Climate Mitigation Has Already Worked

We forget all of the people who have been working on climate change for years

I constantly run up against this problem:

Some say climate change is bad, that it’s part of a polycrisis, that it’s a symptom of ecological overshoot, and I agree with it all.

Then they say there’s nothing we can do, and I disagree.

Because time and again, the way they frame climate fixes is “all or nothing.” E.g. “We would need at-scale international cooperation… starting forty years ago.” Impossible scenarios wherein everybody got involved right away and hit the ground running and it’s all looking like things are going to work out great. Short of that, we’re just irrevocably fucked.

My response is always: I agree were fucked, but the degree to which we’re fucked remains in question. So by that token, it’s still every hand on deck, all efforts ahead, doing everything we can to minimize damage, to mitigate, to adapt.

And then I get back: Mitigate how? Adapt how? And the process repeats: “Unless we can mitigate and adapt at scale, through coordinated intergovernmental efforts…”

And around we go.

Here’s the thing. If everyone who looked at the problem of climate change just said, “Ah, fuck it. It’s too big. Nothing we can do,” and left it in the dark, we’d be even worse off. Inarguably. Fewer EVs on the road, less solar, less wind, less public understanding, less everything. We have an IPCC for God’s sake. We have the Conference of the Parties. Has anyone pulled a Superman and lifted the falling DC10 back into flight? Of course not. Superman doesn’t exist. We’re a planet of eight billion, and perfect cooperation is a complete nirvana fallacy.

We have to do the best with what we can.

From Tyndall on down to Carl Sagan, Al Gore, James Hansen, Greta Thunberg, and countless others; from every paleoclimatologist to glaciologist and atmospheric scientist; every ardent journalist, concerned writer, and public speaker, we have built the climate science, we have raised the awareness of our impact. It’s not their fault we have this co-morbidity of social media, of a starkly divided socio-political system. When the wall came down and we lost a common enemy (Communism) we probably began our implosion. Social media helped us to turn on each other, the national political news media cashed in, and even the nighttime talk shows went from please-everybody-with-anodyne-banter to blatantly partisan with a clear culture-war position.

Regardless, the science developed, the awareness spread, and the whole reason we even have a terrifying understanding of the situation today is because of all of the climate change pioneers. They’re the proof that mitigation efforts work. None of them said “fuck it,” and none of them said, “unless we have a perfect solution we’re all doomed.” They saw themselves as a piece of the overall picture, they perhaps considered the aggregation of marginal gains; at the very least they figured: we just can’t predict the future perfectly.

Currently, we have a range of models. They’re perhaps narrowing as we run out of road. But it’s not even about efforts to “solve” or “fix” the problem. This is the straw man. This is Faust beckoning. It’s about minimizing the damage. And we do that the same way we’ve been doing it — by plugging forward. By doing everything in our power to do, each of us. How we live, how we consume, how we vote, and — perhaps especially — how we think about this situation and discuss it.

Because it all starts there.

What do you think the scientists say? If you’re a glaciologist, or a biologist, a botanist, or an oceanographer — any kind of climate expert — do you look a the problem, dust off your hands, and say, “Well, too late for this one?”

The expert I spoke to who’s been working on the problem for fifteen years had only mitigation on his mind. And I suspect the rest of the experts are like that, too.

It’s us laypersons, us armchair experts folding our arms and smugly proclaiming it’s over. Even if we qualify that with “I’m not saying to give up!” too many of us are still using the language and rhetoric of a panacea-or-nothing. We say: “Renewables can’t fix the whole thing / The transition to renewables has too much fossil fuels embedded / We’re still growing in population and energy demand / Even if we fix it all we still have colonialism and social injustice / The global warming is already baked in / It’s exponential / Geoengineering has risks.” We champion degrowth or pooh-pooh degrowth. We point out every obstacle, and every challenge, and, seeing no way to bowl them all down at once, purse our lips and sigh. “I guess that’s that.”

It’s seriously some of the dumbest shit I’ve ever encountered.

Don’t get me wrong: there are some air-headed Pollyannas out there. In no way do I think climate change is reversible, that it’s “just about fossil fuels,” or any other reductive thing. And of course, there are deniers galore. But while doom has its place in waking people up, of speaking the truth about the direness of our situation, that’s as far as it goes. As soon as you’re riding doom into the “nothing we can do” space, you’ve stayed on the ride too long.

Who are you, anyway? Do you just follow the crowd, jump when they say jump, give up when they say give up?

If everyone else in the world right now said the civilizational and environmental collapse is inevitable, there’s no perfect solution, so we’re all just going to “live in the moment” and enjoy our last few years, would you go along?

Or would you be that last stubborn motherf*cker out there, yanking on the floor of the world, trying to tug it in the right direction?

I hope you can look in the mirror and say that’s you.

I hope when you hear that there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for climate change, that “things are going to be bad, so buckle up and just let it all happen,” you say fuck that. You look back at all of the men and women who have risen up from the beginning, who have raised the consciousness, who have endeavored to minimize and mitigate, who have considered the suffering at hand, now and in the future, and who have made their contribution, that you make yours.

That’s all anyone can ask of you.

And that’s all you owe.

TJ