Silver Linings Playbook, Climate Edition
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To my knowledge, I have never been accused of erring on the optimistic side of the climate issue, and too often I have been right. Still, I have thought a lot about how to make some lemonade out of this bitter lemon. To pursue silver linings is not to minimize the climate catastrophe now hard upon us. It is only to try to make the best of a bad situation.
Here are six silver linings—areas to which we can put our energies. We need to frame a positive politics for the climate issue, and these silver linings can help.
First, the ongoing shift to widespread renewable energy will have many ancillary benefits beyond reducing greenhouse gas emissions. The climate requirement will get us out of fossil fuels more quickly and thoroughly than the many longstanding fossil fuel problems ever could.
The benefits from this most widely appreciated of these silver linings will be enormous. The Lancet recently stressed that air and other pollution from fossil fuels contribute to huge health impacts, including asthma and other respiratory diseases, heart disease, cancers, poor birth outcomes, cognitive effects, and premature deaths—these fossil fuel deaths now estimated to be about 350,000 a year in the US. Beyond health benefits, retiring fossil fuels would bring dramatic reductions in surface mining, oil and other spills, pipelines, fracking, and more.
Similarly, while climate change promises to be devastating for the Earth’s biota, it is also possible that the imperative of keeping greenhouse gases in the world’s soils and forests will drive major new efforts to conserve natural habitats and healthy agricultural lands. We need to keep the world as green as possible. Climate change’s destruction of much biological diversity is now inevitable. Countervailing conservation is something we have to make happen.
Second, the climate disaster could draw communities together, much as natural disasters do today. People will be required to fend more for themselves, and they could discover that they will succeed more often if they cooperate, support each other, and accept and get beyond social and political divisions. The stronger the community bonds, the more intense the interactions across sectors and differences, the higher the spirit, the better off they will be as much of the world seems to be falling apart.
There is much good that can come from community revitalization. Local, state, and regional governance could grow stronger, and their successes in response to the unprecedented climate challenge can carry over into other areas of public concern. Also, community climate efforts will be paired with individual efforts of homeowners to go solar and adopt climate-friendly lifestyles, and in the process that will activate a larger constituency for other needed changes. Here’s another pattern: the fights to “own your own electrical utility” are not new, but the climate challenge is giving them new momentum.
Implicit in these changes at the community level are corresponding changes in individual values. Crises, in this case the climate crisis, can compel a rethinking of what we value most highly and who we are and want to become. The results of this value change can be helpful across a broad front.
Third, technologies driven to commercial scale to address climate change will have other major benefits beyond climate. One can think of all the ways we can use new battery technology. And more: improvements in air conditioning and cooling technologies, electricity grid performance, energy efficient construction, biophilic design, green cities, and much more can better our lives as well as reduce climate threats.
“We need to prepare our communities for the full destructive possibilities of climate change while working to bridge social and political divides, build local resilience, and strengthen governmental capacities.”
Fourth, the climate issue is leading to an appreciation of the need for effective, capable, engaged, and truly democratic government—of, by, and for actual people. The creeping corporatocracy and plutocracy that got us into this mess is not going to get us out of it, at least not until the economic elite are through making money out of both causing the problem and providing their profitable answers. Reagan said “government is not the solution to our problem, government is the problem.” But of course, he had it backwards. With good government, we can solve a lot of America’s many problems.
Fifth, the climate crisis is driving a lot of people to progressive activism. This growth is happening especially among the young and the old (everyone else is working too hard) and, to be sure, the victims, the moms, and the preachers. Here, we recall the leadership Bill McKibben is giving us, including most recently with Third Act for us elderly folks and before that with 350.org, and the powerful mobilization of young people by the Sunrise Movement and others. With climate threats helping to mobilize citizens, we can work to build a powerful progressive coalition addressing a large agenda of national needs.
Sixth, societies will eventually have to face the reality that the climate crisis results from the failure of economic and political systems. The climate demonstration banner says it all: “System Change, Not Climate Change!” An economy so hellbent on profit and growth that it is destroying the planet’s habitability. A politics so captured by economic interests that it can barely stir itself to save the planet. Consumers so enthralled by the diversions and infatuations of modern life that they hardly care what is going on around them. That has been the pattern for a half-century. But here is the good news: it is beginning to change, and to deal successfully with the climate threat it will have to change dramatically. The oncoming climate calamity is the most powerful argument for transformation of America’s political economy, and with that system change would come benefits for a wide range of today’s challenges.
Here is another way of looking at the need for deep change. Adaptation to climate realities will receive huge attention in the future. If tactical adaptation is the practical preparation for climate change’s impacts, then what I would call “systemic adaptation” is the design and adoption of the societal changes needed to correct the fundamental systemic flaws that have brought the climate crisis to our doorstep. Systemic adaptation looks beyond tactical measures like preparing for floods and extreme heat, and it asks what type of societies will fare best for people and the planet in the future. See “Clearing Skies: Opening a New Path on Climate and the Future” from Yale E360.
All of this raises an interesting question: what about international action? Might the climate crisis establish new paths for international cooperation and inclusion that might carry over more widely? We must hope that it will.
It takes a playbook, used by us
The silver linings of the climate storm clouds will not simply materialize down here on land. They must be first appreciated and then pursued as part of the climate struggle. This is a playbook, after all. There is much to be done if we want to seize the opportunities just reviewed. Here are a few of the things we need to do, together.
We will need to avoid the pitfalls that are all around us in this area. Communities could disintegrate rather than cohere. New technologies, like those for geoengineering, could produce disasters. Climate change could further authoritarian tendencies as societies grasp for security and embrace fake solutions. Elites can be counted on to try to save themselves. Climate change could get too severe for adaptation, even systemic adaptation, to succeed and for the silver linings to be realized.
Paul Raskin and his colleagues at the Tellus Institute have described positive scenarios, but they have also developed a "Fortress World" scenario—a place of gated communities, private security and even armies, safe and unsafe zones, all for the privileged elites. As puny government responses to climate stresses fail, some expensive private sector solutions are available to the rich while most people are shut out. There are not many silver linings in Fortress World.
Beyond avoiding pitfalls, we need to join in supporting the efforts, locally and nationally, to cut by 50 percent US greenhouse gas emissions and to protect 30 percent of America’s land, both by 2030—two ambitious goals already set by the Biden Administration. That means quickly putting a stiff fee on carbon and other greenhouse gas emissions and halting new fossil fuel investments and leases.
We need to prepare our communities for the full destructive possibilities of climate change while working to bridge social and political divides, build local resilience, and strengthen governmental capacities.
We are in an era of rapid technological change, some of it good and some not so. We need to support an effort to revitalize “technology assessment and choice,” an area where the federal government was once strong. We even had an independent Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, which was eliminated allegedly for budgetary reasons. Speaking of budgets, the crazy, broken federal budgeting process needs to be revamped so that careful attention can be given to building government capabilities and carrying out sustained, long-term programs.
Environmental and climate advocates need to join with the advocates promoting pro-democracy reforms, including campaign finance reform and public financing of elections. Pro-democracy reform is an environmental issue just as surely as putting a price on carbon or acting to save species. More broadly, advocacy groups need to come out of their issue-specific silos and join together to build a powerful new movement of movements. See this Orion magazine discussion.
Regarding system change, the first steps toward a new system of political economy that gives priority to people, place, and planet occur at the personal level with the rise of a new consciousness. For some, a new consciousness can arrive as a spiritual awakening—a transformation of the human heart. For others it is a more intellectual process of learning to see the world anew. From a society-wide perspective, it involves major cultural change and a reorientation of what society values and prizes most highly.
If properly guided, nothing can drive this transformation in cultural values quite like the unfolding climate disaster. It can and will shatter settled assumptions and habitual thinking and prompt a search for the societal flaws that have brought the climate crisis to our doorstep. This base of people alerted to the need for deep change in our economic and political systems can build a movement for transformational change.
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Readers who have stuck with me through previous Essays from the Edge will know that those pieces are a source of information and ideas for moving these proposals forward. The Essays from the Edge can be found online at democracycollaborative.org/essaysfromtheedge.