STUCK
Our politics is in a rut, and it will take new energy to climb out.
Bill McKibben
May 27, 2022
In the mountains of the northeast, where I’ve spent my life, we have a season in between winter and spring—mud season, it’s called, when snowmelt and rain can turn the region’s dirt roads into quags and mires from which escape is difficult. (And sometimes impossible, with nearly fatal consequences). Driving down a mud season road, the ruts just keep getting deeper—and either you reach a patch of dry ground and escape, or you sink into the muck till at some point your tires start to spin or the undercarriage of your car hangs up. At which point you need a friend with a tow chain and a truck.
The worst parts of the Uvalde and Buffalo massacres, obviously, were the massacres: dozens dead, families broken, survivors scarred forever. But there was also the secondary horror that, as usual, nothing happened in response. Unlike a long list of other countries that dramatically tightened their gun laws after mass shootings, our politicians lapsed quickly into their well-worn grooves: it’s a mental health problem, perhaps we should only have one door at schools, let’s arm teachers. Maybe Joe Manchin is right when he says “this time it feels different” and that a bipartisan group of Senators will deliver gun legislation. But since that same Senator Manchin said he would not do anything to override the Senate’s filibuster rules, color me skeptical. (The filibuster, he said memorably, was the “only thing that prevents us from total insanity.” Okay.)
This type of lather-rinse-repeat cycle is also familiar to those of us working on the climate crisis, where we’re also deep in a policy rut. At this point, each new forest fire or heatwave produces a reliable series of quotes about how we must change and a reliable lack of action from…anyone. In fact, we’re clearly getting farther from serious change: earlier today the Times had an important piece on the ways that the financial industry is backtracking from earlier promises to work on climate change. Blackrock is the biggest beast in the planet’s financial jungle, and it may have the smallest spine: after protests from officials in Texas and West Virginia, it said it would support fewer shareholder proposals on climate going forward. “We are perhaps the world’s largest investor in fossil fuel companies, and, as a long-term investor in these companies, we want to see these companies succeed and prosper,” the company wrote Texas regulators in a particularly craven example of capitulation; meanwhile, banking giant HSBC wouldn’t even say whether they’d suspended a key executive who’d memorably explained why the bank continued to fund the fossil fuel industry: “Who cares if Miami is six meters underwater in 100 years?” Who indeed?
Our country has fallen into a rut where we expect stalemate and inaction. It’s not that we lack popular support: huge majorities favor climate action and gun regulation. It’s not that we lack technology: renewable energy is now so cheap that as a new study pointed out this week adopting it en masse would save our economies trillions. But each time we get stalemate and inaction the rut deepens—people become more hopeless and cynical. If you’re the NRA or Exxon, that’s the best possible outcome: you want the status quo to drag on as long as possible. A mass shooting or an enormous forest fire is a challenge, but if you make it through the initial outcry you’ve strengthened your hand. If you hate the idea of government, then government inaction proves your point.
This means it’s up to the rest of us to figure out how to jump our society out of those ruts. It requires organizing, and obviously we’ve seen lots of it: after the Parkland shootings there was a huge upsurge in (mostly youthful) protest about gn policy; it was soon echoed by the Greta-inspired youth uprising over climate. These efforts were powerful—for a year or two, corporations actually made promises about carbon. But they weren’t powerful enough. So either we give up, or we organize to make them bigger.
I don’t know precisely what that looks like with gun control: my sense is that millions of Americans keeping their kids out of fourth grade for a week might start to put real pressure on the system, but of course, that’s hard to organize: it disrupts daily life, and takes a little of the commitment that, say, powered the Montgomery bus boycott.
I don’t know for sure on climate change, either. My suspicion is that the banking and financial system is the weak point. If supposedly engaged corporations like Google and Apple would stand up to their bankers and demand they stop lending to Big Oil, and if normal citizens were protesting regularly inside and outside many of the 30,000 bank branches across the country—well, that pressure might produce a reaction. Or not—there’s only one way to find out, and we’re doing our best at Third Act.
But we need our leaders to be willing to dare as well. Instead of just repeating their bromides about the horror of it all, do something unexpected. At the moment, thanks to Joe Manchin, the Biden administration has little to show for its climate advocacy. It continues on with a business-more-or-less-as-usual approach: at Davos this week Biden’s climate envoy John Kerry was touting a new “buyer’s club” where big companies would buy more climate-friendly products. Ford pledged that by 2030 it would get…ten percent of its aluminum from low-carbon producers. That’s spinning the wheels.
Say, instead, the Biden crew really wanted to shake things up. They could, for instance, embrace the lawsuit from 21 young plaintiffs that demands climate action from the federal government. It’s been working its way through the federal judiciary for years—the Obama administration opposed it, and the Trump administration, predictably, did everything it could to squash the lawsuit. So far Biden’s DOJ has followed their lead. “There was zero shift when Biden took office, zero shift from the Trump administration,” the plaintiff’s lead lawyer told reporter Julia Rock. But why? Why not endorse the plaintiff’s contention that youth deserve a working climate system, and enter into negotiations to make it happen? It would, at the very least, put a new set of variables into play.
In the end, however, it’s not sensible to count on congresses or courts, CEOs or commanders-in-chief. We activists and organizers have to push in ways that really challenge the status quo, making full use of the panoply of tools that nonviolence provides. Instead, movements too often settle into an uneasy stasis of their own, repeating old actions even as they make at best marginal gains. If we want to pull our society out of its rut, we need to be the ones with the tow chain and the (electric) F-150 pickup. I’m not sure it’s doable—vested interest and inertia have created a truly formidable quicksand. But I know we better try, and in new ways.
More news from around the world of climate and energy:
+The wonderful Svitlana Romanko, writing from besieged Ukraine, reminds us that Putin’s invasion offers us a real chance for change:
Because I live on the front line, I see clearly that this is a decisive point in modern history. We can make the wrong turn back to fossil-fueled colonialism. Or we can properly start the green transition. The fight for Ukraine’s freedom can lead us to what science has told us we must do: stop burning coal, oil, and gas right now.
+An important new series of calculations show just how much the world’s pension funds stand to lose if we follow science and keep coal, gas, and oil in the ground:
The researchers estimated that existing oil and gas projects worth $1.4tn (£1.1tn) would lose their value if the world moved decisively to cut carbon emissions and limit global heating to 2C. By tracking many thousands of projects through 1.8m companies to their ultimate owners, the team found most of the losses would be borne by individual people through their pensions, investment funds and share holdings.
The analysis also found that financial institutions have $681bn of these potentially worthless assets on their balance sheets, more than the estimated $250-500bn of mispriced sub-prime housing assets that triggered the 2007-08 financial crisis.
+Iraq, ranked as one of the five countries on earth most vulnerable to climate change, is dealing with horrific sandstorms—and as the desert continues to dry out and heat up, experts say that by 2050 300 days a year could be marked by the apocalyptic scenes. The dauntless writer Alan Weisman adds some reflections of his own from the once Fertile Crescent. And here’s a truly fine diary on what it’s like to live through the killer heat waves afflicting the Indian subcontinent:
4 p.m. Temperature: 41°C | Feels Like: 43°C
Madhu is frustrated. The 62-year-old grandmother just received news that government tankers meant to deliver water to her slum in southwestern Delhi have been canceled. The settlement hasn’t been recognized by the authorities, and as a consequence there’s no tap water available. “The heat has left us to the mercy of the water mafia,” she says, referring to private dealers who charge between 100 rupees ($1.29) and 200 rupees per 20-liter jerrycan. Today’s delay means Madhu and her neighbors will have to spend hours standing in long lines the next day to secure extra water. It also means lost work hours and forcing children to skip school to make sure their families get enough to drink.
+A bright spot: Exxon failed once again in its efforts to stop a Massachusetts lawsuit attacking its long record of climate lies. With the Supreme Court controlled by radical reactionaries, state constitutions may afford the best chance of actually holding climate criminals accountable.
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