Why to Feel Hopeful Despite the Climate Crisis

Jaceybonavia/ Climate, Conscious Consumerism, Eco-minimalism, Intentional Living, Lifestyle, Zero Waste

The climate crisis is terrifying. In Naomi Klein’s book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, Klein describes the horrifying reality of this crisis in detail. She explains its causes, ridiculous proposed solutions, and possible real solutions.

I have hope that when a critical mass of people understand the causes and potential solutions to this overwhelming crisis, we will rise to the challenge.

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1. How Capitalism Caused the Climate Crisis

Humans are releasing greenhouse gases into the atmosphere at unprecedented rates. These greenhouse gases are causing Earth’s climate to change rapidly. One of the significant ways we contribute to the climate crisis is our dependence on fossil fuels (e.g., oil, natural gas, coal), which release carbon into the atmosphere. As you likely know, carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

Capitalism is the root cause of society’s extremely excessive fossil fuel use. So far, rather than doing anything to counter these dangerous, extractive practices of capitalism, humans continue to contribute to the growing problem.

Faced with a crisis that threatens our survival as a species, our entire culture is continuing to do the very thing that caused the crisis, only with an extra dose of elbow grease behind it … the global economy is upping the ante from conventional sources of fossil fuels to even dirtier and more dangerous versions–bitumen from the Alberta tar sands, oil from deepwater drilling, gas from hydraulic fracturing (fracking), coal from detonated mountains, and so on.”

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, 2014, pg. 2

Privatization, deregulation, free trade, and globalization are incompatible with efforts to prevent catastrophic climate change because the problem “demands collective action on an unprecedented scale” (pg 41). Klein explains that our global economy, which relies on burning fossil fuels, “requires heavy-duty interventions: sweeping bans on polluting activities, pricey penalties for violations, new taxes, new public works programs, reversals of privatizations” (pg 39).

2. False Solutions to the Climate Crisis

Major “Environmental” Organizations and Businesses Will Not Solve the Climate Crisis

Many of us believe that we are doing our part to combat climate change if we support national environmental organizations. However, the truth is that these organizations are also operating in our current economy.

Although I am sure that nearly all of the staff and volunteers for these organizations mean well and contribute positively to protecting life on earth, some leadership is corrupt. We cannot rely on these organizations alone to solve the climate crisis.

Klein describes one particularly horrific example of what she calls “Big Green” failing to comply with its environmental mission. Oil and gas development along the coasts of Texas was decimating the endangered Attwater’s prairie chicken population. In response, the Nature Conservancy–the wealthiest environmental agency in the world–swooped in to acquire the land from Mobil, create a preserve, and save the Attwater’s prairie chickens from extinction in 1995.

However, Klein reveals the Nature Conservancy’s corruption. “The Nature Conservancy began to do the very thing that its supporters thought it was there to prevent: it began extracting fossil fuels on the preserve.” By 2012, the Nature Conservancy had made millions off of oil and gas, and there were no more known Attwater’s prairie chickens remaining on the preserve.

Klein also exposes that some environmental organizations have partnered with big extractive businesses, including Shell, BP, American Electric Power, Walmart, Monsanto, BHP Billiton, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Toyota, McDonald’s, Duke Energy, and General Motors. For example, staff of these businesses have sat on the boards of–or given money to–several green groups. Equally important, green groups have also invested their money in oil, gas, and coal companies. Again, the Nature Conservancy has a particularly abysmal record.

Philanthropy Will Not Solve the Climate Crisis

In addition to environmental organizations, we often turn to “green billionaires” as, in Klein’s words, “messiahs.” Billionaires–including Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Warren Buffett (Berkshire Hathaway), Tom Steyer (Farallon Capital Management), Michael Bloomberg (Willett Advisors), Bill Gates (Gates Foundation), and T. Boone Pickens (BP Capital Management)–have offered promising solutions using their extreme wealth.

Unsurprisingly, they are letting us down. It seems that most of these older, rich white men are most concerned with increasing their power, reputation, and wealth. As we have already seen, this economic model is incompatible with our survival needs.

Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin Group, appears to be a particularly awful player. In 2006, he publicly pledged to invest three billion dollars in addressing climate change. His reputation benefited from this pledge, but he failed to make all of the investments he promised. Even worse, his business included airlines, which increased their greenhouse gas emissions. Though he had a facade of being a climate champion, he significantly contributed to the problem.

Branson image credit: Chatham House, https://www.flickr.com/photos/chathamhouse/16528067458/
Buffett image credit: Timothy Archibald/The Forbes Collection, https://www.forbes.com/profile/warren-buffett/
Steyer image credit: Gage Skidmore, https://www.flickr.com/photos/gageskidmore/49560088017/
Bloomberg image credit: Bloomberg Philanthropies, https://www.flickr.com/photos/bloombergphilanthropies/29828795984/
Gates image credit: Kuhlmann/MSC, https://securityconference.org/en/medialibrary/asset/bill-gates-1523-18-02-2017/
Pickens image credit: David Shankbone

Technology Will Not Solve the Climate Crisis

Klein also explains that many people are relying on geoengineering or technological solutions to the climate crisis.

Thought leaders, scientists, and engineers have proposed several “fixes.” One of the most widely promoted is called solar radiation management (SRM)–or, as Klein calls it, “dimming the sun.” These bizarre proposed methods include using space mirrors, brightening clouds by spraying water into the air, and spraying sulfate aerosols into the air.

However, these sun-dimming projects would cause catastrophic environmental, social justice, and other ethical issues. For example, computer models and historical events, such as volcanic eruptions, show that improving the climate in some places will cause drought in others. Further, these projects would have additional consequences models cannot predict.

All of the proposed tech and geoengineering solutions, such as dimming the sun, bring us further away from returning to the natural processes that kept Earth in balance before humans introduced the technologies that caused the problems in the first place. Earth would become entirely and forever dependent on even more geoengineering and technology with known and unknown potential consequences to attempt to solve the problems it creates.

We very likely would not be dealing with a single geoengineering effort but some noxious brew of mixed up techno-fixes–sulfur in space to cool the temperature, cloud seeding to fix the droughts it causes, ocean fertilization in a desperate gambit to cope with acidification, and carbon-sucking machines to help us get off the geo-junk once and for all.

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, 2014, pg. 279

Earth’s systems would lose their abilities to self-regulate and return to equilibrium.

Finally, some people have suggested that we colonize space. To me, this is a depressing idea. Why would anyone attempt to create livable martian places before trying to protect the beautiful and awe-inspiring life and systems on earth?

3. A Reason to Hope: True Solutions to the Climate Crisis

The People’s Resistance

Blockadia

One reason to be hopeful is what Klein calls “Blockadia.”

Bockadia is…a roving transitional conflict zone that is cropping up with increasing frequency and intensity wherever extractive projects are attempting to dig and drill, whether for open-pit mines, or gas fracking, or tar sands oil pipelines

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, 2014, pg. 294-295

Blockadia is bringing together unlikely coalitions of locals in places across the world to block the projects’ operations physically. These coalitions do not consist of the mega-wealthy. Instead, the students, business owners, ranchers, grandparents, and others who stand to be directly affected by the projects comprise the coalitions. Blockadia is “building a global, grassroots, and broad-based network…driven by a desire for…real control over those resources that are most critical to collective survival–the health of the water, air, and soil” (pg 295). These local, place-based acts of community resistance sometimes successfully block these fossil fuel extraction projects.

Democracy

As Blockadia demonstrates, people care about the conditions of their local environment. They find their identities and cultures in these places, and they love their lands. Thus, they are unwilling to risk oil spills and other fossil fuel industry tragedies in their territories. Therefore, in addition to blocking projects, they also democratically voice their opposition to extractive projects to appropriate government officials. The people are starting to win these democratic fights resulting in local fracking, open-pit mining, or offshore drilling bans.

Divestments

One reason the well-intentioned green billionaires could not fix the climate crisis is that they operate within capitalism, intending to grow their wealth. Therefore, they often invested their fortunes in fossil fuel companies and other extractive industries.

Ordinary people are not just joining forces to physically block extractive projects and democratically voice their opinions about fossil fuel projects on local scales. They are also joining together on an international scale to call on “public interest institutions, like colleges, faith organizations, and municipal governments to sell whatever financial holdings they have in fossil companies” (pg 353). Institutions are heeding the call. Across the United States and other countries, they are divesting their endowments from fossil fuel companies, harming the companies’ reputations and power.

Indigenous Rights

Many extractive projects occur on lands where sovereign native nations have unique and powerful rights confirmed in treaties. Indigenous leaders are beginning to stand up firmly for their land rights in ways that could carry severe financial costs for their adversaries if violated. The successful efforts described above are partly due to Native land rights: “Indigenous land and treaty rights have proved a major barrier for the extractive industries in many of the key Blockadia struggles” (pg 370).

Native people have legitimate legal claims to much of the land above fossil fuel reserves. By exposing potential and existing violations to their land rights, indigenous people have more legal power than anyone else to stop these extractive projects.

They are starting to win court victories, and as more people support the tribes, they will win more and more frequently. Support for the tribes is increasing. Klein describes the probable reason why:

Non-Native people are starting to realize that Indigenous rights–if aggressively backed by court challenges, direct action, and mass movements demanding that they be respected–may now represent the most powerful barriers protecting all of us from a future of climate chaos.

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, 2014, pg. 380

Solar and Wind Power

Klein also speaks optimistically about the possibility of powering our lives with solar, wind, and other “renewable” or “green” energy sources rather than fossil fuels. Personally, while I think that they are much better options than fossil fuels, they still represent an extractive economy and present problems. For example, to construct solar panels and windmills, people must mine materials from the earth. To set up large solar or wind farms, people destroy the existing habitats.

Regeneration

What gives me the most hope for fundamentally changing our behaviors drastically and quickly enough to successfully tackle the climate crisis is that people are changing–or more strongly expressing–their mindsets. More and more people understand that “all of life has the right to renew, regenerate, and heal itself” (pg 443). People want to live in harmony with their environments and help generate and promote life. In some places, people are even giving nature itself fundamental legal rights to exist and flourish. (If corporations can have rights, nature most certainly should, too.)

In addition to traditional indigenous practices, Klein cites examples of ways people are replacing extraction with life-promoting, reciprocal systems: permaculture, living buildings, rainwater harvesting, seed saving, water recycling, and using animal manure as fertilizer.

Systems are being created that require minimal external inputs and produce almost no waste–a quest for homeostasis that is opposite of the Monster Earth that the would-be geoengineers tell us we must learn to love.

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, 2014, pg. 447

These systems promote diversity and rely on resources that can continually be regenerated.

Since the Industrial Revolution and the wide-scale adoption of capitalism, as a species, humans have overwhelmingly used our power to take from and destruct life on our planet. We can use this same immense power to restore, regenerate, promote, and protect life.

Conclusion

I highly recommend that you read the book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. The Climate, by Naomi Klein. The first steps to mitigating the climate crisis are to truly understand and stop denying the problem’s nature and scope. This book will help you arrive at a place of deep understanding.

Because of our decades of collective denial, no gradual, incremental options are now available to us.

This Changes Everything by Naomi Klein, 2014, pg. 22

We are in a crisis. We have little time to radically transform our economic system away from extractive capitalism to save our species (and many others) from extinction. Even if we act now, we (or our posterity) will feel vast impacts of the emissions already released into the atmosphere – from natural disasters and extreme weather patterns to mass human displacement to desertification to species’ extinction to ocean acidification.

However, I have hope that–with people-powered movements, including Blockadia; growing support for indigenous people and their land rights; and increasing participation in low-waste, regenerative practices–we can make this massive transformation. We will not only survive but also help the world heal and thrive.

What will you do to stop contributing to capitalism and the climate crisis and begin to support renewal and regeneration on Earth? Let me know in the comments below or on Facebook or Instagram @WildSustainability!

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