I bid you farewell, and what’s next
There are many extraordinary people who are going to continue to lead the fight to protect our climate in the coming years. While I will remain involved in this work, it’s time for me to close Power Up for Climate Solutions. It became clear to me some months ago that the world, physically, biologically, socially, culturally, technologically and politically has changed so much in the last few years that the part I was endeavoring to play in promoting climate action had become outdated. The US election results provided the final confirmation that it’s time for a new direction. I thank you for joining me in my efforts to share ideas, tools and inspiration to take action on climate. Going forward, I invite you to follow my new blog at wiseonearth.com to see what I’m getting up to.
I will leave you with a few thoughts. I claim no special grasp of our predicament except that afforded by time and experience. I’ve been worried about climate change for at least 35 years. For the past 20 years, climate writing and advocacy have dominated my work life. In this time, our situation has changed in profound ways, opening up both extraordinary opportunities and extraordinary threats. Although no one can see the future, I can tell you what I see, and how I plan to respond going forward.
In 2013, when I got involved with climate advocacy, there was only one grassroots organization active where I live focused on climate. Journalists were still being taken in by fossil-fuel funded disinformation efforts, and climate scientists were being harassed, maligned, and attacked for simply for trying to do good science. A very sizable chunk of the American population, never a terribly scientifically literate people, were confused, disengaged, uninformed, or fully deceived about the facts. Clean energy technologies were so expensive that they were not a viable alternative to fossil fuels in most situations. No global climate agreement had been ratified by the world’s nations, and no major climate laws had been enacted in the U.S.
Today, all these things have changed. We now have more public acknowledgement of the threat, better and cheaper technology, and some real climate policy wins. There’s also been a huge blossoming of organizations and individuals doing great climate work. The niche I was trying to help fill providing ways to take simple climate actions is now quite crowded, in the best possible sense. I think it’s fair to say that the clean energy transition has begun.
However, climate scientists are more and more convinced that we are entering an era of worsening climate-change fueled disasters and increasingly deadly harms. The party taking power in the US is communicating it’s intent to reverse progress on climate. We are missing the window we had to contain greenhouse gas concentrations to levels consistent with a stable climate, successful agriculture, and stable ocean, wind, and ice patterns. The US election results will likely slow progress on a clean energy transition both nationally and internationally.
So, although the future is unknowable, here is how our situation appears to me: I don’t see a pathway for avoiding devastating climate harms in the coming decades. Greenhouse gas levels are still rising. We have started transitioning toward clean energy, but in the US and globally, it appears that progress will slow instead of speed up in the next few years.
Therefore, going forward, I’ll be shifting my efforts to focus on strengthening local systems to better weather the coming storms. I’m beginning to look for ways to help build and strengthen resilience in Corvallis and the Willamette Valley. In his new novel Sun House, David James Duncan refers to this as lifeboat work, and I am drawn to the image of community lifeboats to help us weather an uncertain and destabilizing future. This includes continuing to shift toward clean energy, re-localization efforts, community building, reducing consumption and waste, and emergency preparedness. I will also be looking for opportunities to support climate solutions at the local and state level, and to counter hate, xenophobia, and fascism.
Thank you again for your support, interest, and participation in the Power Up for Climate Solutions experiment. I am deeply grateful to you for joining me in this effort. If you’d like to follow my writing going forward, I will be blogging at wiseonearth.com, where I plan to share what I learn as I dive into lifeboat work. And if you have thoughts, ideas, or questions about resilience work, I’d love to hear from you!
