The UN has just released yet another report on where we are at in fighting climate change – and the news isn’t great. In 2015, in Paris, most of the countries of the world agreed to a target of a maximum of 1.5 degrees of global warming. This was based on years of research, and the pleas of a number of island and low-lying countries which argued that anything above 1.5 degrees would be a death sentence for them.
Eight years later, we are at about 1.1 degrees of warming above pre-industrial levels, and greenhouse gas emissions have gone up and up and up.
But hope is far from lost.
For one thing, progress is being made. New technologies, the number of people making an effort to modify their own emissions, and systemic thinking across every aspect of our civilization, from transport to farming, from buildings to the role nature plays in absorbing carbon, should eventually make a difference. With a massive effort, the UN argues, we could still stay below 1.5 degrees – if we stop pumping fossil fuels out of the ground and invest in carbon capture, anyway.
And if we don’t manage that target, well, every tenth of a degree of warming still matters. As Mark Lynas lays out in his book Six Degrees, every increment affects how much ice will melt, and thus how far sea levels will rise, and it also affects the total energy of the earth’s weather systems – more heat equals more energy, equals bigger storms, equals bigger and more frequent extreme events like heat waves and hurricanes.
So there would be an enormous difference between 1.5 degrees and 2 degrees, for example. Just think about the impacts we’ve seen at just 1.1 degree of warming – record breaking fires, floods and drought across the entire world.
Even if we do blow past the 1.5-degree goal, then, we have to continue to hope and work toward not letting it go higher – and eventually even bringing it back down again. Though obviously that will probably be tragically too late for places like Kiribati, and likely for many of our current biospheres and the creatures which live there.
A Storm of Emotions
When people first start paying attention to what’s going on they often feel enormous anger that the world didn’t act fifty years ago, when scientists began sounding the warnings about carbon dioxide and its effects on global temperature. If we’d started acting then, we’d be laughing, and many lives would have been saved. But we didn’t.
Just as often, people feel terrible grief, over the natural world so under siege, and the innocent people suffering.
I’ve certainly felt, and still feel, both of those emotions, sometimes almost unbearably.
I’m not sure, though, that either emotion is worth indulging. Anger at people of the past, who had less reason to trust the science of the time than we do, seems pointless. Like many of us, they believed and hoped that solutions would be found which wouldn’t inconvenience them. Democratic leaders had other concerns that people cared about more – like education, poverty, and conflict.
And grief…well, that’s tougher for me. But one thing that helps me is to try to grasp Earth’s long history of life. I recently found out that an ancestor of dragonflies was around a million years before the dinosaurs. Five mass global extinctions later, there are still dragonflies enchanting the summer. The few tens of thousands of years in which Earth has hosted human beings almost seem insignificant against the vast span of millennia in which plants, fish, insects and reptiles have dominated. Over and over again, life has found a way. Not the life we are used to. Not the creatures we love now. But life.
A Transition Generation
So those thoughts keep me sane, but given I have them, why do I work so hard on my local eco group? I’m only a little, ordinary person and I don’t see myself as a world changer or eco-warrior. But I do believe that everyone alive now is part of a crucial and important transition generation. We will all see huge and rapid changes in the way we live – some caused by climate change, some caused by the attempts to prevent it. Some of us will choose to embrace it – to be part of the solution in any ways we can. Others are more resistant to change – but change will come for them as well, one way or another.
In the shorter term, i.e. the next few decades, it seems very likely that many of the changes we will see will be painful. We may lose much more of our native wildlife. Our choice of diet may become limited: plants like coffee and chocolate are at high risk from climate change, and there may be crop failures of staple foods like wheat and rice. And some of what we see as our freedoms and privileges may be curtailed.
For many, that seems like the hardest loss to take. Or maybe it’s just the most immediate one?
Here in Cambridge, and across the UK, for example, there has been outrage over proposed congestion charges, or sustainable travel zones, which some have mixed up with the idea of 15-minute towns to claim that “they” want to force everyone to stay in their own neighbourhoods. And in fact schemes in cities like Canterbury are proposing to charge car drivers every time they cross a sector boundary, that is, move from one neighbourhood to another. The idea is to make car driving so expensive that people are forced to use public (or active) transport, rather like France’s recent 3 year ban on short haul flights.
People don’t like being forced, and we can argue the merits of such a scheme. But let’s at least keep our facts straight - the idea of 15-minute towns is not always or even commonly connected to the idea of charging zones. The 15-minute towns idea involves planning communities to make it easy for people find everything they need within 15 minutes of their home. They can walk, or cycle, or take a bus, and it will be quick and easy to visit the doctor, pharmacy, school, or shops.
People who have experienced this kind of modern planning approach have found it improves their lives enormously. And of course, in cases where this is combined with road charging, they can still leave their neighbourhoods and go farther in a car…it just isn’t free anymore. Just as fossil fuel companies have not had to pay for the damage their product has caused, just as all forms of production have viewed the services which nature provides (water, air, plants, minerals, pollinators) as external to their business, and therefore outside of any need for consideration, we as individuals have taken our behaviour for granted. We pay (through our taxes) for our solid waste to be disposed of, but we have felt we have the right to emit greenhouse gases for free.
So What’s My Job? Or Yours?
Here’s what I see my job, as an ordinary citizen, to be. I need to keep informed of the changes going on around me. I need to think hard about what kind of future I’d like to see for the generations to come and for the natural world. I do need to question and be involved in the changes brought by society in its attempts to fix things (or otherwise!), but always in the context of that desired future – which for me is one in which we do keep warming to 1.5 degrees or less and we foster and protect nature. I need to do as much as I can to reduce emissions and consumption I have control or influence over. And I need to prepare for the environmental changes that are now inevitable, and protect the natural world where I can.
It's quite a list. And there’s one final thought. I can’t do any of this alone. I rely on smarter people to carry out research and provide the information I need. I rely on local authorities and organisations to also keep informed, answer my questions, and use their powers to support a positive transition. I rely on my community to do all the things communities do that will get us through this – from sharing goods, services and skills; to volunteering at sports clubs and school fetes and food banks and litter picks; to supporting each other when times get tough.
It's my job to be part of that. Just like air isn’t actually free, neither is community. In creating the future, we all have a part to play.