It’s a common question among climate change activists: what will it take? What will it take to force our society to finally act on the planet-changing scale that a planetary crisis demands? There is a single, definite answer. It is not an easy one to face, because at first glance it seems to imply despair. It doesn’t. The answer is that it will take the Event: a climate-induced crisis so devastating that any action short of a massive, society-wide response is unthinkable, for political leaders and everyone else. The science tells us the Event is coming, not if but when. Climate activists in New Mexico and around the world need to anticipate what it will look like, and what they will do when it comes. This counsel is not one of despair. The Event is the only possible catalyst for the only course of action that has a chance to work.
Such talk might seem unjustified, given recent events that seem to herald progress on a number of climate policy fronts. In June President Obama delivered what many activists saw as a transformative speech on climate change. At White House direction, the Environmental Protection Agency is preparing the most sweeping federal climate initiatives in U.S. history, regulating greenhouse missions on new and existing electric power plants. The President has appeared to question the wisdom of the Keystone XL pipeline. These moves might well give the United States leverage in climate talks with China, which has initiated a cap and trade system to limit carbon emissions. The G-20 nations have agreed in principle to begin phasing out hydroflourocarbons, one of the most potent categories of greenhouse gas. Meanwhile, around the world, renewable energy markets are taking off.
All of these movements are encouraging. But they don’t change the basic physical dynamics on land, sea, and air. The global mega-machinery of human industry still vents greenhouse gasses on a planet-altering scale every year, inexorably raising rather than lowering the amount of those gasses in the atmosphere, despite all the recent progress. Even if the carbon limits and renewable energy expansion now emerging in the United States and elsewhere should continue, they’re not big enough to begin slowing and reversing the planetary buildup of greenhouse gas levels in time. The only way to reverse that buildup is to launch immediate, truly massive emission cuts across global energy, transportation, land use, and manufacturing sectors. This means, according to a recent article in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, that the amount of annual emissions across the entire planet has to begin dropping by ten percent or more per year, by 2020 at the latest. This is extremely unlikely. EPA carbon limits on power plants will not go into effect until 2016 at the earliest, and no one in the agency, the White House, or Congress has shown any inclination for cuts ambitious enough to reverse the overall growth in U.S. carbon output within four years after that and begin reductions of ten percent or more per year. A recent report from the Center for American Progress, moreover, suggests that surging U.S. natural gas production might well sabotage any efforts for early, massive carbon reduction. Only wholesale, planet-wide cuts beginning in this decade stand any chance of making a difference.
Reductions on that scale appear impossible at the moment. Government and global corporations have shown no sign of massive, rapid cuts in fossil fuel use with steep, planetary drop-offs of ten percent or more per year. Populations addicted to those fuels show virtually no signs of pushing for reductions on that scale. A few thousand emails to Congress calling for climate action mean nothing compared to trillions of purchases of fossil fuel-dependent goods and services every day. Thus, the limited climate initiatives now underway, such as new EPA regulations or new state support for renewable energy, are at the outermost limit of political possibility. Anything more is simply not going to happen. For now.
The likely consequences of this trajectory have drawn increasing attention, even beyond the environmental community. A report from the World Bank, for example, warns that current carbon emissions trends threaten the long-term continuation of global economic growth. Corporations are taking notice, with the business consultant network PricewaterhouseCoopers warning firms to begin preparing for extreme weather disasters as global temperatures surge far beyond an increase of two degrees Celsius over preindustrial levels. Military and intelligence assessments anticipate whole countries at risk of collapse by 2030 from famine, drought, sea level rise, and unprecedented migration. The commander of U.S. military forces in the Pacific recently stated that the Pentagon is coordinating with counterparts across the region on military exercises and contingency planning for military crises driven by climate-induced catastrophes. New York’s governor speaks of massive new infrastructure projects after the flooding of Superstorm Sandy, to prepare for hundred year storms every other year.
The scientific data bears him out. A recent report from the global insurance firm Munich Re found that North America since 1980 has suffered more property damage and deaths from extreme weather than any other continent, with these trends expected to worsen as climate change unfolds. A likely cause of the escalating damage to North America will likely be dramatic superheating above the Arctic Circle, which drives fluctuations in the jet stream capable of unleashing extreme storms across the continental United States. Meanwhile, the broiling Arctic is putting the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets at risk of rapid breakup in this century, according to new research in the journal Nature Geoscience, with consequent two-meters or more of sea level rise possibly occurring in decades rather than centuries. Heat waves, drought, and wildfires in North America are projected to increase dramatically by mid-century, far beyond the already alarming droughts of recent years. Multiple forecasts now project that global food and water shortages will become acute in the 2020s and 30s as savage drought and unprecedented storms envelop the surface of the planet. All of these trends will converge before 2040, assuming the human species fails to begin sufficient reductions in global carbon emissions before the current decade is out.
These assessments help raise awareness, but they aren’t enough, because they typically miss the central, most inconvenient truth. They paint in general trends, emerging today but inflicting the real damage in a future defined only by charts and graphs, unconnected to our own personal hopes for the future. Americans may not plan well for the future. They may lose themselves in the sensual consumer narcotics of the present. But they still speak of hope and the dream of being happy someday. Someday is a real place, in which most of us now living will grow up, live, age, and die. We will do these things in the very real world of the 2020s and 30s, the time in which the climate data tells us the great changes in the earth and sky will accelerate, and converge. Scientific jargon, political platitudes and bloodless policy wonkery fail utterly to convey what that future will be like. And so they can’t help us truly prepare.
We need something else. To see what it might look like requires a story of things that have yet to happen, but might. It goes something like this.
The summer of 2030 was the worst yet. Atlanta, Georgia registered temperatures over 100 degrees Fahrenheit for 92 straight days. In Omaha, Nebraska the number was 95, and in Phoenix, Arizona, 184. Extreme temperatures crashed overstressed electrical transmission systems on multiple occasions, culminating in the great blackout of August 7 that left 120 million people from New York City to Washington DC without power for a week or more. Adding to the misery, food prices continued their upward spiral, as drought hammered farmland in the Midwest and around the world. In Dayton, Ohio, attempted looting of a supermarket erupted into a gun battle that killed 14 people. In Denver, hydrologists read the latest gauge data from local reservoirs, dwindling as water sources along the Colorado River sank toward extinction, hundreds of miles away. Despite water rationing enforced by aerial drones and blanket cyber-surveillance of homes and businesses, Denver would run completely out of water within a year. The governor of Colorado, secretly, ordered his staff to begin planning an evacuation.
Nationwide, business failures crept upward as food prices, failing infrastructure, water rationing, and two decades of accumulating damage from wildfires, hurricanes, flooding, and windstorms eroded the bottom line to the breaking point. Wall Street took notice. By September the worsening decline in employment and consumer spending drove the Dow into a new wave of selling, made worse by new layoffs and revenue declines in the insurance industry. Years of extreme weather had driven insurance firms to the brink, despite continuing government bailouts.
Then it got worse. On October 2 the heads of the U.S. National Science Foundation and the Chinese Academy of Sciences held a secret conference call with the President of the United States, the President of China, and the other leaders of the world’s largest economic powers. The scientists informed the virtual summit that the accelerating erosion of the Greenland ice sheet in recent months had become disintegration, a phase transition heralding rapid collapse of the ice into the ocean. Global sea level rise from the collapse would approach one foot in the next ten years, accelerating to almost half a meter per decade by 2070 – on top of the already expected rise prior to the Greenland event. Every coastal city in the world would be inundated.
The news went public on October 9, and the global insurance giant Lloyd’s of London declared bankruptcy four days later. Global markets lost a quarter of their value within hours. The President of the United States ordered combat troops into the streets of major American cities. Viral Internet reports screamed of plans to suspend the Constitution.
When the President stood before a joint session of Congress on October 14, the nation held its breath. The first words she spoke were: this is not our end. This is not the fall of night. The things happening now, and the things that we must now do, are the reason our nation was born. Our destiny as a people, since our beginning. Thomas Paine spoke of it, at the creation. He said that we have it in our power to make the world over again. And now we will.
The above scenario is not prediction. It’s imagination, open to question and quibbling. The Greenland ice sheet collapse, in particular, is highly speculative, based on our current understanding. But in the last decade we have seen an acceleration of climate impacts that no one expected. Given the likely continued increase of carbon in the atmosphere, we have every reason to expect that the physical consequences will continue to worsen. And events once inconceivable will become possible. Not in a vague someday. In this lifetime. Soon.
Climate activists instinctively get this, in most cases. Public officials and business leaders often don’t, even if they reject Limbaugh-style denial. They continue to see only charts and graphs. Worrisome, but always something that can be put off for one more day. Activists are reluctant to push them, for fear of being labeled doomsayers, unschooled in political realities. So by and large activists play today’s political game, asking only for a little. One more little state regulatory incentive for solar panels here, a deal to trim coal emissions there. One New Mexico environmental lawyer I spoke to called it, “Moving the ball forward.” But in private he also realizes it’s not enough, given the scale of what’s happening to the planet. “We’re almost out of time,” he told me.
Environmental activists echo this sentiment repeatedly – in private. The New Mexico environmental lawyer speaks discretely of escalating extreme weather events as a possible political tipping point to finally galvanize sweeping federal climate action. But, he assumes, it’s not something we can count on or integrate into present day action. A water policy expert in Colorado told me he expects a crisis on the Colorado River sometime in the next fifteen years, as drought triggers draconian water supply cutbacks to expanding cities like Denver. I showed him a version of the 2030 crisis scenario above, anticipating the disappearance of Denver’s water supplies. I asked: is it plausible? With a few quibbles, yes, he replied. In New Mexico, a scenario assembled by a committee of climate and water experts anticipated a massive, wind-and-drought-driven wildfire that burned much of the city of Albuquerque to the ground.
It’s not just the environmentalists who talk this way. At an oil and gas industry conference in Denver last year, a veteran petroleum engineer told me of watching a whole town in Colorado nearly run out of water during a recent drought. That’s the future, he said. I asked him: so you think climate change is happening, and humans are causing it? Absolutely, he said. Not a single industry representative I spoke to at the conference spouted the standard climate denial talking points. Everyone spoke of the undeniable changes on the ground – heat, drought, storms, fire. And they spoke of the industry positioning itself for the reckoning. In the burning American West, for example, they want to make sure that oil and gas corporations get whatever water is left.
All of this is anecdotal, lacking systematic polling of energy and climate experts as support. But it seems reasonable to infer a growing sense among those experts, as well as business, government, and the military more generally, that a crisis is coming. But no one will talk it about publicly. And no one thinks of the oncoming emergency systematically, as a single, defining event on its way within a finite time. Instead the climate crisis remains a vague set of future trends and possibilities.
It’s time to change this mindset. It’s time to talk about climate change not as piecemeal, incremental adjustment to emerging, smeared out trends but as emergency preparation for a single, defining, catastrophic event that will arrive sometime in the 2020s or 30s. Individual climate related events are happening now, to be sure, in an accelerating spiral of destruction (Superstorm Sandy, the burning of Colorado Springs). But in every physical system in nature, when a series of seemingly isolated occurrences are driven by a single, underlying force, they inevitably escalate in time to a dramatic crescendo, unless the underlying force is removed. Temperature and pressure changes, for example, are the forces that become a thunderstorm. Wind and water erosion are the forces that become the collapse of a mountainside. Climate is no different. Global temperature rise is the underlying force, driven by greenhouse gas increases. They will reach a tipping point, the data implies. Soon.
Climate policy, then, must become more than adjustment to accumulating, individual events. It must prepare for the culmination of the force driving the events. That culmination will be the functional equivalent of an asteroid impact no later than a date certain, in this case 2040 at the latest. We know it’s coming, and roughly when, and what the possible range of physical consequences will be, just as we would for a planet-rending celestial collision, a limited nuclear exchange, or an incoming category five hurricane. At the moment of impact, climate change won’t be a trend. It will be an event. And all the data tell us the event will happen not only in impoverished countries far away but on the home soil of the United States.
Federal, state, and local agencies, along with many private engineering and consulting firms, have abundant experience planning for anticipated catastrophes over specific time horizons. They know how to identify the resources that will need to be mobilized when a hurricane, an earthquake, or a nuclear strike hits. Disaster preparation experts know to design plans for mobilizing resources when the time comes. Climate change should be no different. American institutions need to treat climate policy as preparation for an oncoming national disaster.
Talking about climate change this way would mean an entirely different approach to climate advocacy in government and business. Today’s push for incremental gains in energy efficiency, renewables, ecosystem preservation, and other climate salvage measures would continue, wherever the gridlocked, money soaked status quo of American politics would permit. But in the new disaster preparation paradigm, the environmental movement would make incremental policy advocacy part of a larger purpose: constructing a network of allies in government and business specifically dedicated to preparing for the coming planetary storm. Environmental organizations would exploit policy advocacy efforts to systematically identify individuals who “get it,” who have indicated they understand the scale and urgency of what’s coming even if they believe current politics preclude the necessary response. Recruiting efforts would then bring these individuals into a private, multi-disciplinary, nationwide network of influential elites. Insurance executives, venture capitalists, charitable foundation managers, think tank analysts, current and former military officers, federal and state environmental administrators, members of Congress and stage legislatures, energy technology entrepreneurs, and more.
At regular conferences and in ongoing virtual communication, this network would function as a cohesive whole, toward a single end: laying the groundwork for America’s future response to a climate-triggered national emergency. The network would draw up detailed assessments of the most likely scenarios, based on the latest science. The scenarios would map out necessary responses to specific climate events such as: a national deep freeze caused by destabilization of the jet stream; a nationwide shortage of food and water supplies; major storm damage to economic choke points such as New York City’s financial district and critical energy distribution centers in the South; an extreme national heat wave inflicting electrical failures or an overloaded healthcare system; the destruction of major metropolitan areas by tornado, hurricane, or wind-driven firestorm; a pandemic caused by ecological shifts in disease vectors; and, unlikely though potentially the most devastating event of all, an unexpected major acceleration in sea level rise triggered by collapse of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice sheets.
Anticipating the time that one or more of these scenarios began to unfold, the climate emergency network would prepare itself to act. If all goes well, by the time the day for action arrives the network will have assembled funding and influence to move swiftly amidst a sense of national panic and foreboding analogous to the days after December 7, 1941 and September 11, 2001. Public officials previously distracted by other priorities will be in need of ready-made, off-the-shelf plans for an unprecedented national response. These plans, of necessity, will deal not only with climate per se but with the political and economic forces that obstructed any significant climate action prior to the moment of national emergency. The model would be Colin Powell’s message to Pakistan in the aftermath of September 11: abandon your obstructionism and cooperate, or you will have no place in the new world. So it will be as the climate emergency unfolds. On the fateful day, a pre-positioned national network in business and government will deploy its influence to ensure the cooperation of any remaining anti-climate factions in American business, finance, and politics.
Is this strategy too negative, too rooted in doom saying? No. Scientific data supports all the scenarios discussed here, and at least some influential individuals at the state and national level are willing to discuss contingency preparations. It wouldn’t require an unusual amount of political will to begin holding annual conferences and ongoing communication, with the aim of quietly, systematically preparing the necessary policy and legal documents. Such activity will be far less demanding than, say, getting a national cap-and-trade bill through Congress in the current political environment. Behind the scenes assembly of a cohesive national policy network would be a feasible extension of normal fundraising and advocacy efforts in the environmental community.
Those efforts, it might be argued, risk betting too much on a sharply demarcated catastrophe that might not arrive. What if climate events continue, as they do today, to manifest as a worrisome but slowly spreading haze of background events, rather than building to a single, culminating storm? What if climate change continues to look more like the slow boiling of the frog, instead of chucking the frog into a fire? The short answer is that this isn’t going to happen. The models and field data tell us that climate systems will steadily, inexorably cross points of no return if planetary heat rises high enough. It’s not if but when. We can’t predict the when, exactly, down to the exact year that precise events will unfold. But we now have enough scientific knowledge to know, beyond reasonable doubt, that the odds favor a range of specific catastrophes occurring before 2040. The odds may play out in our favor on one of these scenarios. Maybe more. It’s inconceivable that our luck will hold for all of them.
The most compelling argument against climate policy as disaster preparation is that such an approach delays meaningful action until it’s too late. In this view, a focus on preparation for a defining national catastrophe means discarding any efforts to address climate change in the present. This view is misplaced. The approach I’ve outlined here presumes that current advocacy for greenhouse gas limits and other climate change policies would continue. But the complimentary disaster preparation policy track would recognize that climate action beyond modest, incremental steps, like the upcoming EPA regulation of power plants, is politically impossible – and will remain so until physical changes in the Earth deliver a massive, catastrophic shock to governments, corporations, markets, and military establishments around the planet. Such a shock is literally the only thing that will prompt the massive response necessary to truly make a difference in responding to the devastating climate change now underway. Paul Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace and now a sustainability consultant, makes exactly this point in his recent book The Great Disruption. Instead of denying this reality, Gilding argues, environmental advocates need to face it, doing what they can in the present while preparing for the future bearing down on us, when the former things will pass away.
Let us not talk falsely now, for the hour is getting late.
(Photo credits: Hurricane by Nasa's Earth Observatory; Flooding by U.S. Geological Survey; Forest fire by Ervins Strauhmanis.)
September 23, 2013