Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Repeating and evolving. We are learning together. You are welcome in. Your voice is needed. Your transformation of shock and grief into response and relief is needed. We’re all in this together. Humanity finally has a common challenge.
Nah, there’s nothing deathly or millenarian about the XR activists I know. They’re just ‘ordinary’, flawed, caring (middle-class) people like me, full of love and zest for life, and really, really scared about the deathly devastation that climate change threatens to wreak upon the world and the life they hold dear, unless governments act radically and immediately.
There are more possibilities than a marginally less-bad business-as-usual future. Effectively and justly achieving deep emissions cuts requires fundamentally changing the system, not merely modifying it or slapping its beneficiaries’ wrists. Real change requires state programs and regulations as well as trying out new forms of ownership and governance.
I don’t know where we are going – no one does really – and I don’t know what we will find ultimately in this unprecedented new world, but I do know something about the early days of the voyage and have thoughts and experiences to share.
Like most people, I hoped climate policy would improve, but years of infighting and adversarial politics have resulted in a dearth of climate action, where cooperation might well have yielded positive results.
One solution to this frustrating deadlock is to place the responsibility for climate policy at arm’s length from political actors. We need a Council for the Future, tasked with the long-term thinking that eludes so many of our elected representatives.
You’re here because you see the danger clear.
That’s great, but now where do we go from here?
I don’t know! There’s a lot of things to factor,
And I don’t have the answers; I’m an actor.
But yet our voices join with yours this hour
For even silly words speak truth to power.
So below I bring you a sceptic’s guide to XR scepticism, in a two-part post that’ll be continued next time. In this first one I focus on issues that strike me as requiring a genuine, substantive response and/or that I wrestled with myself in embracing the movement.
So yes, whether we do the right things or keep doing the wrong things, whether our current systems collapse or are carefully dismantled and rebuilt, even young Hoosiers leading modest lives in a small town in western Indiana will be personally affected by climate change. I am sorry, guys. And you still have to turn in your homework.
As I’ve shown in my latest book, creating the car-free city is possible, and urgently necessary, right now. We have all the technical and policy know-how. But we lack a vision of how it could be different, and the recognition that far from a sacrifice, it will bring mainly improvements, rather than constraints, to our lives. Such visions are necessary.
While new light-rail systems, subways, inter-urban commuter trains all have their place, simply giving buses preference on existing roads could improve urban quality of life while bringing carbon emissions down – long before the planning and approval process for new train lines is complete.
Just around a year ago, business sustainability consultant and climate organizer Eduardo Sasso published A Climate of Desire ー a book reconsidering the original roots of Christianity to more fully enable us to respond to the challenges of climate change.
The University of California’s investment strategy takes stakeholder views into account – such as student protesters at Berkeley, above, in 2014 – but its divestment program is primarily based on the belief that fossil fuel investments present a financial risk.
