Climate: Facing reality and fighting back in 2025
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A new and frightening world of climate change is unfolding around us, and Donald Trump’s election will strengthen its hold. I will focus here on three things: What will the emerging climate reality be like? How did we get here? What can we still do?
What does climate change have in store for us?
Global warming and climate change are, of course, well underway. Last year, despite considerable efforts, the emission of climate-altering greenhouse gases reached an all-time high globally, as did the atmospheric buildup of these gases. Because of this, it is likely that emissions will continue for several decades or longer and that conditions here on Earth will continue to worsen as they do.
We must try in every possible way to reduce the fossil fuel use causing them, and do so with a profound urgency. But even declining emissions will still build up in the atmosphere. The result of huge efforts is going to be a better state of bad.
The climate change consequences I describe here are, I think, each more likely than not. Some are inevitable; some are just good guesses. The question for us now is whether societies will act with swift determination to minimize their prevalence and severity.
Already underway, the “first order” effects of climate change are droughts, extreme heat, wildfires, severe storms, floods, unwelcome new weather patterns, melting of glaciers and landed ice, sea-level rise, and more.
You know this world; it is the world we see emerging today.
These effects will lead in turn to second-order consequences. Entirely predictable are widespread biological losses and ecosystem degradation, the spread of diseases into new areas, water and food shortages, persistent crop failures and famines, large-scale economic disruptions, uninhabitable zones along coasts and elsewhere, scorched cities, and major loss of human life.
Simultaneously with these changes, we will likely see still more consequences such as climate refugees and mass migrations, resource and other disputes within and between countries, and costly efforts at adaptation, much of it futile, as well as risky geoengineering.
These impacts will greatly stress governments around the world. They will struggle to cope. We will see police forces and militaries called upon for social stability and invoked as solutions. There are already a number of countries tallied as “failed or failing states,” and climate change will drive these numbers up. At the international level, the multiple inadequacies of global governance, never strong except in certain economic spheres, will be magnified by the international tensions and domestic preoccupations caused by climate change.
“Understanding the full dimensions of the climate threat can drive home the need to head off the worst. Importantly, it can encourage people to ask what’s wrong with a society and a world that has brought the climate tragedy to our doorsteps.”
Equally telling will be the psychological burdens. The loss of homes, communities, and livelihoods; the many “excess deaths;” the destruction of much-loved natural and cultural resources including species, forests, and coastlines; the pall of grief, dread, and powerlessness—these will weigh heavily, especially on the young.
There's more, possibly worse—for example, the tendency of frightened, overwhelmed people to reach for authoritarian, strong-man solutions.
I hope it is clear why such distressing information is relevant. Understanding the full dimensions of the climate threat can drive home the need to head off the worst. It can spur crisis readiness for what is unavoidably coming. Importantly, it can encourage people to ask what's wrong with a society and a world that has brought the climate tragedy to our doorsteps.
How did the Big Mistake happen?
The United States has released by far the most climate-changing gases. What is it about our economy, our politics, and our culture that has let this giant failing happen?
It is critical, particularly for today’s children and the generations after, to understand at a deep level what has driven the climate emergency. If we can identify the underlying factors and forces that have caused the Big Mistake, then we can say with conviction that these are things that must be different in the world we want for today’s kids and future generations.
I believe we have this crisis for reasons that are, and have been, fundamental to our society, and that is troubling.
First, our current system of political economy has for decades warred against effective climate action. Here are some key dimensions of the problem.
In today’s economy, output, productivity, profits, the stock market, and consumption must all go up. This growth has required vast amounts of energy, and to this day that energy is still 80 percent fossil fuels. A large portion of the new and impressive renewable energy growth has been used merely to meet increased energy demand.
Growth, supercharged with advertising, is measured by tallying gross domestic product at the national level and sales and profits at the company level, and pursuit of GDP and profit are dominating priorities in economic and political life. GDP, of course, simply adds everything up, the good and the bad. There is no deduction for climate change’s vast social and environmental costs nor any adjustment for appalling income disparities. No wonder it’s called Grossly Distorted Picture.
Profits can be increased by keeping social, environmental, and economic costs externalized, borne by societies at large and not by the company. The atmosphere is a handy disposal site. Profits can also be increased through subsidies, tax breaks, regulatory loopholes, and other gifts from government. Today, the US government subsidies to the fossil industry are estimated at about $20 billion annually. Together, these externalized costs and subsidies lead to dishonest prices, which in turn lead consumers to spur on the businesses that do damage—and to buy more fossil fuel.
The system of money and finance deserves special note. Perversely, it is taken for granted that investors and banks should seek high financial returns, not (with rare exceptions) high social and environmental returns. One result is that today the big banks are financing, among much else, the destruction of the planet’s climate.
The United States will never be able to go far enough, or fast enough, doing the right things on climate, as long as our priorities are ramping up GDP, growing corporate profits, increasing the incomes of the already well-to-do, neglecting the half of America that is just getting by, encouraging unrestrained consumerism, facilitating great bastions of corporate and moneyed political power, and helping abroad only modestly or not at all.
Second, a weak, flawed democratic system has also made the Big Mistake possible. The US political system has been corrupted by money, focused on the short time horizons of election cycles, and guided by a discouraging level of public discourse on important issues like climate change. Today, discourse is further degraded by abundant and intentional misinformation and by weaponization of the climate issue for political ends.
Climate change has been a difficult issue for our political system. It is scientifically complicated, and until recently its impacts have not been acute or immediate, so the problem has been thought a speculative, uncertain matter for the future. For decades the mainstream media largely ignored the climate issue and bears a big responsibility for the consequences. Huge swaths of the public distrust science and “pointy-headed experts.” The stage has thus been set for disinformation and an entire political party in climate denial.
Climate action has been further stymied by the reigning neoliberalism and its convenient insistence that markets can better manage things than government. Indeed, the whole attack on “big government,” “government interference,” and the denigration of government generally has weighed against climate action.
And third, the final big flaw leading to the Great Mistake is a set of dominant cultural values and habits of thought that are outdated and now dangerous.
American values are strongly materialistic, anthropocentric, individualistic, and contempo-centric. Materialism and its partner consumerism seek to meet human needs, even non-material ones, through ever-increasing purchases of goods and services. Consumption is the biggest variable in the GDP summation and a huge driver of emissions. Today’s self-centered individualism wars against community and social solidarity. It blocks consideration of the community as a whole. The habit of focusing on the present and discounting the future leads away from a thoughtful appraisal of long term consequences and from care for future generations.
The most relevant failure of our value system is its view of nature and our place in it. Today’s thinking sees humanity as something separate and distinct from nature, and superior to it. Nature in this view is ours to dominate and exploit; it lacks both intrinsic value independent of people and rights that create the duty of ecological stewardship. The idea that the economy is nested in the natural world, and we should behave like it is, is largely absent. We are the offspring of nature’s evolutionary process and close kin to wild things, but our cultural values don’t embrace this reality.
What can we still do?
We thus face a horrendous problem brought on by deeply embedded forces. In this context, what is a plausible climate agenda for the years ahead, years when our national politics will be dominated by President-Elect Trump and his frightening plans?
First, concerned citizens can massively resist the climate rollbacks and roadblocks that Trump promised in the campaign. National environmental and climate groups are skilled at this resistance, which is often in the courts. Many of President Trump’s efforts were stymied in his first administration. Two big things citizens can do is be sure the groups fighting his climate moves are well-funded and join with them in their campaigns, of which there will be many. Along with these efforts, national-level advocacy can focus on opportunities that may arise to save key portions of the Inflation Reduction Act and to protect electric vehicle subsidies while eliminating those for fossil fuels.
“The next few years can be a period of education and outreach, including a major investment in building a climate-capable politics.”
Second, climate advocacy and action can focus even more on states and localities. I say “even more” because in the last decade, and particularly during the Biden administration, there has been a flourishing of climate action at the state and local levels. Most states now have climate action plans. The goal must be to strengthen state and local plans and to ensure their aggressive implementation. State and local climate and environmental action groups have programs to support such efforts. Citizens can join fully with them in this work. Big states like California have a special role to play; their policies can have national impact. Another area to ramp up is interstate collaboration, like the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (REGGI) in the Northeast.
A key dimension of action will surely be lawsuits—by states and localities to enforce compliance and collect damages and fines from fossil fuel industries and by citizen groups to force state action and block new fossil development.
Third, advocates and other citizens can do far more to address climate change at the international level. Americans naturally focus on US greenhouse gas emissions, which remain huge and demand curtailment. But today almost 90 percent of global emissions come from outside the United States. This reality underscores how critical it is for our citizen groups to focus internationally and for US foreign policy leaders to be fully engaged in the struggle. Americans need to remember: the US bears heavy responsibility for the climate disasters occurring around the world. The US has contributed 25 percent of the greenhouse gas buildup, far more than any other country.
Here are some ripe targets for innovative international action. During the past eight years the world's big banks have pumped more than $7 trillion into the global fossil fuel business, JP Morgan Chase and Citibank among the worst of them. It is insane for this to continue. Foreign governments, US states, customers, and citizens need urgently to pursue new ways of reining in the big banks.
Several states, including New York and California, have been pursuing legislation to force fossil fuel companies to pay for climate damages. Vermont now has such legislation. The stage is set for coordinated international action to make the polluters pay. The developing world is demanding ever more loudly that the polluting nations pay. We need to strengthen these efforts internationally and form alliances with those most victimized. To address the financing needed in the developing world, the Bridgetown Initiative proposes a new global financial architecture to make a lot more money available and to create financial guarantors for larger private sector funding.
Across the pond, Europe has adopted a new system of carbon border tariffs to protect its companies from unfair competition from imports from countries without carbon controls. That approach can put real pressure on the laggards and can be used to help force US action.
And, of course, the UN climate treaty process with its endless, ineffectual Conferences of the Parties (COPs) needs to be thoroughly rethought and revamped. This comprehensive overhaul should be a major, priority project of all those institutions and individuals now in the fight against climate change. A related imperative is the necessary preparation of the world organizations and its many agencies. The UN as a whole is simply not ready for what is coming, though every aspect of its responsibilities will be dramatically affected.
Fourth, the next few years can be a period of education and outreach, including a major investment in building a climate-capable politics. The climate issue in the recent election was a sad sight. The concerned public can make the next four years a period of unprecedented effort at climate education, at outreach including to friends and neighbors who are climate skeptics and deniers, at changing messages and communications, at countering and exposing disinformation, and at politically mobilizing those already concerned.
It will be important to deal honestly (and programmatically) with concerns and fears generated by climate policies. More must also be done to communicate the benefits of climate action. Those who study communications have a lot to teach, such as focusing factually on the reality of major calamities. When 2026 and 2028 come around, a powerful, voting constituency of climate-concerned citizens could make an important difference.
Fifth, climate-active citizens can work with others to save the democracy we have and to build the climate-capable democracy we need. Historically, American environmentalism has never truly embraced the goal of strengthening democratic performance. That is one of several factors accounting for environmentalists’ current political weakness, and it must dramatically change if the voice of climate sanity is going to prevail in our politics.
Today's political unrepresentativeness and democracy deficits are created partly by anomalies like the Electoral College, gerrymandering of Congressional districts, state control of federal elections, impediments to voting rights, and, of course, the enormous sway of big money in politics. Most of these can and should be fixed, and the good news is that there are ways to fix them.
For starters, Sen. Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota and her colleagues have introduced an impressive bill that would shore up voting rights, protect election integrity, and otherwise greatly strengthen our democracy. This legislation should be an environmental priority.
Democracy, of course, depends for its success on many factors in the social and economic spheres as well as the political. When economic inequality mocks political equality, democratic progress is difficult. When corporate power dwarfs people power, democratic progress is difficult. When the voting public is subjected to repeated lies and endless disinformation, democratic functioning will be difficult. When future generations and the natural world are not accorded political rights, democracy will be deprived and unrepresentative.
Sixth, it is time to get serious about transformative change to a new political economy. The past 20 years have seen a flourishing of creative efforts to explore deep change in our interlinked economic and political systems—our political economy. Doubts about the current order are increasing, and calls for transformative change have grown louder. “System change, not climate change,” the frequently-seen climate protest banner says.
Bookshelves are actually full of good ideas in this regard—some reformist, some radical, some near-term, some more distant. Importantly, our landscape is now populated with many hundreds of real-world initiatives that show the way. In other words, we know how to transform the system just described.
More and more people are seeing the root of the problem in America's misguided value system, and they are searching for new values and new lives to go with them. Many now see the need, not for more analysis, but for an awakening to a new consciousness. Value change is not something to just wait for. Social values have been, and can be, changed.
And seventh, to make all this ever more possible, there needs to be a movement of movements. Progressives of all stripes should leave their issue silos, come together, and forge a mighty political force, both for immediate action and for deep, transformative change. The need here is for a fusion of forces, a movement of movements, among other things to lead a massive outpouring of citizen protest and resistance. The big national NGOs in several fields can come together and start this effort. The environmental justice movement has breathed new life into American environmentalism. As a movement that is already a fusion, perhaps it can help spearhead this effort.