How We Make Progress Now

Part 1: Some Limits We Need to Work Around

College students Thomas Gaither, who died Saturday, and Lloyd Williams prepare for civil disobedience at a Kress five-and-dime store in Rock Hill, SC 1961

We’re a week in, and the Trump blitzkrieg has had its desired effect—everyone is stunned by the sweep and depth of the cruelty and silliness on display, bludgeoned into a kind of fish-faced silence because what, really, do you say to someone who has just by fiat renamed the Gulf of Mexico?

The attacks on sensible energy policy have been swift and savage. We exited the Paris climate accords, paused IRA spending, halted wind and solar projects, gutted the effort to help us transition to electric vehicles, lifted the pause on new LNG export projects, canceled the Climate Corps just as it was getting off the ground, and closed the various government agencies dedicated to environmental justice. Oh, and we declared an “energy emergency” to make it easier to do all of the above. “The dizzying pace of announcements gives the impression that the nation’s entire climate landscape has changed in less than a week,” Bloomberg reported (though as Lever News added, the Biden administration did succeed in shoveling a good deal of money out the door in its final weeks, dollars that will be hard for the new guys to claw back.)

I don’t plan on taking apart every one of these dumb decisions—I’ve written a lot about why they were worthy and important efforts, and in any event the Trump administration and the Congress are not responding to reason or evidence. As the Guardian just reported, Big Oil spent $445 million in the last election cycle, and they now have a firm grip on the controls of power. The question is how to erode that grip—which won’t happen in a week, or a year. It will take steady organizing, occurring against the stern backdrop of physics, which will be piling up climate damage even as we work. No easy answers or quick victories; November’s loss was deep and profound.

Some of the fronts on which we’ll fight are obvious. Lawyers from the big environmental groups are already heading to court to try and blunt the worst of Trump’s measures, many of which are blatant attempts to override statutory process engrained in federal law. We shall see how robust the commitment of our judiciary to that law remains.

And in blue states and cities we can continue to pass important legislation. I think the most promising measures may be modelled on New York’s recently adopted Climate Superfund “polluter pays” laws—a similar effort is now gaining steam for obvious reasons in California, and may be spreading to Illinois. These are huge economies; they matter. And there are lots and lots of other things to be done, some of which don’t require vast amounts of federal money—Manhattan’s new congestion pricing law, for instance, has produced 51% fewer crashes and injuries. There are a thousand such good ideas in the air, and places we can enact them.

But we have, I think, a bigger task, which is to shift the zeitgeist around energy.

For some time now, the climate movement has perceived a central task as resisting the depredations of the fossil fuel industry. Since those are manifold, it’s been important work, and often effective. As Cynthia Kaufman writes in an important new paper, activists have been attempting to undermine the power of Big Oil in many ways, from stopping pipelines to divesting pension funds. Power, she writes,

can be challenged in a piecemeal fashion, and a movement can move forward in a somewhat uncoordinated way, something like the game of Jenga, where supports for a structure are removed in a piecemeal fashion. As with the game of Jenga, it is never clear which undermining move will cause the tower to topple. But at some point, with enough challenges, the structure becomes unstable and small moves can have large consequences.

That’s been, I think, the theory that unites many of these efforts, and to a very great extent it worked: the IRA could not have been passed, for instance, without the two proceeding decades of resistance, most of which had nothing to do with the IRA.

But two things have changed. One is that the second Trump presidency seems to be unlike anything that came before it (including his ugly but befuddled first administration). We are seeing a triumph of illiberalism unlike anything in our recent history, when cruelty is not obscured but exalted. I think for me the single most disheartening news of the past week—not close to the most important, but somehow the most illustrative—was the news that the Air Force would no longer be telling its new recruits about the history of the Tuskegee Airmen. That is to say, our proto-fascists want to erase the history of men who fought fascism in Germany and, by their example, helped erode racism in America. (Co-president Musk this weekend called on Germans to “move beyond” any guilt over their history).

The at-least-temporary triumph of this kind of illiberalism narrows somewhat the scope for protest of the sort that’s been useful in the past. Much of the American tradition of nonviolent movement building draws on the epic history of the civil rights movement. We were reminded of that noble history this weekend when Thomas Gaither died at the age of 86. He’d helped to bravely pioneer the “jail no bail” tactics of the early sit-ins, opting for thirty days on the chain gang in Rock Hill South Carolina rather than pay a $100 fine, a gesture that made life difficult for southern sheriffs whose jails began to fill to overflowing, but also underscored the seriousness of the commitment of these young people. That commitment mattered enormously—in a fast-liberalizing country, which was America in the 1960s, it helped build the momentum that within a few years would pass the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act^.

But we are not a liberalizing country right now—we’re closer to a reactionary one, where many people are consumed with grievance real or imagined. And so such gestures have less purchase on the broad center that defines political outcomes. That center is—again, at least for the moment—not broadly responding to this kind of sacrifice; indeed, the ascendant Trumpians welcome resistance so they can smash it, physically (the Proud Boys celebrated their release from jail this week with vows of revenge) and legally—I suspect that the sentences for protest going forward may not be thirty days, but closer to the brutal ones imposed last year on climate protesters in the UK, now languishing in jail for many years to come. (Here is the superb prison diary of one of these protesters, and here is the insane and maddening story of one of her colleagues, a 78-year-old woman returned to jail yesterday because the authorities couldn’t find an ankle or wrist monitor small enough to fit her bones).

It’s not that protest needs to end; it’s that we need to explore some new ways. And there’s plenty to choose from. If there’s one book I’d recommend spending some time with, just to stretch your thinking, it’s volume two of Gene Sharp’s Methods of Nonviolent Action—here, thanks to the War Resister’s League, is a crib sheet of his catalogue of 198 practices, most of which bear little resemblance to the canonical civil rights sit ins. Many of them won’t fit, because in a divided country they produce more anger than resolve. But some will—again, a guide from elsewhere can be found in the history of Otpor, the Serbian resistance movement that eventually overthrew the country’s totalitarian leader Slobodan Milosevic. As one of its leaders, Ivan Marcovic, told Waging Nonviolence last year:

When we started, society was largely in a state of despair and apathy. And that is why we decided to use hope as one of our major forms of messaging. People were like, “How can you be hopeful? It looks like things are getting worse by the day.” But we didn’t care how people reacted to the message of hope, or that they reacted with skepticism. What we were focused on was whether people had a need for hope — and they did. They desperately wanted to hope. They were skeptical because they didn’t want to get hurt or disappointed. Cynicism and apathy were at the surface, but below that was actually a common desire to live in a normal country. That’s why one of our slogans was “We want Serbia to be a normal country.” It was silly because just wanting things to be normal was kind of outrageous. But this is why persistence is important.

To me, that sounds a bit like where we are right now. Otpor famously used humor to make its points; I think that will be key here too (The Emperor’s New Clothes should be standard reading too).

And in the climate movement we have something else going for us. All those years of pipeline fights and divestment battles occurred in a period when fossil fuel was the cheapest way to power a society. That’s no longer true; now it’s Trump and his friends fighting uphill against economic gravity. And they know it—Trump moved so fast to ban new wind and solar—indeed to literally define ‘energy’ to exclude them—because every poll shows they are far more popular than hydrocarbons.

We need to figure out how to leverage those facts in the years ahead—creatively, in ways that make use of our advantage in truth and beauty and minimize our current lack of political power. That’ll be part two, and it may come with an assignment!

In other energy and climate news:

+Good to see that one of the greatest energy scams in the world is beginning to receive the attention it’s due in the British press. Just a recap for a story that will be familiar to long-time readers of this newsletter. Britain’s biggest carbon emitter is the Drax power plant in North Yorkshire, which burns wood harvested mostly in North America. It’s gotten enormous government subsidies on the grounds that some day those trees will grow back, soaking up the carbon that’s being emitted, which is more than you can say for coal or gas. Sadly, that ‘someday’ is decades in the future, and in the meantime the plant is pouring carbon into the air in huge quantities (wood is an inefficient fuel); for at least a decade now scientists have known of the folly of wood-burning for electricity, but the idea that this is green power has been too tantalizing for politicians to pass up (especially since, for the Brits, it’s someone else’s continent that’s being deforested). As it turns out, great investigation by the U.S. based Dogwood Alliance and others have shown that there’s a powerful overlay of environmental racism as well—and in a series of scandals it’s become clear that the company claim to using ‘waste wood’ is not to be taken at face value. Anyway, the writer and political analyst Dominic Lawson (brother of tv chef Nigella) wrote an excellent column on the whole mess for the Sunday Times. I don’t pretend to understand the ins and outs of British politics, and I note that Lawson is the son of the excellently named Baron Lawson of Blaby, but I enjoyed the final paragraphs of his rant, describing a debate in the House of Lords.

But at least when Lord Forsyth of Drumlean, the formidable former secretary of state for Scotland, expostulated that this sustainability argument was “mad”, given it is based on “cutting down trees in North America, turning them into pellets, dragging them across the Atlantic Ocean using diesel-powered ships … and then burning them at Drax”, the minister acknowledged: “I realise that it sometimes sounds counterintuitive.” Sometimes?

We can only hope the Drax whistleblower who briefed Lord Birt finds a way to make their claims known to all of us, who have for far too long subsidised this state-authorised tree-burning green scam.

+The only thing worse than burning trees may be burning cities—not just because of the obvious losses, but because the stuff that’s on fire pours pollutants into the air. An important Times investigation into the consequences of the LA conflagration found

At the height of the Los Angeles County wildfires, atmospheric concentrations of lead, a neurotoxin, reached 100 times average levels even miles from the flames, according to early detailed measurements obtained by The New York Times. Levels of chlorine, which is also toxic at low concentrations, reached 40 times the average.

The spiking levels underscore the added danger from wildfires when cars, homes, and other structures burn, researchers said. Lead is often present in paint and pipes used in older homes, while chlorine and other chemicals are generated when plastic melts or combusts.

+I am the very furthest thing from an investment advisor, but the people behind the Keeling Curve prize have endorsed the platform Climatize for allowing people to join in various efforts to put up clean energy.

+We’ve been following the ongoing scientific worry that the great currents of the Atlantic are in the process of collapse because of cold, fresh water pouring into a melting North Atlantic. A new paper last week offered some hope that the current was more stable than suggested; a commentary from the eminent climatologist Stefan Rahmstorf at the authoritative climate science website Real Climate this morning…threw cold water on that comfort.

Hence, I do not believe that the new attempt to reconstruct the AMOC is more reliable than earlier methods based on temperature or salinity patterns, on density changes in the ‘cold blob’ region, or on various paleoclimatic proxy data, which have concluded there is a weakening. But since we don’t have direct current measurements going far enough back in time, some uncertainty about that remains. The new study however does not change my assessment of AMOC weakening in any way.

And all agree that the AMOC will weaken in response to global warming in future and that this poses a serious risk, whether this weakening has already emerged from natural variability in the limited observational data we have, or not. Hence the open letter of 44 experts presented in October at the Arctic Circle Assembly (see video of my plenary presentation there), which says:

We, the undersigned, are scientists working in the field of climate research and feel it is urgent to draw the attention of the Nordic Council of Ministers to the serious risk of a major ocean circulation change in the Atlantic. A string of scientific studies in the past few years suggests that this risk has so far been greatly underestimated. Such an ocean circulation change would have devastating and irreversible impacts especially for Nordic countries, but also for other parts of the world.

+California’s former insurance commissioner Dave Jones has authored an excellent argument for why the fossil fuel industry should be footing the bill for the LA fires

Major oil and gas companies have known for decades that burning their products could lead to “potentially catastrophic events,” like the higher temperatures and abnormally dry conditions that fed the fires still being battled in Los Angeles. Exxon scientists warned about this internally starting in the 1970s. Instead of disclosing these risks, big oil companies deliberately misled the public, policymakers and investors. According to a yearslong congressional investigation, even as these companies publicly pledged to meaningfully contribute to a transition away from fossil fuels, they were privately working to continue production for decades to come.

We should require these highly profitable companies to compensate communities, homeowners, businesses and even insurers for the losses. And while this might sound like a big lift, there are ways that states and local governments can start taking action today.

Several states and local governments, including California, are suing oil and gas companies to ensure that these polluters pay for the vast harm their actions have caused. The Supreme Court recently declined to take up an oil industry demand to stop one such case brought by the City and County of Honolulu from proceeding to trial. Just as lawsuits were brought against the tobacco and opioid industries, officials across the country now have a path forward to bring to trial their own claims against oil companies. More cities and states should pursue such lawsuits.

+Writing in Undark, Paul Bierman makes the essential point about Trump’s inane pursuit of Greenland

Like an ice cube on a sultry summer day, Greenland’s ice sheet is melting, and that water, flowing into the ocean, is steadily raising sea level globally. The rising ocean is now endangering our national security.

Consider that Naval Station Norfolk, the largest military port in the world and home to five of 12 U.S. aircraft carriers, is now sinking beneath the waves. Worldwide, more than half a billion people live within 25 feet of sea level, according to a 2019 study. If Greenland’s ice continues to melt, rising seas will submerge their homes and farms, like those of the Norse. What follows will be the largest human migration in history.

Greenland’s ice wouldn’t be melting if several decades of moral appeals to address climate change had effectively engaged people and politicians. But those pleadings, often couched in apocalyptic tones, have fallen flat. We need a different approach.

I suggest that advocating for climate stability as a strategic and economic imperative — an idea that politicians across the ideological spectrum could support — is our best hope to keep Greenland’s ice frozen and thus the seas from rising further. The U.S. military, integral to the Cold War occupation of Greenland and respected by most Americans, provides an example of just such an approach.

+No one has been more steadfast in the effort to persuade the big financial institutions to stop funding climate chaos than Ben Cushing of the Sierra Club. Here’s his lament about the retreat of the big banks from the Net Zero Banking Alliance in the face of Trumpian pressure—and a reminder that it’s not (yet) total

On its face, the departure of these major financial institutions from global net-zero initiatives is clearly disappointing, and is a sign that these banks and asset managers are capitulating to ongoing attacks from climate denier politicians that want to stop sustainable finance efforts. However, we want to be very clear on where we stand: while voluntary corporate-led climate initiatives can serve an important role, membership in them has never been the ultimate measure of a company’s actual progress.

The fact of the matter is that all six major US banks have previously made their own net-zero commitments that pre-date or are independent from their membership in the Net Zero Banking Alliance, which have not changed as a result of the banks’ exit from the initiative. We will continue to scrutinize and hold those banks accountable to meeting their own climate pledges.

+It might rain tomorrow in Phoenix, and if it does that will be the first precipitation in 156 days.

“We’re coming off the hottest year of record by far and the current drought conditions in Phoenix signal a convergence of natural, seasonal weather patterns with the climate crisis,” said Brenda Ekwurzel, director of scientific excellence at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “This is the desert but if it doesn’t rain it’s a real problem … it amplifies the chance of lethal heatwaves in the summer.”

Dangerous heatwaves are getting longer in Phoenix, and many of the daily high records broken in 2024 took place in September and October when temperatures continued to hit triple digits in Fahrenheit.