“Many more people are beginning to grasp that the fight is not for some abstraction called “the earth.” We are fighting for our lives. And we don't have twelve years anymore; now we have only eleven. And soon it will be just ten.” —Naomi Klein, On Fire: The (Burning) Case for a Green New Deal, 2019
I made this drawing for a friend in California.
She regularly has nightmares about climate change and awakens in a sweat to visions of raging wildfires. She cries about climate change, in despair about protecting her 3-year-old daughter from its
consequences.
The dizzying pace of climate catastrophe has made it difficult
for me to write a piece to accompany my illustration. The
inferno California wildfire season in 2019 provided much of the impetus for my
image. Then I learned that California
has already had at least 1,506
wildfires in 2020. I had planned to write about the bushfires of Australia in the summer
of 2019, when the world gasped at the heart-wrenching scenes of kangaroos
fleeing the flames in successive bounds and koalas wrapped in bandages after
getting torched. Then a quick web search
revealed that the bushfires had continued into January 2020 (March in some
locales). There was so much smoke in
Sydney in December 2019 that their air
quality was 12 times the “hazardous” level.
Now, as the world's attention is focused on the Coronavirus pandemic,
2020 is on pace to be the warmest year in history and the western U.S. faces
megadrought, quite
possibly the worst in 1200 years.
Much of Africa deals with its worst
swarms of desert locusts in 70 years.
The locusts devour crops like wildfires do trees. They thrive in a warmer world. So do mosquitoes—the deadliest animals on Earth,
for their power to spread malaria, yellow fever, and other diseases.
And
if we don't take drastic action, this dizzying pace will dramatically accelerate. According to some models, the Earth’s climate
will warm by 4.3
degrees Celsius by 2100 under a business-as-usual scenario. Journalist David Wallace-Wells summarized
predictions by climate scientists for
this overheated future in his
book The Uninhabitable Earth. He
said, “In a four-degree warmer world, the earth's ecosystem will boil with so
many natural disasters that we will just start calling them “weather”:
out-of-control typhoons and tornadoes and floods and droughts, the planet assaulted regularly with
climate events that not so long
ago destroyed whole civilizations.”
Among Wallace-Wells's most frightening passages are those about heat
waves: “Since 1980, the planet has experienced a fiftyfold increase in the
number of dangerous heat waves; a bigger increase is to come.” In a four-degree warmer world, “the deadly
European heat wave of 2003, which killed as many as 2,000 people a day, will be
a normal summer.” Due to physical limits
to the human body’s tolerance to heat and humidity, parts of
South Asia and the Middle East are on course to becoming unlivable by the
time a child born today turns about 55.
I stayed home for the fiftieth Earth Day on April 22, 2020,
showing due diligence to the social distancing order from the governor of New
Mexico. It was hard to miss taking part in mass gatherings for this historic and momentous
day. Nonetheless, the legacy of the
first Earth Day in 1970—when 20 million people (including my mother) partook in
rallies and marches—lives on. Earth Day
co-founder Senator Gaylord Nelson's words still ring true: “Our
goal is not just an environment of clean air and water and scenic beauty. The objective is an environment of decency,
quality and mutual respect for all other human beings and all other living
creatures.”
My lofty hope is that the lessons of the Pandemic will
prompt us to passionately strive for such an environment. Our response to the Pandemic and the resultant Great Depression 2.0 has been
mixed. There have been plenty of
insanely rich individuals using this disaster to enhance
their wealth at the expense of everyone else, following the disaster
capitalism model articulated by
Naomi Klein. And yet, national and state
governments have made
proposals and taken actions for the common good, many unthinkable in the
pre-Covid-19 world.
The slowing of the world's economy due to Covid-19 has
caused an estimated 5%
drop in carbon emissions for 2020. This is nowhere even remotely close to the
drop needed to stave off the worst effects of climate change, and we
obviously do not want to attempt to save the climate by wrecking people's lives
and livelihoods. Generally, the Covid-19
lockdown has not had a major impact on humankind’s
long-term ecological footprint. This
indicates the magnitude of the task ahead of us. We need an ambitious Green New Deal to remake
our infrastructure and agriculture to work in harmony with the Earth. The law professor Jedediah Britton-Purdy
explains:
“Why
a politics of infrastructure?
Because the world makes hypocrites of us all. There are at least 2,000
tons of infrastructure for every human being—things like roads, buildings,
pipelines, and cables. We tap into it for everything we do: getting to work,
being with family, finding food, staying warm. As a species, we would hardly
exist without this technological exoskeleton. It determines our ecological
impact much more than individual choices can. I can choose my route through the
city, but the city itself determines my carbon emissions.”
Luckily, we have the opportunity to refashion our
infrastructure for sustainability. For
example, on the energy front, a
study by Finnish and German researchers concluded that the world can transition
to 100% renewable power by 2050 and create 36 million jobs in the process. We have the technological knowhow. The question is whether we have the political
will to implement it on a massive scale.
Given the combined crises of Great Depression 2.0 and the
climate emergency, a Green New Deal which includes a just transition should
be the issue that unites the American left.
In the past few years, the
left has begun to unite to face climate change. Much has changed in between the televised
Democratic primary debates for the 2016 election and those for the 2020
election. For 2016, when asked by a
debate moderator about the greatest threat facing humanity, Senator Bernie
Sanders was the only candidate who answered with climate change. When the same question was posed for 2020,
many of the other candidates agreed with Sanders. For 2016, climate change received fewer than
six minutes of air time. For 2020, the
candidates participated in a seven-hour climate town hall, a two-day climate
forum hosted by MSNBC, and a Weather Channel special. The international environmental group Greenpeace
analyzed the climate action plans of the 2020 candidates and awarded letter
grades. Senator
Sanders scored highest with an A, but even Vice President Joe Biden
eventually earned a B+. (Greenpeace
awarded a D- to the climate plan that Biden had in April 2019. After popular news media trumpeted this low
score, Biden
quickly replaced his initial plan with a more ambitious one.)
Throughout all this, the Republican party led by President
Donald Trump continues to deny that anthropogenic climate change is real—an
unscientific position on par with saying that the Earth is flat or that viruses
don't exist. The general election is on November 2, 2020. If we want to prevent the horrific
predictions of climate science from coming true, we must vote the Republicans
out. Then use every tool in the toolbox
to pressure Democrats to deliver a massive Green New Deal. When I volunteer
to get out the vote, I will be thinking of my friend's daughter, and all
the children I know.
