I Believe

I wrote this for the Burlington Free Press right before I went to the Copenhagen climate talks in December 2009, and again, forgot to post it. Catching up finally...

"Not only is another world possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing."

- Arundhati Roy

As a climate activist, someone who spends the bulk of her time trying to awaken the community to the realities of climate change and peak oil and enliven people to do something about it, it’s very easy to focus on where we’ve gone wrong. It’s almost effortless to bemoan the amount of destruction we humans have heaped upon the planet. I have no problem alternating between fear, despair, and rage when I contemplate how many climate tipping points we’ve crossed and how close we are to losing the planet’s ability to support life and civilization as we know it. It’s so easy to feel both flabbergasted and powerless in the face of our apparent lack of passionate, gung-ho readiness to do something about it.

Despite the remarkable spectacle of people in 181 countries creating 5200 events for 350.org’s first international day of climate action on October 24, 2009 [note: and an even bigger turnout on October, 10, 2010], despite the pole-to-pole call for strong action and bold leadership on the climate crisis, I am deeply influenced by the doubt most experts express at the ability of the delegates at this December’s international climate conference in Copenhagen to walk away from the table with a solid, science-based, toothy climate treaty in hand.

I want more than anything to believe we are capable of addressing the climate crisis, and in fact I do believe more than anything that we’re capable of it. I’m just not so sure we’re willing to take it on. Why? Because the reality of addressing the problem involves profoundly scaling back from the lives we’re currently leading.

We are a civilization which has built its foundations upon fossil fuels. We use them to get us to the corner store and we use them to get us into orbit. We use oil to make everything - from asphalt to aspirin, deodorant to duct tape, vitamins to volleyballs. We use fossil fuels to build our homes as well as light and power and heat them. Oil is the mainstay of commercial agriculture’s pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers, and antibiotics – and oil drives all the machinery and equipment used to grow, harvest, process, and distribute our food.

The reality we’re facing is that not only does all this industrial and agricultural activity pour carbon dioxide and a host of other greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and heat up the planet – which is bad enough – but we’re also facing the fact that we have maximized global oil production. This is known as Peak Oil. We’re not running out per se, but oil is getting harder to find and more expensive to produce. Which means that all the elements of our society which have been based on cheap oil and the massive amounts of energy contained therein are going to get much more expensive as well – prohibitive to the smooth running of the global economy as it’s currently structured. Or, as Dr. Fatih Birol, chief economist with the International Energy Administration, recently stated: “We must leave oil before it leaves us.”

But here’s the thing: I don’t blame us. We may have wreaked incredible havoc on the planet, but we didn't mean to. In fact, I’m in awe at the depth and breadth of humanity's creativity and ingenuity. We found a mess of black sludgy stuff in the ground, and look what we’ve done with it! In fact, I look at what humanity has created during the vast scope of our history, both pre-oil and during this little energy boom, and I’m blown away. We've made paintings on grains of rice and built rockets to the moon. We've made cathedrals and tinker toys and spandex and haute cuisine and rock and roll and the Hubble telescope and iPhones and sneakers and giant Buddhas and pyramids and mummies and illuminated manuscripts and samurai swords. We built the towers of the World Trade Center and then tightrope-walked between them. We research and dissect and explore and learn and dance.

So, what do I believe? I believe that if we can harness ourselves, we can clean up the mess we've made – even now, at the 11th hour. More than clean it up, I believe we can re-make the world with a constructive power that rivals and even surpasses our destructive power. I believe that even in a carbon-constrained world, we can have remarkable lives of novelty and meaning and humor and adventure and purpose and fun and love. I believe that in 20 or 50 or 100 years things probably won’t look anything like they do now, and that the shocks to our collective system and the changes to our way of life will be challenging to absorb at first. But I also believe that we are incredibly courageous, infinitely creative, and supremely adaptable, and I believe it is our moral responsibility to step up to this task placed upon us. It’s up to us. There is nobody else.

I also believe that no matter what happens, there’s meaning and value in taking action, in being part of this chapter of humanity’s story. Because in all likelihood, something or someone will survive. And whatever the conditions of their life are, whoever they are, I would want them to know that someone tried to hold things together on their behalf. I would want them to know that someone was thinking of them, living there, farther on down the road. I would want them to know that someone, whoever they were, didn’t give up.

Willing and Able

I just had this essay published on the Coalitions of the Willing's blog. Feels good to finally get my opinion aired in public. Now on to Cop16!

If you look at the science about what is happening on earth and aren’t pessimistic, you don’t understand the data. But if you meet the people who are working to restore this earth and the lives of the poor, and you aren’t optimistic, you haven’t got a pulse.

- Paul Hawken

I have been meaning to come out of the closet for a while now, and confess that I took a very different view of what happened during the UN climate talks in Copenhagen than what has become the oft-repeated mainstream story of unmitigated failure.

I spent the bulk of my time in Copenhagen not watching the UN negotiations at the Bella Center (though giant kudos to all the activists – in particular the folks from Climate Justice Fast – who permanently lodged themselves there), but at Klimaforum.

For those of you who missed it, Klimaforum was a gathering of over 7000 people from global civil society – activists, artists, educators, farmers, freelance journalists – all coming together to talk about climate change, peak oil, and environmental justice.

It felt as if the whole world was there. I met Kenyan tree-planters and Ecuadoran Indians and Navajo social workers and Lapland Elk herders and Tibetan liberation activists. I met a Swiss shaman with a 20-foot alphorn, a Brazilian tour guide in body paint and a leopard print bikini, a handful of Danish Hare Krishnas, and not one, but two Santa Clauses.

Klimaforum had over 300 scheduled events including talks on topics ranging from preventing rainforest destruction to dismantling industrial agriculture. There were workshops on permaculture, canceling Third World debt, and Transition Towns. There were youth activist trainings, spiritual rituals honoring the climate crisis, networking rooms. There was art, music, and theater. Many of the folks who couldn’t get into the overcrowded Bella Center ended up at Klimaforum and I eavesdropped on several discussions about how “this is what COP15 should have been.”

Concurrent to COP15 and Klimaforum were two other convergences: a conference of world mayors sharing cutting edge urban planning techniques and technologies for reducing CO2 and increasing sustainability, and a gathering in Christiania of indigenous leaders (cheekily called the Climate Bottoms) working on their own tactics and solutions.

On my daily travels through Copenhagen, I was blown away by all the public art, youth activism, bloggers by the truckload at the extremely well organized TckTckTck media center, hundreds of thousands of people marching through the streets, and the endless how-do-we-fix-it conversations in all the restaurants and cafes.

In spite of the fact that for weeks beforehand the official word was that there wasn’t going to be an agreement coming out of COP15, we all still wanted a miracle. Of course we did. Climatically speaking, the hour is very, very late indeed. And thanks to people like Ian Fry, Chief Negotiator from Tuvalu, and President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives, there were at least a few dramatic mini-miracles out there.

But honestly, the real miracle for me was watching global civil society say: “While the people at the Bella Center are leaders, they are not the only leaders. Our capacity to address the climate crisis does not rest solely in their hands. We have passion and vision and immense creativity. We have profound love for the planet, and for each other. We have a vision of universal justice and the ability to collaborate across cultural lines, and that’s exactly what we’re going to do.”

I came away feeling – and still feel – the strength and power of the movement in which we’re all engaged. To echo Transition Town Maestro Rob Hopkins, I feel an intense sense of both humility and gratitude for being present at this remarkable, charismatic (and yes, sometimes terrifying) moment in human history. And I bow my head to the remarkable global community working like hell to weave us all a future we can anticipate with joy.

COP-outs

This is a great summary of where the talks are at right now.

Though it doesn't even begin to address the problem that far more people have been accredited to get into the Bella Center than the place can hold, and it's become a logistical nightmare.

People have been waiting in the cold for hours, missing their own side events, and feeling very disregarded and silenced.

But at least it's a very democratic process. Al Gore had trouble getting in, the head of the Natural Resources Defense Council waited outside in line for 5 hours, and it only took me an hour (of course I had a badge from having registered last week - these guys just got here).

Photos from The March

There were two marches on Saturday. One of them began at 10 and went through town to a building where industry is discussing carbon trading. The other went from the center of Copenhagen all the way out to the Bella Center.

My ankle is still in rough shape, so I only attended the first march. I took the train out to the Bella Center to meet up with the second march, but it took them 3 hours to go 6 km, and by that point, I had to get back to check out of my B&B.

But here are some shots from the smaller march. Folks are in blue because they're symbolizing rising water levels.

Tuvalu Testimony

Ian Fry, the COP15 delegate from Tuvalu. "The fate of my country rests in your hands."

Courtside at the Cop

December 8. Sitting in on a plenary session at COP15. The first time I have ever seen such a thing. They're having a…discussion (and I use this term loosely) about a particular point in the climate treaty having to do with “carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) in geological formations.”

This basically means pulling all the carbon out of the effluvia from, say, the smokestack of your coal-fired power plant, wadding it up into a big ball, and burying it deep in a handy hole in the ground. For example, in a dried-out oil well in Saudi Arabia. More on that in a moment.

CCS is more of an idea and a focus of ongoing research than anything else. It certainly isn’t a proven, workable, and cost-effective technological solution to excess CO2. This is why, when people talk about clean coal, they’re philosophizing more than strategizing. Clean coal depends on fully-functioning CCS technologies, and we don’t have that. Therefore there is no such thing as clean coal.

The proceedings are difficult to follow at first because every delegate making a comment was reading from a statement prepared by an official working group, and which used dense, arcane, highly academic/political language designed to (as far as I can tell) not annoy your allies and not commit to anything you haven’t been authorized to commit to while still trying to move things in a generally positive direction.

I’d been wondering why it’s been so hard for the world to come up with a solid climate treaty, and here's the answer live in front of me.

Burkina Faso (all the delegates are referred to by the name of their country – it’s very Shakespearean that way) talks for 2 minutes about the relationship between energy, ozone-depleting chemicals like CFCs, and carbon dioxide, but I have no idea what he's actually saying.

Brazil goes totally over my head, and Sweden says some generally positive things about the idea of CCS, but doesn’t seem to have a big emotional investment in it.

Australia is the first moment when my Effluvia Meter goes into the red zone. I'm prepared for some shuck and jive from Down Under because they’ve just had a big political turnover and the incoming party is very right wing and opposed to doing anything to save the planet. Australia is all about making robust CCS projects.

I would imagine since the majority of the continent is dry, hot, wasteland, they feel like they’ve got a lot of room to bury the rest of the world’s carbon. For a reasonable fee, of course.

Within the space of a sentence or two, we hear that “CCS is a mature technology” (well-developed and ready to roll) and that “CCS is in need of much more development” (not a mature technology).

Now comes Saudi Arabia, who says, “The most promising technology to achieve the objective of reducing CO2 is CCS.” Mr. Arabia is very upset about the fact that there are no CCS projects in his country (even though there aren’t any CCS projects anywhere), and demands in a petulant, teenager-like way, inclusion of CCS in the treaty.

The Saudis want CCS because pretty soon they're going to have a bunch of big holes in the ground where their oil used to be, and like Australia, they’d be very happy to let us stick our carbon there. For a reasonable fee.

Kuwait pipes up like Saudia Arabia’s annoying younger brother. “It’s true! It’s true!” he whins. “CCS works! Look on the internet!” I’m serious. As if all the delegates here are going to turn around, slap their foreheads, and say, “Oh my Allah, Kuwait! I never thought of that! The internet!”

And then, from out of the proverbial darkness, speaks Mighty Little Grenada, of Conquered-By-Great-Britain-In-A-Weekend Fame. In a voice of Truth and Clarity, he basically says, “Why are we spending so much time on an immature technology? Australia is full of crap. Let’s get on with it.”

Jamaica promptly gives Grenada the equivalent of a High Five and Buttslap, and Paraguay drives the point home with the moral argument that focusing on CCS implies that emissions can continue unchecked, and this sort of thinking will stand in the way of real plans to end dependence on fossil fuels. I started to cheer and applaud for Paraguay, when I realize that this sort of thing is frowned upon at formal UN negotiations. I’m such a barbarian.

More news as events progress...

Climate Scoreboard

The group Climate Interactive has developed this scoreboard to calculate the long-term climate impacts of proposals under consideration for the climate treaty.

It will automatically update to reflect changes in the negotiations. Very, very clever.