, sliced clean off.
Reading before bed has been my habit for thirty years, so I’m pretty good at keeping the stories out of my dreams. Occasionally, however, a book refuses to respect those boundaries and crosses realms. The culprit, this time, was Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything, and it’s where I learned about ‘mountaintop removal’ coalmining (MTR).1 It is exactly what it sounds like. Think can-opener rather than drill. Or a bomb. After the mining company razes the forest and all that lives in it from a mountain’s slopes, they dig a big hole in the top and pack it with explosives. The draglines that clear the rubble can be as large as a city block.
The practice began in the Appalachian Mountains of West Virginia, Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee in the 1970s and scaled up in the ’90s, so that by 2012, rock, soil, bits of broken trees—or the industry’s weasel word for it: ‘overburden’—had obliterated more than 1600 kilometres of streams.2 Communities living nearby face soil and water contamination, and increased instances of lung disease, cancers and birth defects.
A 2016 study likens the devastation in Appalachia to the havoc wreaked when a volcano erupts, concluding, ‘the entire landscape is fractured … effectively resetting the clock on landscape and ecosystem coevolution.’3 The volume of rock removed from West Virginia (where MTR is concentrated; it was banned from most of Tennessee in 2016) ‘would bury Manhattan’ and has made some regions 40 per cent flatter than before. This is not what my second-favourite ’60s folk singer Donovan meant when he sang his great Zen song, ‘First there is a mountain, then there is no mountain … ’
That we should value our mountains goes without saying. They are not just great places to hike or ski or film The Sound of Music, but places of great poetry and spiritual symbolism. In meditation, we are told to ‘be like the mountain’ and let the weather of our thoughts simply pass. Tibetan Buddhists and Indigenous peoples like the Standing Rock Sioux hold mountains sacred. The Inca shamans believed the mountain gods had the power to heal, while in the Bible mountains often represent celestial things. Every religious text includes mountain stories, from the Qur’an to the Bhagavad Gita.
Climbers often experience moments of great profundity on the slopes where, as the explorer Edmund Hillary (the one who climbed Everest) noted, ‘It is not the mountain we conquer but ourselves.’ I’m the least sporty, least religious woman I know, but I came the closest I’ve ever been to feeling god’s presence on the Annapurna trail in Nepal. My god, incidentally, if she were to exist, would be Gaia, the ancestral mother of all life, the primal Mother Earth goddess. Or else Bob Dylan. We seek out mountain wildernesses to find meaning, and something greater than our egos. The Renaissance poet François Rabelais was referring to death when he wrote, ‘Je m’en vais chercher un grand peut-être’ (I go to seek a great perhaps), but that phrase has been adopted by adventurers ever since.
Spiritual matters aside, mountains perform vital practical roles. Almost all of the world’s major rivers begin in mountains. Mountains ‘make’ weather, in that warm air cools as it rises up and over them, and since this cooler air is able to hold less moisture, it starts to rain. Wooded slopes do the vital work of storing water from heavy rains, reducing floods in the lowlands. Mountains also provide habitats for a wealth of flora and fauna, some of it found nowhere else. Paleontologist Tim Flannery, who in the 1980s discovered sixteen species of mammals in the mountain rainforests of Papua New Guinea, warns that ‘throughout the world every continent, as well as many islands[,] has mountain ranges that are the last refuge of species of remarkable beauty and diversity.’ Climate change is crowding them out; as temperatures rise, the only way is up: ‘We stand to lose it all, from gorillas to pandas to New Zealand’s vegetable sheep (a unique tussock plant).’4
Naomi Klein dubs our age the extreme energy era and categorises mining that reconfigures mountains as ‘high-risk extreme extraction’—along with fracking, tar sands–mining and deep-water drilling. I would add to that list: drilling in places that have until now been protected, places where it surely offends whatever deity you believe in (unless you worship only money).
The Ecuadorian government is drilling for oil in a UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in the Amazon rainforest. The Trump administration seems intent on opening up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska for drilling and has granted new exploration permits for the Arctic Ocean. At the time of writing, Chevron has abandoned plans for exploration in the rough, remote deep of the Great Australian Bight, where wild weather increases the risk of spillage, but says the decision has nothing to do with environmental concerns, just oil prices. Norwegian company Statoil is still keen to drill the Bight. A spill in these waters off the South Australian coast, which are a haven for whales and sea lions and, according to Greenpeace, harbour more unique species than the Great Barrier Reef, would be catastrophic, uncontainable and irreversible.5 These heinous ideas, these great affronts to Nature designed by big, irresponsible business, are powering a resistance and boosting the numbers in the climate movement—because this is personal. We have everything to lose.
Fracking, or hydraulic fracturing, involves deep and dicey drilling too, in this case into subterranean shale rock. The rock is then injected with a mixture of water, sand and chemicals at very high pressure to fracture it, releasing pockets of hitherto inaccessible natural gas. Fracking has been linked to increased earthquakes and tremors in places that rarely experienced them before, and while the energy companies insist it’s perfectly safe (tobacco giants once told us ciggies were good for our health), studies show how the process can poison groundwater.6
France banned fracking in 2011 and, in 2017, passed a law to ban oil and gas exploration and extraction too. Critics point out that since almost all of France’s fossil fuels are imported, it’s purely symbolic, but President Emmanuel Macron is serious about tackling climate change: his government raised carbon taxes and announced the phase-out of petrol and diesel vehicles.
Scotland and Wales have effectively banned fracking, but in England, alas, it’s on. Designated conservation areas have been earmarked for it, and Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May thinks it’s fabulous,7 despite safety concerns and the fact that the wells are unsightly blots on the landscape. How many would be needed to cut the UK’s gas imports in half? About 6000, reckon Friends of the Earth. Not surprisingly, the idea is enormously unpopular.
In Australia, farmers are organising to prevent extreme extraction from happening on their land (more on this later), but since the Crown owns almost all of Australia’s unmined minerals (even if they don’t own the ground in which they lie), it’s no straightforward fight. With the exception, for now, of Victoria, which in 2017 became the first Australian state or territory to ban fracking, licenses can be granted without consultation with landowners (unless Native Title is involved); a company rep simply drives up to your house to inform you they intend to drill. And another thing: fracking is also a supervillain when it comes to emissions. Klein claims ‘methane leaks at every stage of production, processing, storage, and distribution.’8
Big energy is chasing ever more elaborate methods to extract fossil fuels while ignoring the science, which is unequivocal: we should be leaving this stuff in the ground if we’re to have a hope of keeping climate change to liveable levels.
Of the greenhouse gases that trap heat in the atmosphere—carbon dioxide (CO2), methane, nitrous oxide and synthetic fluorinated gases—CO2 is the clear leader. Fossil fuel and industrial processes are the main source, accounting for 65 per cent of global emissions.9 CO2 is also emitted from natural sources, through breathing for example, and when dead plant matter decomposes. For a detailed explanation of how the atmosphere, or what was once called ‘the Great Aerial Ocean’, and the carbon cycle work, I recommend Tim Flannery’s The Weather Makers. ‘Earth’s thermostat,’ as he writes, ‘is a complex and delicate mechanism,’ and without its proper functioning there would be no life on this planet.10
Over billions of years of history, the Earth has experienced ice ages and warmer periods, and levels of CO2 and other gasses in the atmosphere have fluctuated for natural reasons—after volcanic eruptions, for example. However, since the Industrial Revolution, when humans began to pump CO2 into the atmosphere at scale by burning fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) to power electricity, manufacturing and transport, the Earth has been warming up. Taking the year 1800 as a baseline, by 2005, when Flannery published The Weather Makers, temperatures had risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius. Ten years later, the United Kingdom’s Met Office reported that the global average surface temperature rise had passed 1 degree.
So, if we’re to keep warming below 2 degrees, we’ve already spent half our budget, right? Wrong. In fact, we’ve spent more. CO2 is a long-lived gas—it hangs around. About a quarter of fossil fuel CO2 emissions remain airborne for several centuries,11 which means a sizeable fraction of the gas that’s up there right now, causing the Earth to warm, was emitted years ago. And today’s emissions have yet to make their warming effects felt. This does not mean we should admit defeat; it means we have even more reason to curb emissions as swiftly and decisively as possible. We won’t turn the thermostat down, but we can stop it turning up and up, and up.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization. It’s made up of 195 country members, and hundreds of scientists from all over the world, who volunteer their time to provide a global assessment of climate change, its impacts on society and future projections. Their first Assessment Report in 1990 asked how much the average global temperature would rise by the end of the twenty-first century if we continued to emit at current levels (the report called this scenario ‘Business-as-Usual’). The answer was about 3 degrees (or 4 degrees over pre-industrial levels). The revised estimate from the fifth report in 2014 was between 2.6 and 4.8 degrees relative to a 1986–2005 baseline (the next report is due in 2021). However, some projections are as high as 6 degrees.12 There are complicated reasons for these variations (again, Flannery is your man for a detailed breakdown on how computer modelling works, where it’s done and what limits it). Suffice to say, it’s getting hot in here.
The impacts of such a hike are barely imaginable, but author and international relations expert Parag Khanna has given it a go with a colour-coded map published by New Scientist.13 This imagines what our world might look like warmed by 4 degrees: Most of Europe has become a desert. Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and everywhere in between are uninhabitable and large areas have been given over to solar energy production—Antipodeans now live in high-density cities in Tasmania and New Zealand, while western Antarctica has become a metropolis. 14 Polynesia has vanished beneath the sea. Southern China is a dust bowl and almost no one lives there anymore. Ditto all of South America; except for Chile and the southern part of Argentina, it is uninhabitable. Bangladesh has been largely abandoned, along with southern India, Pakistan and Afghanistan, where ‘isolated communities remain in pockets’. Europeans have moved north, as the rivers have dried up, to farm in Russia and Siberia. Snow is just a memory for the Alps. New York is a ghost town, Miami underwater.
Okay so now you know, but can I suggest that you don’t look up the map? We don’t have time to waste freaking out about it. We need to get on with saving our future.
How are greenhouse gases pulled out of the atmosphere, and what else, apart from burning fossil fuels, puts them there in the first place?
The oceans do much of the grunt work of sequestering carbon dioxide, and in coming chapters we will explore how ocean change is hindering their ability to do so, and what activists are trying to do about it.
Fossil fuels are the ancient carbonised residues of once-living things, formed hundreds of millions of years ago and buried at great depths. In a former life, coal was prehistoric vegetation. Today’s land-based plants absorb and store CO2, which is pretty darn useful. Over the past forty years, the world’s forests have absorbed about a quarter of our carbon emissions. When plants die and decompose, they release that gas, but in the natural scheme of things, there is balance—old trees die, new ones grow. Deforestation, whether by land-clearing, industrial logging or forest fires, upsets the balance, accelerating the release of previously sequestered carbon back into the atmosphere. Some of it, for example that stored in Tasmania’s monumental old-growth trees, has been locked in there for hundreds of years. Cutting them down is a bad idea, but that’s not the only way trees die en masse. The IPCC expects more forest dieback in many regions over the twenty-first century, due to increased temperatures and drought.15 Is planting more trees the answer? Flannery reckons we’d need to reforest an area the size of Australia, over a fifty-year period, to draw down one-tenth of the volume of carbon pollution humans emit each year.16
Soils are also carbon stores. So, for example, as Canada’s boreal forests shrink, we lose not just the trees that help clean our air by ‘breathing in’ carbon right now, but the ancient storage facility beneath. What does this do? It turns up the heat. For someone who didn’t pay attention in science lessons, the facts and figures behind all this can be confusing, but I like David George Haskell’s description from The Songs of Trees: the conversion of a forest ‘from a carbon sink to a carbon source adds yet more eiderdown to the atmospheric quilt.’17
Farming is another contributor to the build-up of greenhouse gases, thanks in no small part to livestock, and in particular the world’s 1.5 billion cows. This is the basis of the argument that if you really care about climate change you should be vegan. Cows’ burps, farts and manure emit methane. While there’s way more CO2 in the atmosphere, methane is much more effective at trapping heat, which is why Naomi Klein is worried about methane leaks from fracking. Farming is also the major source of nitrous oxide pollution, which primarily comes from fertilisers.
The last part of the greenhouse gas picture belongs to human-made fluorinated gases, which do not occur naturally in the environment. Remember when we worked out that CFCs from fridges and spray deodorants had damaged the ozone layer? Their replacements, HFCs (hydrofluorocarbons), are no angels either. While in terms of volume they are minimal, they have a strong greenhouse effect and are long-lived. Other synthetic fluorinated gases escape when producing things like aluminium and are used in the electronics sector.
Carbon dioxide levels are now at their highest in around 2.5 million years. Using ice cores drilled from Antarctica, where the ice trapped air bubbles as it froze, scientists can work out how much CO2 was in the air 800,000 years ago. Rocks and deep sea sediment cores take us back further still. In March 1958, the first readings were taken directly from the air by a scientist called Charles David Keeling at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii. Keeling recorded the concentration of CO2 in the air in parts per million (ppm) by volume. Monthly recordings have been taken from Hawaii ever since, with labs set up in additional locations from 1967 onwards. This ppm thing has become a rallying point for climate activists.
Before the Industrial Revolution, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were about 280 ppm. Keeling’s first reading was 315. By 2008 they’d reached 385. That was the year American climate scientist James Hansen and his team at Columbia University published their paper ‘Target atmospheric CO2: Where should humanity aim?’ They concluded that 350 ppm was the tipping point. Any more and we risk dangerous levels of warming. ‘If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted,’ they advised, ‘CO2 will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm to at most 350 ppm.’18
Hansen describes how climate sensitivity increases as temperatures rise, risking reinforcing feedback loops that could lead to much more rapid warming. So, for example, as polar sea ice shrinks, the white surfaces that reflect heat back out from the Earth (what we call Earth’s ‘albedo’) are reduced. When dark seawater takes the ice’s place it absorbs more heat, which leads to increased warming, which kills more trees, which releases more CO2, which leads to even more warming … Basically, we don’t want to go there.
London’s November temperatures were about average in 2015. On Saturday 28th, the city reached 10 degrees: quite cool, take your coat, and if you’re headed to the Tate Britain, a camera too. For here, in the 1840 Room, in the company of Lord Frederic Leighton’s bronze of an athlete wrestling a python and surrounded by paintings dating from the Victorian Great Exhibition era, thirty-five activists in dark clothing form an arresting tableau. A woman washes her hands in a small bowl brought along for the purpose, pulls on latex gloves, then proceeds to ink her first volunteer, who has unzipped his hoodie and slipped half of it off to reveal a bare shoulder. She asks him, sotto voce, ‘How are you feeling?’
‘Pretty excited,’ he says. ‘I love this stuff.’
‘Do you?’ she whispers.
‘How many tats have you got already?
‘Three.’
‘Any of them to do with climate change?’
‘The one that Mel practised on my leg,’ he laughs.
‘Okay,’ she says, adjusting the light on her headband. ‘I’m ready, if you are.’
When she’s done, his tattoo reads, ‘351’. It represents the CO2 ppm number the year he was born.
Organisers from the group Liberate Tate staged the happening to draw attention to the fact that the gallery’s major corporate sponsor was BP. Protests began after the Deepwater Horizon spill in 2010, when activists tipped molasses down the Tate’s stairs. The next year, the Reverend Billy and his Earthalujah Choir turned up at Tate Modern to perform an exorcism. After the Birthmark protest, a Liberate Tater explained, ‘The black mark on our skin reflects the taint of BP on Tate.’
A university art teacher was among the tattooed that Saturday. He recognises the performance as an ‘audacious and poignant’ way to challenge the idea of an oil company sponsoring public art. As for the tattoos, ‘As birthmarks, memorialising the constant increase of greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution, they connote our individual complicity in the accumulation of atmospheric CO2, as well as serving as constant reminders of our capacity to become better stewards of our planet and its future.’19 The idea caught on. Youth delegates came home from the Paris climate summit with birthmark tattoos. Students lined up to get them outside a Canadian university.
In 2017 BP ended its 27-year sponsorship of Tate.
The United Nations climate change conference was held in Paris in December 2015. This was the twenty-first time the Conference of the Parties (COP) had met to discuss the climate issue—hence, it is known as COP21. It was this lot who’d negotiated the Kyoto Protocol, which in 1997 sought to limit emissions and put the obligation on developed countries on the basis that they’re historically responsible for current levels.
Kyoto was ratified by the European Union, Australia, Norway and various other countries. Russia and Japan did not follow through. Canada committed but withdrew in 2011, and the United States never signed it in the first place. When COP15 happened in Copenhagen in 2009, environmentalists pinned their hopes on a new agreement with universal buy-in, but went home disappointed.
For many in the climate movement, Paris, COP21, felt like the last chance. There was reason for cautious optimism. Within a year of the summit, 176 countries had signed the Paris Agreement, committing to aim to keep global warming below 2 degrees above pre-industrial levels, and ‘to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase even further to 1.5 degrees’. It is, however, non-binding: signatories agree only ‘to put forward their best efforts through “nationally determined contributions” and to strengthen these efforts in the years ahead’. It’s easy to see how they might do the bare minimum. Switching to renewables means redrawing the economy; jobs and profits will move, and the big fossil fuel companies will fight like hungry tigers to prevent it. The United States, as the world’s second largest carbon polluter, pledged to aim to reduce emissions by 26 to 28 per cent by 2025. Barack Obama signed that one. Trump wasted no time in announcing he’d withdraw as soon as possible (although the deal prevents exit before 2019).
In 2018, CO2 levels in the atmosphere passed 410 ppm. NASA’s ‘moderate emissions scenario’ projects 650 ppm by the end of the century.20 Two years on from Paris, 1.5 degrees sounds like an impossible dream. Business as usual is leading us inexorably towards greater warming than that. But the extreme extraction strategy of the giants (ExxonMobil, BP, Shell and Chevron are among the ten biggest companies) aren’t business as usual—they’re business on steroids, they’re incredibly risky business, worse than Tom Cruise dancing in his underpants.
I’m finding it stressful to research this. It’s properly scary. Weather systems are complicated, but a pattern is clearly forming: climate change is exacerbating extreme weather events. We saw it with hurricanes Harvey, Katia and Irma. We’re seeing it with fires. Seven of the ten biggest California wildfires have occurred in the last ten years. Longer, hotter heatwaves are driving up the bushfire risk in Australia. Globally, the ten warmest winters ever recorded have all occurred since 1998. The Arctic sea ice is declining. I watch over and over the heart-wrenching National Geographic footage of a starving polar bear dragging its emaciated hind legs across a grassy plane in search of food that isn’t there, and I cry. Summer for the bears has always meant going without food while they wait for the ice that is their hunting grounds to form, but now that’s taking longer, and they are wasting away. No wonder there are still climate-change deniers out there.
Denial is a coping mechanism for things we find too difficult to face, which explains why social scientists at Yale estimate that 30 per cent of Americans believe global warming isn’t happening, while more than half think it’s not caused by human activity. According to CSIRO, just 45 per cent of Australians agree that climate change is happening and is caused by humans.21 About 8 per cent believe it isn’t happening, and 38 per cent that it is, but as a result of ‘natural fluctuations’. The remainder haven’t a clue.
Australian IPCC scientist Lesley Hughes draws this analogy: Imagine you’re standing in front of a Qantas plane with 100 engineers. Ninety-eight of them tell you they are very worried that the plane is going to crash. Two of them disagree, saying it’s going to be fine.22 Would you board that flight with your family?
I try to talk to my husband about the Qantas plane and about Parag Khanna’s map, and suggest we start looking for property in Hobart. ‘The whole of New South Wales might turn into a desert,’ I say. ‘Good for nothing but solar energy production.’ For some reason this puts my husband in a bad temper. He reminds me that last week I regaled him about the Dr Evil possibilities of geoengineering that might see renegade governments or sinister billionaires take it upon themselves to inject sulphur into the stratosphere to mimic the effects of a giant volcanic eruption, thus dimming the sun. He tells me his own convoluted story about how his late grandmother won an encyclopaedia as a prize in 1932, and there were no entries for jet engines or DNA. ‘What’s your point?’ I say.
‘My point is that we have no idea what will be known in a hundred years’ time.’
‘It’s eighty-two years.’
‘You are unbelievably frustrating. That, I know,’ he says, and goes back to browsing air conditioners online.
‘If you feel sorrow, anger or fear about global warming, you’re not alone,’ Dr Anthony Leiserowitz reassures me in dulcet tones. I’m not reclining on a leather sofa in a psychiatrist’s office but sweating through a 47-degree Sydney summer’s day, the second hottest on record, listening to audio from the Yale Climate Connections website. As Leiserowitz says, ‘Immersing yourself in the subject can take its toll.’
The overwhelm is real. Support groups are beginning to crop up. In Salt Lake City, one uses the classic twelve-step program to structure bimonthly ‘Good Grief’ sessions, where sufferers meet, share and presumably blub. This kind of personal work takes effort and courage. No wonder some prefer to switch off, or pretend it’s all in hand; that science or governments or Richard Branson will somehow save us. Just in time.
Since the publication of her 2016 book, Hope and Grief in the Anthropocene: Reconceptualising human–nature relations, Australian geographer Lesley Head has given talks about how hard we find it to acknowledge climate grief. ‘There is a deep cultural pressure in the West to not be a “doom and gloom merchant”,’ she writes, but ‘at least some of us should be thinking systematically about worst-case scenarios’ and figuring out what our responses should be.23
I would argue that a lot more of us ought to be organising to pressure our governments to take action. Although we are mourning considerable losses, it is not game over. There is work to do. Urgent work. Denial isn’t just pointless; it’s dangerous.
Australian ethicist Clive Hamilton hammers this home in his book Earthmasters: Playing God with the climate:
The psychological strategies we deploy to deny or, more commonly, to evade the facts of climate science, and thereby to blind ourselves to our moral responsibilities or reduce the pressure to act on them … include wishful thinking, blame-shifting and selective disengagement. For selfish reasons, we do not want to change our behaviour or be required to do so by electing a government committed to deep cuts in emissions.24
Meanwhile those who profit from the existing fossil fuel–based system attempt to discredit the science. The Heartland Institute is famed for its defence of the tobacco industry. One of their best guys on this in the ’90s was the American physicist Fred Singer, who called the link between passive smoking and cancer ‘junk science’. Singer appears in a controversial ‘documentary’ called The Great Global Warming Swindle. While the Heartland Institute no longer discloses where its funding comes from, past donors include ExxonMobil, tobacco giant Philip Morris and oil barons the Koch brothers. Since 2009 they’ve released reports from something called the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, which claim to debunk the IPCC findings. The IPCC reports are produced by more than 500 unpaid scientists; the NIPCC reports are written by three (and one is our old mate Fred Singer), paid by Heartland, which is paid by oil companies. I know. Even so, this stuff gets reported on, and people get duped by it. I mean, it’s a scientific report, right? Who are we meant to believe? Most of us haven’t a clue what scientists are on about, but we know we’re meant to trust them.
Joe Duggan thinks scientists have a communication problem. ‘Your average person doesn’t understand that, in the academic field, when we say we’re 95 per cent certain something is happening, that means we are, essentially, certain. The tendency, outside of science, is to say, “Ah, but what about the other 5 per cent?”’25
Duggan, an Australian, worked in marine research after getting his degree (he majored in zoology), then took time out as a builder’s labourer. ‘My science work didn’t centre around climate change, but in the research world you understand that it affects everything, and in my sphere, the dark little brother of climate change—ocean acidification—had massive repercussions.’ On building sites he was ‘reminded how ordinary people talk. The contrast could not have been starker in terms of communication. When you work on a building site, you need to speak and interact in a clear, straightforward way to get the job done. No more flourishes; what you say is exactly what you mean.’
He decided to return to academia, this time to study science communication. ‘There’s a whole bunch of reasons for the disconnect between what scientists know and what the general public believes,’ he tells me. ‘I thought one of them might be that scientists aren’t communicating the way everyone else does. Scientists deal in evidence and data, not emotions, and that’s as it should be. Their work should be precise and meticulous, not riddled with feelings, but if you give them a moment to reflect on what their climate science findings mean to them, it’s a different story.’
Is This How You Feel? began as a website and became an exhibition that opened in Melbourne during National Science Week. It consists of handwritten letters from scientists in response to the question ‘How does climate change make you feel?’ Duggan’s aim was to battle public apathy and disengagement by humanising the scientists: ‘They’re not robots. These scientists are mothers, fathers, grandparents, daughters. They are real people. And they’re concerned.’
In her letter, Lesley Hughes describes how she dreamed of being a biologist as an animal-loving kid: ‘[My] bedroom was full of jars and boxes of things that crawled and slithered and hopped. The notion that I could actually be paid for doing this, as an adult, was truly wonderful.’ And how she feels today at the thought of climate change–induced species extinction: ‘We have so much to lose.’
British geographer James Byrne writes that worrying about climate change keeps him up at night. He admits to anger and sadness, but also excitement. ‘We can fix this!’ he writes.
Michael Mann, professor of atmospheric science at Penn State, lists his emotions as: concern (‘that we will leave behind a fundamentally degraded planet for our children’), bemusement (‘because the scientific case is clear’), frustration, disgust, anger and hope. ‘Yes, most of all, I feel hope.’
Duggan expected fear to dominate the letters, but was pleased to see that hope is very much in evidence. That CSIRO report that speaks of denial also confirms anger, fear and powerlessness are the most commonly felt emotions in response to climate change, but—and here’s the clincher—active engagement on the issue results in ‘a higher sense of hope’.26 We feel better when we get off our arses and try to fix it.
We can all take steps to tackle climate change. We can give our votes to politicians who prioritise it, lobby government, local councils and business, and join environmental groups. We can switch to a green energy supplier, divest our funds from fossil fuel companies and pressure institutions to do the same. We can switch off the lights (not just for Earth Hour), fly less, buy less, shop local, eat less meat or go vegan, and talk about those things so that, gradually, we change the culture. We can cycle, walk, take public transport. We can be the change. Sure, I am just one person, but we are a community of people, connected to many more.
The universe has sent me May Boeve on a rare visit to Sydney from the United States. ‘David won. Remember that,’ she tells me. ‘You have to keep telling yourself: “David won, David won.” It’s a useful mantra when a task seems daunting.’27 Not that Boeve does daunted. The woman who was made executive director of 350.org when she was twenty-seven is confident that the Davids of the climate-change movement will ultimately beat the lumbering old fossil-fuel Goliaths.
Renewables now make economic as well as moral sense. Solar power costs have fallen dramatically. Tesla has built the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in South Australia, linked to a wind farm, while Bloomberg reports that electric cars might soon be cheaper than gas-guzzling ones.28 Petrol and diesel cars aren’t just on the way out in France; the United Kingdom, Norway, the Netherlands and India are all up for banning them, while loads of other countries have set targets for increasing the percentage of electric vehicles on the roads. Global coal demand has either reached its peak or is about to, depending which report you read. While the International Energy Agency expects that oil and gas use will continue to rise as populations grow, renewables are getting cheaper and more accessible all the time,29 despite many fossil-fuel operations being propped up by government subsidies and sweet deals.30
Resistance is spreading. Cities are suing over extreme weather events. In September 2017, San Francisco filed a lawsuit against BP, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, ExxonMobil and Royal Dutch Shell, claiming that ‘Global warming is here and it is harming San Francisco now’ and ‘this egregious state of affairs is no accident’.31 Burning fossil fuels is the primary cause, they assert, and these companies have known for years and have done nothing about it.
The People vs Big Oil. It’s a Hollywood script writing itself. In January 2018, New York’s mayor Bill de Blasio joined in: ‘This city is standing up and saying, “We’re going to take our own actions to protect our own people!”’ In February it was Paris’s turn, when the city council announced it was looking into the viability of a case—floods in recent years have seen curators rushing precious artworks out of the Louvre. Bill McKibben must be punching the air.
In 2012, McKibben wrote an article for Rolling Stone calling for mass divestment to hit the fossil-fuel companies where it hurts: in the wallet.32 Since serious change requires a movement, and movements (usually) require an enemy, he nominated the industry as ‘Public Enemy Number One’. Why should these companies be allowed to dump their waste—CO2 emissions—for free, for years? We could use some moral outrage. It worked against South Africa during the apartheid era. That article got Rolling Stone ten times more Facebook likes than Justin Bieber’s cover story.
McKibben made a movie called Do the Math and went on the road with it. ‘Shall we work through the numbers?’ he says.33 ‘There are three, and they’re easy.’ Two degrees is how much the world has said it’s safe to let the planet warm. The second number is how much carbon we can pour into the atmosphere and have a reasonable chance of staying below 2 degrees: 565 more gigatonnes (a gigatonne is a billion tonnes). Under business as usual, we’ll be there by the late 2020s. Scary? The third number is the really frightening one. This refers to how much carbon the big fossil-fuel companies already have in their reserves, and it’s 2795 gigatonnes: ‘Five times as much as the most conservative governments on Earth think it would be safe to pour into the atmosphere.’
In 1989 McKibben wrote the first book about global warming for a mainstream audience. He was inspired by a fierce drought that had hit the American grain belt the year before.34 That summer, James Hansen had given a testimony on ‘the greenhouse effect’ to the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. Global warming, Hansen said, had begun. McKibben set about investigating, and the result, The End of Nature, is as sobering a read as the title suggests.
The author assumed that once everyone heard what was going on with the climate there would be rapid action taken by governments and business.35 Yeah, about that. For the next decade he published more books, went on speaking tours and penned stirring opinion pieces for important magazines, but McKibben knew one man could not build a movement alone. He needed an army. An army with energy, enthusiasm and brains to spare, and with skin in the game. If climate change breaks Earth’s thermostat, this group ‘won’t have much of a planet on which to make use of their degrees,’ he said. He needed university students.
In 2003 May Boeve was an eager, blue-eyed, blonde undergraduate newly arrived at Middlebury College, Vermont, and keen to make a difference. She was that sort of kid. ‘From an early age, I was aware that something was not right with the way the world worked,’ she says.36 As a four-year-old growing up in Sonoma, California, she’d gotten her mother to help her write a letter to George H.W. Bush asking him to make cruelty to animals—‘including bugs’—illegal. ‘When I was ten, I started an animal rights club, and we raised money with a lemonade stall at my dad’s church. Even then I knew fundraising was important.’ They made $18. ‘I had a financial-planning thing going,’ she says. ‘It involved three peanut butter jars—one for savings, one for spending, one for giving. The giving jar always went to PETA.’
Her father was a pastor in the Dutch Reformed Church, and her mother a writer. ‘She writes mostly about food now, but she also wrote a book about her brother, who was the first American civilian killed in the Vietnam War. He was a volunteer in the program that the Peace Corps was modelled on. The experience turned my mother into an anti-war activist very early on.’
Boeve says her parents helped shape her view of the world and her role in it. ‘I was raised in engagement with bigger issues; that’s what we talked about at the dinner table. I guess because of my mother, the ’60s was very shaping for me as a young person. You always grow up thinking that your generation is the worst and all the fun was had before you came along, right?’ As a kid, Boeve was the one listening to her mother’s Joni Mitchell records imagining herself at a hippie sit-in. ‘For me the idea of being part of a social movement was a really big deal—that was the world I wanted to live in—so when there was this emerging climate-change movement, I do remember very clearly thinking: here’s my chance.’
At Middlebury, Boeve’s animal thing morphed into a gardening thing, and she helped set up a worm farm in the college greenhouse. One summer she and her friends took a road trip in a bus fuelled by vegetable oil. They stopped to talk in 150 venues along the way, collecting names for a Clean Car Pledge to encourage American companies to make fuel-efficient vehicles. When the tour wound up in Detroit, they presented 11,000 signatures to the United Automobile Workers union. So this is how you change the world; take on awesome challenges while everyone else is at the beach. And do it with grace.
While Boeve is now one of the most respected climate-change activists of her generation, and is entirely at home with putting politicians in their place—‘I want you to know, if you fail to rise to the challenge,’ she told Todd Stern, then the United States Special Envoy for Climate Change, before he left for COP15, ‘that you are personally responsible to all the millions of people who have tried to let you know how important this issue is’—what strikes me most about her in person is how warm and empathetic she is. The future is female. We both wish it would hurry up. ‘Trump has waged war on climate,’ she says.37
Bill McKibben, as Middlebury’s scholar-in-residence, was an influential presence while Boeve was at college, but he wasn’t the one to start her on the climate path. That was an economics professor who ran a class called ‘Building the New Climate Movement’. Boeve didn’t actually take it—she’d enrolled in something called ‘Voices of Rock in Latin America’—but she attended anyway, and joined in the class project. ‘It was to create a campus-based activism group. It soon became the most fun part of my week.’ Some Sunday evenings they’d have 100 students show up. They did things like camp outside in terrible weather to push the slogan ‘Keep winter cold!’ and campaign to persuade the university to go carbon neutral. Did that happen?
‘How could it not?’
Middlebury is now famous for incubating 350.org. As graduation grew closer, Boeve and her inner circle were reluctant to give up their climate-action group. ‘We wanted to stay together. We had this idea to move somewhere in the United States where there was a lot of coal and stop it being mined. We got the maps out, looked for the place with the highest concentrations of coal reserves, green energy potential, students and micro-breweries.’ If all else failed, there was beer. They never made it to Billings,Montana.
‘That same summer Bill had just come back from a trip to Bangladesh,’ explains Boeve. ‘Seeing the floods, the dengue fever and considering the implications of that—mosquitos now live in places they didn’t used to—he came back thinking, “I can’t just write books anymore.”’ He asked Boeve and her friends Jeremy Osbourn, Will Bates, Jamie Henn, Kelly Blen, Jon Warno and Phil Aroneanu to help organise a march across Vermont. In September 2006, their five-day trek culminated in a rally of 1000 people in Burlington’s Battery Park. McKibben was shocked to discover this was the biggest climate-change march in American history. Clearly, something had to be done.
Their next move was to create a viral protest, under the banner Step It Up. It being 2007, they used MySpace. Humble beginnings—just seven people sitting in a room with their laptops emailing everyone they knew—but the April timing was great. Cities were already pledging to reduce emissions. In February, An Inconvenient Truth had won an Oscar, after taking US$45 million at the box office worldwide. A study found that watching the film caused a 50 per cent relative increase in the purchase of voluntary carbon offsets within a 10-mile radius of the screening.38 Unlike the Women’s March, Step It Up had a single clear policy ask. They were demanding a more serious commitment from Congress to reduce emissions, way beyond what Kyoto called for: they wanted an 80 per cent reduction by 2050. It didn’t happen, obviously, but it did make it harder for politicians to ignore requests for action on climate.
By 2 March, the team was expecting 757 different actions, including an underwater rally by scuba divers off Key West and a parade of ‘clean’ cars in San Francisco. By 13 April, there were 1300 events planned in fifty states. Step It Up had ‘no business being particularly successful because we have no money and not really any organisation,’ said McKibben, but rather like Earth Day, ‘people were ready to act.’39 Many participants had never done anything like it before.40
Boeve attributes its reach partly to the students’ ‘beautiful naivety. What we didn’t know we made up for in enthusiasm. We were really bubbly; we had a sense of humour, but no sense of what was too big to ask for. It was like, let’s get everyone together and demonstrate our beautiful movement, which was awesome—that’s exactly what we should have done. It was not pointed, or if it was pointed at anyone, it was pointed at politicians, with the idea that we could encourage them to do the right thing.’
A second action day that autumn led to the foundation of 350.org the following year, with McKibben and Naomi Klein on the board. Boeve says it thrives because it rejects the top-down ‘Big Green’ model; it’s about interconnected networks rather than central control. She spends most of her time on the phone talking different groups into coming together, although she did manage to get herself arrested in front of the White House protesting the Keystone XL Pipeline. ‘To make this work today, it has to be about allies and collaboration,’ she says. ‘350.org is not a movement. It’s part of one.’
As McKibben once said, ‘For the foreseeable future, weekends are for fighting tyranny,’41 but today Boeve has a day off. She’s going to the beach with the 350 Australia team. She didn’t bring a sunhat. ‘There’s still a hole in our ozone layer,’ I tell her.
‘I’ll be fine,’ she says, showing that a bit of that naivety clings on. She heads off down the street then doubles back. Boeve can’t resist an organising opportunity. ‘You know there are 1200 proposed new coal plants throughout the world? You have them here. You can stop them. You should get in touch with Lock the Gate. There’s a big Australian action day coming on the 24th of March. It’s called Time 2 Choose. It’s going to be amazing. Make sure you’re there, Clare.’
I’ll be there. It’s impossible to resist May Boeve.