It’s too hot, this minute, to do anything. It’s too hot to march, it’s too hot to rally, it’s too hot to launch any dense, detailed footnoted report urging government (local, national, global) to Take Action Now. (It’s too hot to work on your tan as well).
So, what is to be done? Plant some (mental) seeds.
Explain to people (especially easy if you have a Keeling Curve tattooed on your forearm, just sayin’) that this heat is caused by the build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere over the last couple of centuries. Explain to people that scientists and activists have been warning about this for forty years (longer, in fact, but no need to complicate the narrative right now).
Explain that all the talk of renewables this, Strategic Plan that, have not, in fact, slowed the increase of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
And, most of all, explain to them that this weather we are having is only in the most trivial sense the “new normal” – explain that it is not going to stay like this, it is going to get warmer – that looking back from 10 years into the future this will be regarded as not a particularly unusual year.
And, beyond explaining, if you’re not checking in on your neighbours and family who are vulnerable to heat (the old, the young, the poor, the ill, the asthmatic etc), then why should you expect anyone to listen to you about anything?
This heatwave will end. There will be others, later this summer (it is, after all, only June), and next year. And the year after.
So what does responsible activism on climate change mean? Most of all, it’s about, wait for it… holding good meetings.
To quote myself from 9 long years ago –
“The Arctic is melting, the Antarctic slowly cracking up. Even 1.5°C of warming will mean serious problems for Australia, and that target has probably already been blown. I think it’s really important, therefore that we talk about… meetings.”
The point is this. We need to understand that governments (made up of elected politicians and employed officials) have had forty years of warning, forty years to act, on climate, and they have been either unwilling or unable, for the most part. They will make declarations, sign pledges and then continue with business as usual, blameshifting onto another layer of government (“Well, we can’t do anything without money from central government” “Well, most of these actions have to be taken locally.” Rinse and repeat.
Similarly, there are constant false dawns of ‘progressive’ business, groups formed with great fanfare while CEOs get around the world to give motherhood-and-apple pie powerpoint presentations about ‘the sustainability agenda’ and “innovations which will help meet the challenge (once research and development funding from the taxpayer arrives).”
Meanwhile, every year we burn more coal, oil and gas to heat houses, fly planes, etc. Yes, electric vehicles are going gang-busters, but the total amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere does not come down, it keeps going up.
So, if government and the corporate sector can’t act/won’t act, then, what? Individual action? Too difficult, not going to make a difference. Amounts to re-arranging deckchairs on the Titanic while feeling good about yourself.
But what if – stay with me here, I know it sounds crazy – people got together in groups (unions, parties, churches, mosques, pressure groups, professional bodies) and those groups came up with enough in common (not frying the planet would be a start), then they might be able to insist, effectively, that governments and corporates stop making things worse – because that is what we’ve been doing these last forty years. In 1988, when the ‘carbon dioxide’ issue finally broke through, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 351ppm. We’ve now made that blanket much much thicker – it’s about 430ppm and rising more quickly with every (well, most) passing year.
This would be what the academics like to call ‘civil society’ getting up on its hind legs.
The initiator for this, or one of them, would likely be effective ‘grass roots’ groups (based around shared interest, shared beliefs, shared demographics, shared location).
The problem with this pretty picture is that most groups are led by people with confidence and status who – almost always, from my experience – absolutely lack the relevant abilities to hold a meeting that is engaging, inspiring and will involve more than the usual suspects staying involved. I mean, most meetings are excruciating – boring, alienating, disempowering. As per one L. Cohen “they sentenced me to twenty years of boredom, for trying to change the system from within.”
Alongside that, you have charismatic individuals with Old Testament prophet vibes who lead a bunch of desperate people (and anyone who can read a Keeling Curve and has the courage to understand its implications is desperate) into emotionally-charged and (in the moment) satisfying actions which lead to long court cases and not much else.
Somehow we need to create norms for these “social movement organisations” so that they avoid the boredom and demotivation of the former, and ALSO avoid the sugar-rush/sugar-crash of the latter.
In the former case the air leaks out like a punctured tire – people simply don’t come back for a second or third meeting. In the latter case they go up like a rocket and come tumbling down like a stick.
I think I have developed some (okay, quite a lot of) words to help explain that, and – more importantly – some techniques for how to avoid it. BUT it isn’t something that can be done in isolation. It requires a ‘critical mass’ of different groups all doing it at the same time, to kind of ‘create their own weather’.
I no longer believe it will happen, but if there are other people who want to know about it, then I’ll write about it.