350.org sees the "100 by '50 Act" as a Washington record-breaker, "the most ambitious piece of climate legislation Congress has ever seen.” But even if it does actually clear that decidedly low bar, it threatens to bog down efforts at preventing climate catastrophe.

A climate bill known as the “100 by '50 Act” (S.987), introduced last month by U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley and Bernie Sanders, is being hailed as an important step in the fight against greenhouse warming. The leading climate advocacy group 350.org sees the bill as a Washington record-breaker, "the most ambitious piece of climate legislation Congress has ever seen.”

Well, maybe it does actually clear that decidedly low bar. But it is also far too little, too late to prevent climate catastrophe.

Worse, it would enshrine in federal legislation the false notion that by taking baby steps over a period of decades, our country and the world can avoid runaway greenhouse warming. That easygoing strategy cannot handle the emergency we face. Only by pushing greenhouse emissions down to zero within a decade and at the same time building a society that can function well without fossil fuels can we keep the Earth livable.

The chance that S.987 will become law is of course vanishingly remote as long as we have the current Congress and Executive branch. And with its lax provisions and leisurely timetable for cutting emissions, this bill seems to be designed around the assumption that we can afford to wait around for years or decades until there's a more friendly political climate before taking dramatic action. We can't. S.987's passage would be a purely symbolic victory, whether it passes tomorrow or in 2019, 2021, or any other postelection year.

Consider one crucial source of emissions: electricity generation. The bill would phase out fossil-fuel-fired power plants—but much, much more slowly than the Earth's ice is melting. Coal and gas generation would decline from 70 percent of total electricity sales in 2022 to 12.5 percent in 2045, but total consumption would not be capped. Assuming consumption stays steady despite population growth, the bill could permit an additional 33 billion tons of carbon dioxide to be released into the atmosphere between now and 2045. That's approximately 33 billion more tons than we can afford under our already-exhausted carbon budget.

The bill would reduce sales of fossil-fueled vehicles as a percentage of all sales, but without restricting the total number of vehicles sold and starting only in 2030; it thereby foresees internal-combustion engines plying our streets and highways until well after 2050. It envisions keeping the personal car and truck at the center of our transportation system, the only change being an “electrification” of the vast national fleet. That will vastly increase the burden on power plants and push farther and farther into the future the day when we can meet all demand with 100% renewable electricity.

Merkley and Sanders deserve credit for much laudable language in the bill that would support and protect low-income households during an energy transition. But otherwise, all S.987 offers other than its dawdling rules on power plants and vehicles are mostly toothless emissions “fees” and tax credits or subsidies for renewable energy or efficient technologies.

None of those provisions take into account the growing stack of evidence for why fossil-fuel burning must be driven down to zero throughout society on an emergency schedule through explicit regulation of production—of what is produced and how, as we did the wartime 1940s—and not just through guidelines, taxes and incentives, none of which can guarantee reductions. Nor do they address the broader ecological destruction that must be reversed if climate chaos is to be avoided.

S.987 would do barely more than current (as of this writing) U.S. commitments under the Paris climate agreement, a lame document that would allow catastrophic warming of more than three degrees Celsius even in the face of strong evidence that to maintain safe atmospheric carbon concentrations, emissions must be cut to near zero by 2030—a year in which Merkley and Sanders would still be allowing 50% of new vehicles and electrical generation to be fossil-fueled.

I can't read the mind of anyone, especially a senator, but S.987 looks like it's meant to be a compromise banner around which liberals and moderates can rally in these dark political times, and then serve as a launching pad for action when action is possible down the road.

But in fact, the bill makes for a lousy launchpad and looks more like a highly effective patch of quicksand. If something like the 100 by '50 Act becomes law, it will be only after a protracted, politically bloody struggle that will make the battle over health care look like a Sunday School picnic. Then once it finally passes, greenhouse warming will hurtle on past acceptable limits anyway.

If we the people are willing to struggle long and hard to keep the Earth livable, we had better fight for a transformation that actually has a chance of hitting that goal. Otherwise, by the time any fight for half-measures succeeds in the halls of Congress, it will have already failed in the real world. And there will be no time for a second shot.

by Paul Burkett

The system of fossil-fueled neoliberal capitalism is indeed moving toward an end of history, but only in the sense of the end of any historical advance of humanity as a productive, political, and cultural species due to the increasingly barbaric socio-economic and environmental conditions the system creates. There is now no alternative to the end of history as we know it. The sustainable development of human society co-evolving with nature including other species now depends on a definite historical break with capitalism as the dominant mode of production.

by Chellis Glendenning

The reader of How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe's Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia must be agile. The book demands that one navigate between several modes of consciousness in order to face the reality of human input into the “weather on steroids” that is routine these days. How the World Breaks takes us on a long tour, but not one launched with vacation or adventure in mind; rather it books us in at one disaster site, then another, and another.

Led by our worthy guides, we visit the scene of 2013’s Typhoon Yolanda in the Philippines in which entire settlements were washed away and some 6,300 people killed; Java where a mud volcano caused by gas drilling plastered 2.5 square miles of fields and villages with forty feet of wet clay, cost 40,000 people their homes, and caused property losses of more than a billion US dollars; Kansas where, in 2007, a 205 mile-per-hour tornado flattened an entire town, destroying 1000 buildings; and more.

But surprise: just as the book takes us on this bleak journey, it also presents an electrifying, can't-put-down detective novel exploring the whats, hows, whens, and whys of each catastrophe. And lest we become too diverted by intrigue, How the World Breaks is a sober investigation of the economics, politics, science, and psychology of a disaster's origins, progression, and aftermath. Taken together, the landscape of climate change becomes a disquieting documentation of the mess we inhabit.

Stan Cox is a former government wheat geneticist, he is now research coordinator at The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. He is the author of books that explore the environmental impacts of air conditioning and of corporate food/medicine production, as well as rationing as one answer to capitalism's out-of-control consumerism. Paul Cox is an anthropologist and development/disaster writer. He lives in Copenhagen, Denmark, where he works for European and African development organizations while writing independently in such publications as Disasters and The New Inquiry. He also happens to be Stan's son.

I delved into How the World Breaks on a spring day boasting brutal unseasonal rains in a small city in the Andes. I needed no more than to pull the blanket to my chin to know the magnitude of this book's importance. I think we've got a classic here—so I asked Stan and Paul to join me for an online conversation.

Chellis Glendinning: What is How the World Breaks about? And how did you end up working on it as father and son?

Paul Cox: The title is a bit misleading—by design. The book is about how and why disasters happen, but the explanations aren’t all our own; we don’t have one big model or answer. Instead we were interested in all the explanations that spring up around disasters and, crucially, who embraces which explanations.

Stan Cox: It started after a disaster with many explanations: Superstorm Sandy. In 2012, following that calamity, my editors at The New Press asked me if I'd be interested in writing one on the increasingly unnatural nature of natural disasters. I had no direct experience in that world, but I knew there was much to be written about their increasingly human causation. I decided to write to Paul, who had studied the anthropology of disaster.

He started his response with, “Wow, that's a pretty huge topic,” and discussed the debates among disaster researchers and policymakers about vulnerability, resilience, inequality, and adaptation, along with what he called “the big issue: climate change itself, or the whole complex of pressures and vulnerabilities that it fits into.” I thought, “Oh oh, this is going to be a much bigger book than I expected, and I don't think I can do it without Paul.”

CG: How did you start?

SC: We resolved not to restrict ourselves to just climatic events, but to include hazards that emerge from the ground, sky, and sea. Since so-called "natural disasters" are social/political/economic phenomena linked to increasingly unnatural hazards, we dropped the term “natural disaster.” We wrote of “geoclimatic” hazards and disasters instead, and we hope that term catches on. We also realized that this could turn out to be a boring book if we made it an armchair study of UN policy debates, studies on risk reduction, international climate negotiations, etc. Instead, we decided to build our analysis on stories from the scenes of actual disasters.

PC: The subtitle, “Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia,” might represent the book better than the title does. Since this seems to be the life of the future, we wanted to consider what such a life looks like—for rich and poor.

Disasters are, of course, terrible by definition. All that ought to matter is how to reduce people’s vastly unequal vulnerabilities to them and how to stop creating more. But instead, some explanations have turned into normalizations of it. We tried to make the book an antidote to that normalization by choosing disasters mostly from the last decade and pulling out all the awful, sad, strange, funny, and infuriating details that make each irreducible to a simple explanation.

SC:So from mid-2013 through early 2015, we studied and visited a dozen or so communities around the world whose inhabitants were struggling to recover from disasters. We benefited from the help provided by my wife, Paul's stepmother, Priti Gulati Cox—especially with the trips in India where she could translate not only language but much else. Priti also drew maps for each of the disasters.

CG: My guess is that New Press doesn’t have the funds to send a couple of investigators around the world. How did you get to all those places?

SC:You guess right. We didn't have big travel budgets ourselves, so we made modest travel plans. In 2013 Priti and I were already going to Mumbai, India, for a family visit, and we figured that if Paul joined us, we could talk with slum residents about the 2005 catastrophic flood they'd lived through. From there, we could go to the Philippines—which is famous for cultural adaptation to the world's worst frequency and variety of geoclimatic hazards—and on to East Java, Indonesia, site of a human-caused mud volcano.

Soon after we made those plans, the Indian Himalaya was ravaged by unprecedented monsoon floods and landslides. Two months before we set out for Asia, Typhoon Yolanda hit the Philippines in probably the most powerful storm landfall ever recorded. Were we superstitious, we might have decided at that point not to make any more travel plans! But the fact is that you can throw a dart at a map, and there has probably been—or will soon be—one or more terrible disasters somewhere near where the dart sticks. So we included Tacloban in the Philippines and the Garhwal region in India in our tour.

Paul had ridden out Superstorm Sandy when he was living in New Jersey and had helped with Occupy Sandy; then he found himself back in the area around the second anniversary of the disaster. For me, there were short drives to two tornado towns: Greensburg, Kansas, and Joplin, Missouri. And living in Copenhagen, Paul could easily get to the Netherlands and Russia.

PC:Our biggest concern was not to put ourselves in situations where we would be a burden on anyone. We worried most about that in Tacloban, where bodies were still being recovered when we arrived. We rode in on a public bus and spent the day in the city, staying out of the way of the relief activity and speaking only with people who were interested in talking with us.

The places we went and the people we met made this book what it is. But the one thing we didn’t want it to be, I think, was a travelogue. The literary scholar Graham Huggan has written, “Much of what passes for contemporary travel writing operates under the sign of the disaster.” Our book falls easily into that claim. But if accounts of disaster and climate change are taking over the role of travel writing—and I also have to give credit to Rune Graulund of Denmark for this observation—then there’s a huge amount of baggage that comes with the genre. Disaster writing can also be colonial, exoticizing, and self-centered. Our choice was to keep ourselves out of view.

CG: Tell me about what happened on the island of Montserrat.

SC: Montserrat is a papaya-shaped island five by ten miles in size, located 250 miles southeast of Puerto Rico. It’s a British Overseas Territory—in other words, a colony. The first Europeans to settle there were Irish Catholics in 1632. By the early 1800s, the slave population was 6,500. Britain abolished slavery in 1833, but Montserrat remained under white minority rule until the 1960s.

In recent decades, the island has been the most disaster-plagued place in the Caribbean outside Haiti. Its residents were still recovering from 1989's Hurricane Hugo when the long-dormant Soufrière Hills volcano exploded in 1995. For two years the island was punished with volcanic violence, including explosive eruptions, fast-moving floods of steam, ash, gravel, and rock; and downpours of ash that covered everything. The eruption remains active to this day, with continuous release of gases that have been punctuated by ashfalls in 2003, 2006, and 2010. Almost two-thirds of the island, including now-buried former capital Plymouth, remain uninhabitable. Before the eruption the population was more than 10,000. It’s now 4,000. Many people emigrated, and those who remained had to move up to the previously undeveloped northern part of the island.

CG: I don't recall even hearing about this.

SC: We first became interested in Montserrat because of a British-funded development project aimed at generating electricity with geothermal energy from beneath the same volcano that had almost destroyed the island—a classic case of a silver lining. But that turned out to be a minor story. The bigger part was the failure of both the British Parliament and a series of island governments to rebuild decent housing and good livelihoods and help the people get back on their feet.

Four months before our visit, the island’s new political party, a group of activists called the People’s Democratic Movement, had been voted into power. Hopes were rising that Montserrat could finally get unstuck from the unnatural disaster/development crisis plaguing it. The PDM’s leader is Donaldson Romeo. As a journalist and videographer during the long crisis of the ’90s, Romeo had exposed the consequences of British neglect, including the horrific conditions that people fleeing the south of the island had to endure in refugee housing and tent camps. In the 2000s he got into politics to challenge the negligence and failures; he led the PDM to victory in 2014.

CG: It’s typical in the Caribbean for volcanoes to lie dormant for centuries, and then when they do start shooting sparks, steam, fiery rock, and sulphur/methane/carbon-dioxide gas, the episode can last for a year. But this volcanic activity has gone on for 20 years! How does detrimental human activity contribute to the activation of volcanic activity, particularly these irregular and unpredictable explosions?

SC: We talked with Rod Stewart of the Montserrat Volcano Observatory, and he said that this volcano is unique for the length of its eruption. There’s no ready explanation for it, and he won’t hazard a guess as to when the eruption will end. Human activity is a factor in volcanic disasters generally. Volcanic slopes like the one where most Montserratians lived before 1995 are attractive places to settle: the soils are fertile, the landscape is beautiful, and there is often employment in tourism. People may be able to live and work on those slopes for 350 years without problem—but there’s always a risk.

CG: Who else did you talk to?

SC: I had interviews lined up, but wanted most to talk with ordinary people and with Don Romeo. Over the next couple of days, in between interviews with government officials, I talked with local citizens. One was a woman named Janeen who had migrated to Montserrat from Jamaica just before the eruption began, had to evacuate homes twice, and now operates a run-down bar and grill on the island’s one main road. Simply by persevering through the past two decades, she has proven her resilience, but like everyone else, she is getting tired of being so resilient. She said she had high hopes for Romeo and the PDM. On the other hand, she feared that the government in London might never “step up.” She and other Montserratians had worn out their bootstraps long ago.

CG: One thing that surprised me is the islanders' desire to boost the economy with "disastourism."

PC: Ha! We sort of made up that word, although I assume we aren’t the first. Unlike nearby islands like Antigua and St. Kitts, Montserrat has no good harbor, so it has never been a major cruise destination. But before Hugo and the Soufrière Hills eruption, ferries, small cruise boats, and private craft would visit the Plymouth pier. Many North Americans bought houses and spent winters there. Romeo and the local government want London to build a new port in the north that can bring some of that small-scale tourist traffic back—with an added attraction: tours of the volcano observatory and zone of destruction in the south.

CG: Did you see the disaster area?

SC: Priti and I went into the zone in the south that had been opened to daytime entry. The volcano loomed above, belching huge clouds of steam and sulfur dioxide. Below we could see the area that people are barred from entering for safety reasons: a broad gray plain ringed by mangled, abandoned structures. Across that expanse there was no visible sign that the city center of Plymouth lay fifty feet below.

CG: It sounds almost like a sacred place.

SC: Yes—we stood there in utter silence for a long while, as our minds struggled to piece together a rational image from the post-apocalyptic landscape. After that, we wandered into long-abandoned houses. In one, plates and pans, now covered in volcanic ash, were still sitting in dish drains where they’d been abandoned years ago. Another neighborhood was being reclaimed by tropical vegetation, and we noticed a man who was sweeping dust and ash out of a house. He wasn’t interested in talking. I decided that “disastourism” isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

On our way back to the habitable north, we stopped at a shop to buy vegetables. As we were paying, in came none other than Don Romeo. “Heard you on ZJB Radio today,” he said. “When are you leaving?” I told him Sunday morning. “OK … what if I drop by on Saturday evening? There are some things I need to tell you.”

The admiring looks on the faces of the people in the shop confirmed what we already knew: Romeo is a heroic figure. But he knew he wouldn’t be a hero for long if Montserrat remained stuck in disaster time. His first words when he arrived at the cottage were: “I didn’t expect to become premier this soon.” He went on to talk about how he was having to metamorphose from an activist into the island’s leader and how he’d better not let people down. Then he told us how the British government had betrayed the people of Montserrat. He believed the refusal of the colonial power to restore housing and livelihoods after the eruption was not really a failure but a strategy. In the mid-1990s, having just finished rebuilding Plymouth after Hugo, the British had no interest in funding the island’s development again. Romeo believes they let conditions become intolerable so people would have no choice but to evacuate. He told us, “The idea was to get us off the island. But we’re still here.”

He became emotional when the conversation turned to the 1997 flash eruption that killed 19 people. He said those people had been pushed into risking their lives in the hazard zone by the deplorable conditions in the refugee camps and the lack of opportunity to earn a living in the north. “People were so desperate,” he said, “they would go back onto the volcano to grow food and keep animals.” Life on his island, he told us, will never be restored until the UK takes full responsibility for its “deliberate deception” and neglect of Montserrat. I'd been reading accounts of that era and the British betrayal with growing frustration, but to hear Romeo talk about the rawness with which he and other Montserratians view those events… I was boiling inside.

CG: You visited one scene of destruction after another. What was that like?

PC: What always confronted me first was awareness that what I feel is only a shadow of the experience of the disaster.

CG:You felt a sort of timidity then? Or perhaps awe?

PC: More like caution: just as there is much more of the volcano down under the ground, there is so much more human experience wrapped up in a disaster than one can possibly know. Some things can’t be communicated if you weren’t there. But other things can. At least that was our assumption in writing a book.

Often my second feeling was déjà vu. That is to say: awareness of repetitions and patterns. This awareness can feel like a betrayal of the uniqueness of the pain and the place, but as writers it was essential to our job. There are patterns to how the ground can shift; that’s what makes seismology possible. There are only so many ways the roof can come off a house; that’s why we have engineering. And likewise there are certain ways people deal with pain and shock and re-establish hope; that’s the basis of psychology. Disasters knot these patterns up together, even if no two events are wholly alike.

CG: In my work as a psychotherapist, I specialize in recovery from personal trauma. Some people say to me: “Isn't it depressing?” Yet I never feel down because I am working with people who want to heal and therefore have the wherewithal and spirit to heal—so being their partner in the process becomes an uplifting experience. I am struck with how you begin the book with a testimony to renewal.

SC: That first story occurred in the Indian Himalaya, and our trip there was probably the most disturbing experience we had. Paul suggested we begin and end the book with it because the floods there were in many ways the most spectacular and tragic of all the disasters we wrote about. Those who survived have been put to the ultimate test of emotional strength and perseverance—with virtually no help from outside.

PC: It was depressing. Yet the story with which we begin the book, Ramala Khumriyal’s personal experience, was a hopeful one. In June 2013 a natural dam holding back a large lake 12,000 feet up in the Himalayas melted. The entire lake emptied within minutes, and the busy pilgrimage site of Kedarnath a mile down slope was buried by water, mud, and rock. Ramala barely escaped up the mountainside with his six children; as they fled, they looked back to see thousands being swept to their deaths. With roads and footpaths destroyed, they had to find their way home through the landslide-scoured mountains. It took them six days.

Once they had to cross a river on a fallen tree trunk, inches above the still-raging flood. Many people did not make the crossing, but Ramala’s family did. This, he said, was the last of many tests they’d received from Lord Shiva, who resides in these mountains and is worshiped at Kedarnath. Ramala and his children had passed all the tests, and in this he found the hope he expressed to us.

SC: By the time we arrived, Ramala had become co-owner of a new startup! Before he’d run a tea shop in Kedarnath, but he had no desire to return there. So with assistance from Adarsh Tribal, a young outsider working for the aid group iVolunteer, Ramala and another man started a soap-making business. Adarsh helped them get the necessary ingredients up to the mountain. It was a low-tech operation, and their product was top-notch. They used a vegetarian recipe—without tallow—and that was a selling point in a pious Hindu region.

PC: The closest we reached to Kedarnath was the village where the pilgrimage footpath begins, Gaurikund. The road having washed away, we had to cling to rocks and tree roots for the final kilometer to get even that far. We were talking to people who were playing carom in front of the only open shop on the half-main-street—the other half had fallen into a chasm along with a number of hotels. Our discussion paused when two outsiders came along the street leading a pair of donkeys. One was wearing a well-tailored wool jacket and the other was carrying a camera. They silently continued towards the start of the pilgrims’ footpath—and returned ten minutes later. As they passed the second time, the cameraman explained to a local that the visitor was on a government fact-finding mission from New Delhi. He was supposed to report on the state of things in Kedarnath, but he’d just gone to the trailhead so he could have his photo taken on the back of a donkey with snowy peaks in the background. Our hosts thought this was a fitting demonstration of the extent of their government’s sympathy; Adarsh, who was interpreting, couldn’t even translate the obscenities they used!

SC: The floods and landslides had not only cut Kedarnath and Gaurikund off from the rest of the world; they had wreaked ruin along the 100-mile road that leads up the valley from the plains.

PC: We experienced pure terror on the jeep ride up and back, especially where the road had become a thin shelf hanging off the mountain face and we could see right through potholes down to the valley floor!

SC: Before the flood, there’d been a burgeoning new industry that hauled well-heeled pilgrims up the mountain in helicopters. Like road-building, the construction of the 400 helipads serving that business worsened the landslides, and almost all of the helipads were damaged beyond usability. The tourism industry was crippled. Neither Adarsh nor the people in Gaurikund nor anyone else said they could foresee any potential economic activities that might provide the valley’s people the modest incomes they had derived from tourism. That was the tragedy: the only route anyone could see to local economic viability was to rebuild the very industry that had almost destroyed them once and could well destroy them in the future. Now three years after our visit, despite recurring monsoon floods, the 2015 earthquake in Nepal, and raging forest fires in 2016, slow efforts to piece tourism back together have been the only official response.

CG: Reading your book, I remembered the collective disasters I´ve endured—which include Hurricane Hazel in 1954, the 2001 Los Alamos fire catastrophe, and a rain-hail storm/flood in 2013 that laid flat the campesino community in Bolivia where I was living. Have you been through any such events?

SC: Well, I’m thankful that neither of us has had the wealth of experience of disasters-in-progress that you have!

PC: I remember filling sandbags there during the Great Midwest Flood of 1993, when I was nine. I remember the pizzas that someone delivered to the crews filling sandbags. That was an early taste of disaster solidarity.

SC: Pizza: the quintessential disaster food! What we both can say, though, is that a tornado 80 years ago had a profound impact on our family. Lucille Brewer Cox was my grandmother, Paul’s great-grandmother, and she was among 203 people killed by the Gainesville, Georgia tornado of April 6, 1936. It struck downtown in the middle of a business day. Lucille was working in a department store on the town square. My grandfather had a ground-coffee business just off the square. The tornado left him buried under sacks of coffee beans, which protected him from falling debris. He dragged himself out and ran over where Lucille's store had been, and, tragically, recognized her shoes protruding from the rubble.

The catastrophe struck a population that was struggling to survive the Great Depression. So everyone in town went through severe times. But it was also the height of New Deal optimism. President Roosevelt visited twice, and his administration set out to make Gainesville an example of government as a positive force. Reconstruction aid poured in, and the town gained a lasting reputation as a vigorous, progressive city.

CG: The psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton spoke of a loss of belief in the future among survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and, as the nuclear arms race grew to threaten the entire planet, generalized this response to include all of us. How do you feel now that you know intimately what so many still living in non-disaster bubbles “know” only by watching videos and reading newspapers? I ask this with a view towards the ultra-right presidency of Donald Trump, with his troupe of oil executives and climate-change naysayers.

PC: I don’t think we know that much more than people watching videos and reading newspapers.

CG: I'm amazed to hear you say that.

PC: Reporters and videographers are good at communicating pain, and disasters are among their most powerful material. If someone can see all that pain and rationalize their way out of being affected, I don’t think it’s because they haven’t seen something that we’ve seen.

We write about various forms of rationalization, and about something like a loss of belief in the future, but that doesn’t always look the way you expect. Take the idea of resilience—which has been spectacularly popular in recent years. The resilience doctrine rationalizes that disaster is inherent in everything, and that the most people can hope for is to get better at bouncing back. At heart this attitude has little to promise for the future.

This discourse has been thoroughly critiqued, and we join that critique. But the resilience doctrine is really the stuff of global neoliberal governance, of UN conferences and development cooperation regimes. You could say it’s the sort of “globalist” project that the Clintons were accused of furthering.

The election happened in the middle of this conversation with you, Chellis, and we felt it like an earthquake. Or maybe it was more like a forest fire; the fuel had been building up for many years. Up until Election Day, we thought our biggest worries were well-intentioned international initiatives that would actually make life worse or be band-aids on the catastrophes of climate change. We were concerned about an abundance of optimism that says climatic disaster can be endured if our economies just keep growing.

CG:Astonishing—and yet denial does help people feel better.

PC: Now it feels like we were the ones in denial! We wrote in the book that climate change optimism would be “what we will have to worry about when we don’t have to worry about climate-change denial anymore.” As it turns out, we still have to worry about it—and also about resurgent zero-sum nationalism, triumphant oligarchies, and fascism. We face a lack of regard for common humanity that’s based on forthright racism.

SC: We set out to share stories of communities on the front lines of the ecological crisis in hopes of influencing US citizens and our government’s policies. But far too many people don’t want to hear about anyone’s predicament but their own—enough of them to make the November 8 political temper tantrum succeed. Those angry Americans had no regard for the consequences to be suffered by vulnerable people and communities here or elsewhere.

The rest of the world has pledged to carry the Paris climate agreement forward without the US, but even if they do fulfill their emissions commitments, under the agreement those commitments would still allow warming of 2.7 to 3.5 degrees Celsius, which in itself would trigger planet-wide catastrophe. The past couple of years have shown that unforeseen political and social change can come suddenly and dramatically, and that’s certainly what we’re going to need now—but in the opposite direction.

PC:“Sudden and dramatic” are also the qualities that make a disaster a disaster, as distinct from the general, slower trend of climate change. And there is often a hope expressed that if a disaster comes along that's just bad enough, it will shock societies into transformation. Please understand that it’s not what we are hoping for: we are anti-disaster! Besides, the scholarship on possible links between disasters and political change is tentative about shocks causing positive change. If we can draw a conclusion from our research, it is this: when positive change happens in the aftermath of a disaster, it’s because the people affected are ready for change and have the power to see it through.

SC: Until there is deep political and economic transformation to roll back climate change, communities like the ones we wrote about will keep paying the price. Remedies we put forward—like a fund to protect people in the global South from the disastrous impact of the North’s carbon dioxide—had no chance in the political world that existed even before November 8. But we weren’t devising a political strategy; we were saying, “Look, this is what it would take to deal with coming disasters. We have to talk about what’s necessary, not just what politicians and corporations will accept today.“

Likewise with emissions reduction. We have to insist that the only way to head off climate catastrophe is to eliminate fossil-fuel burning on a timetable much more rapid than Paris’s. Now, in this toxic political atmosphere, many on our side will stop discussing that necessity and seek small compromises instead.

CG: Is there anything that heartens you?

SC: Yes. I'm heartened by declarations from cities and states around the world that commit to forging ahead on climate, no matter what Washington does. That, and a lot of rebellious political activity, will have to do for now.

Chellis Glendinning is the author of seven books, including Chiva: A Village Takes On the Global Heroin Trade.

by Stan Cox

The rapid mobilization that’s necessary to stop a greenhouse meltdown won’t be happening in the near future, given that in Washington the attitude toward effective climate action spans a spectrum from open hostility to timid torpor. In the meanwhile activism, exemplified by the April 29 People’s Climate March, is keeping hope alive, or at least on life support, and the more technical struggle to figure out the transition to a world free of greenhouse gases continues.

But even if we can achieve system change in time to rein in climate change, the years ahead will be no gluten-free cakewalk in the park. Whichever way this struggle goes, America faces some tough times ahead. With many households living through tough times already, it’s going to be the affluent who have to make the big sacrifices.

A ceiling and a floor

Dozens of scenarios have been published in the past decade purporting to demonstrate how large regions (in some studies, the entire world) can supply all of their energy needs from non-fossil-fuel sources. But some recent comprehensive reviews have found all such scenarios to be inadequate.

To make these scenarios work, it is typically necessary to make two assumptions: on the supply side an impossibly fast and extensive buildup of generation capacity, storage, and transmission, and on the demand side an unprecedented slowing of growth, or even a decline, in primary energy consumption. Attempts to satisfy current or increased demand with 100 percent renewable energy will run up against hard physical limits; the same fate awaits attempts to reduce demand only through efficiency improvements and market mechanisms. Those limits will defeat all attempts to hold atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations down to a safe level on an emergency timeline, unless there is an explicit, strictly enforced ceiling on fossil-fuel extraction and consumption, with no offsets or other escape routes. And the ceiling will have to decline steeply year by year.

The 33 percent

Renewable energy generation and the infrastructure to support it cannot keep up with the rapid abandonment of fossil fuels that will be required. Meanwhile, many regions of the world are still struggling to achieve a level of energy consumption—a “floor”—that permits a decent quality of life; no cutbacks are possible there. Those realities dictate that all reductions in energy use will necessarily happen in wealthy nations and among affluent, high-consuming classes and communities in developing nations.

Here in the United States, under any effective policy to prevent catastrophic global warming, virtually everyone will be affected by efforts to reduce emissions, but those in the upper part of the income and wealth scales will have to bear the brunt of the resulting economic disruption.

I predict that if we ever manage to achieve a fair, effective climate-emergency policy, it’s the 33 percent of American households with highest incomes who are going to bear the greatest economic burden. This does not mean that policies should explicitly target 33 percent of the population, but rather that the kinds of efforts that will be most effective in reducing emissions and ensuring good quality of life for everyone are going to require a much greater economic sacrifice from the 33 percent than from lower-income Americans. And within that top one-third, the higher a household’s income, the greater the sacrifice will be.

With the response to the climate emergency following two necessary tracks—a legally imposed contraction of the fossil energy supply and a rapid global conversion to renewable energy—the economic onus will inevitably fall on our 33 percenters. First, there is the initial conversion to green energy capacity and infrastructure, the costs of which have been optimistically estimated at $15 trillion for the United States and $100 trillion globally (and the latter will require a large U.S. contribution.) The conversion has to happen over years rather than decades and will have to be heavily subsidized, with the money coming from taxation of higher incomes and slashing of military appropriations and other wasteful spending. And it will have to be regulated so that it provides plenty of employment but no profiteering.

Meanwhile, the tightening of fossil-fuel availability and the consequent cutbacks in production will cut deeply into the profits of industries not involved in green conversion. Stock prices unconnected to the conversion will fall. Owners, investors, and upper managers, the great majority of whom belong to the 33 percent, will take a big hit from all of the above economic forces. And if the economy stagnates or if shortages and inflation strike, then price controls, subsidies, and other assistance will have to be directed at vulnerable households and regions. That will require even greater shifts of income and wealth from the 33 to the 67 percent.

This is just how things add up. It’s nothing personal against the 33 percenters. I like most of those whom I know. And of course, it may be the 25 or 30 or 40 percent. Furthermore, the top one-third are not a homogeneous group. Most probably think of themselves as middle class, while up there at the high end are found those seven-, eight- and nine-figure incomes.

For purposes of funding the transition, the fattest target will be the infamous 1 percent at the peak of the pyramid. Nevertheless, rich as they are, all of the 1-percenters roped together wouldn’t have enough income to fund and sustain such a conversion. Those 1.2 million households at the summit are now bringing in about $1.8 trillion a year, Uncle Sam is already raking $600 billion of that back in taxes, and what’s left will dwindle rapidly in a climate-ready economy. Under a climate emergency, the 1 percent’s brobdingnagian wealth can be mostly taxed away, and the proceeds can be put to much higher uses; even so, a windfall of that size won’t be enough to spare the other 32 percent from feeling the pain.

Put the 1 percent and the 32 percent together and now we have a population of close to 100 million people, numerous and affluent enough to shoulder the economic burden of the climate emergency. Who are these 33 percenters? Currently, they are households with incomes that exceed about $90,000 per year. Together, this one-third of U.S. households receives two-thirds of the U.S. population’s total income. The 33 percent own 94 percent of stocks by value. Their incomes are higher now than before the Great Recession hit in 2007, while the other 67 percent’s incomes are still lower. They have an average household net worth of approximately $700,000, in contrast to another 40 percent of households whose average net worth is negative, at -$22,000. The U.S. 33 percent are the global 4 percent, with higher incomes than 96 percent of the world’s people.

And 33 percent doesn’t add up to 33 for everyone. Only 18 percent of Hispanic and 15 percent of black households are members of the American top third.

Affluence versus survival

An economy in which production is aimed at protecting the Earth and meeting human needs rather than maximizing profit could make long strides toward eliminating both great wealth and deep poverty. And, research shows, economic and ecological fairness form a positive feedback loop: if climate mobilization helps shrink inequality, it will drive greenhouse emissions even lower.

Increases in inequality of wealth and income are consistently linked with higher emissions. In explaining this, researchers note that the affluent have the most to gain from climate-disrupting activities and at the same time are able to shield themselves from the worst impacts of climate disruption. Then there is the longstanding observation that the opulent lifestyles of the wealthier classes influence the less wealthy, driving overproduction and overconsumption at all income levels—the so-called “Veblen effect.”

But because economists love wealth, they also love to argue that increases in wealth tend to increase efficiency—efficiency, that is, according to the economist’s definition: the dollar value of gross domestic product generated per ton of fossil carbon emitted. But that mathematically rigged metric is useless to anyone concerned about climate justice. So researchers like Boston College sociologist Andrew Jorgenson have been using a much more apt ratio: the degree of human well-being per ton of carbon emitted. And, he finds, as inequality grows in prosperous nations, the emissions required to improve overall well-being increase. Therefore, notes Jorgenson, “Reducing inequality in nations throughout the world could enhance both climate change mitigation efforts and human quality of life.”

The problem with inequality is not just that too many people are poor; it’s also that too many are rich. It was once believed that affluence could not only increase efficiency but that, despite encouraging greater consumption, it could even drive down total greenhouse emissions. That belief in the so-called Environmental Kuznets Curve has been debunked. In recent research, whether it’s comparing nations, states, or localities within a given time span or it’s tracking a society over time, greater affluence actually leads to higher greenhouse emissions. Wealthier regions may seem to be polluting less, but that’s just because they export emissions by shutting down their local manufacturing industries and buying more emissions-heavy goods from poorer countries.

The economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 book Capital in the Twenty-First Century brought the explosive growth of destructive wealth and outrageous inequality to the long-overdue attention of the corporate media and political elites. But discussing his book in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster and Michael Yates noted that while Piketty expertly and exhaustively documented the concentration of income and wealth into fewer and fewer hands (and even put the word "capital" in the title of his book), he did not adequately link increasing inequality to the gross imbalances of power that exist in a mature capitalist society—the imbalances between those for whom wages and salaries are the means of subsistence and those to whom they are an expense to be minimized. Foster and Yates endorsed Piketty’s proposal to address inequality—that wealth tax—but went on to write that simply calling for a tax is not enough, that “this would require in turn a reorganization and revitalization of the class/social struggle, and in every corner of the globe.”

That goes for the global ecological crisis as well. The powerful individuals, corporations, and institutions at the peak of the pyramid who have reaped the benefits of the atmospheric carbon buildup will continue to stand in the way of climate justice, because to act otherwise would cost them too much. It will fall to the 67 percent, along with millions of allies in the 33 percent, to upend the pyramid and tackle the climate emergency head-on.

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is an editor at Green Social Thought. He is author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing and, with Paul Cox, of How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe's Path, From the Caribbean to Siberia.

Climate change is a different prospect of calamity—not just elementally but morally different from nuclear exchange in a manner which has not been properly dealt with. The first difference is that it’s definitely happening. The second is that it’s not happening to everyone. For anyone who grew up in the Cold War, the apocalypse was a simple yes-no question: either it was coming, or it wasn’t. Many people I know who grew up before the end of the nuclear arms race describe this as oddly freeing: there was the sense that since the future might explode at any point, it was not worth the effort of planning. Climate change is  species collapse by a thousand cuts. There will be no definite moment we can say that yes, today we are fucked, and yesterday we were unfucked. Instead the fuckery increases incrementally year on year, until this is the way the world ends: not with a bang, not with a bonfire, but with the slow and savage confiscation of every little thing that made you human, starting with hope.

Both capitalism and electoral democracy impede effective climate action. But while we have to defend and transform democracy, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with either global climate mitigation or social and economic justice.

Donald Trump plans to dismantle America’s already weak climate policy, potentially dooming not only this country but the entire world to runaway greenhouse warming. The day after Election Day 2016, star climate scientist Michael Mann was already saying he feared that it was “game over” for the Earth's climate.

But at the same time Trump is taking a blowtorch to climate action, he and his allies in Washington are taking a sledgehammer to our democracy. So what do we do when we face two simultaneous emergencies: a slide toward fascism and a descent into a greenhouse climate gone haywire?

Writing recently in Monthly Review, John Bellamy Foster argued that given the threat we face, the necessary ecological-social revolution will have to be carried out in two stages, and that “The first would involve the formation of a broad alliance, modeled after the Popular Front against fascism in the 1930s and ’40s. Today’s Popular Front would need to be aimed principally at confronting the fossil-fuel-financial complex and its avid right-wing supporters.” But then, “the ecological revolution will have to extend eventually to the roots of production itself, and will have to assume the form of a system of substantive equality for all . . .”

The struggle must be taken to every front. Many continue to see the immediate struggle for civil and human rights and against fascism, racism, and economic exploitation as having top priority, given the all-out assault coming down from Washington, many state capitals, and law enforcement. Others continue to argue that we have to lead with an all-consuming effort to eliminate greenhouse emissions and ecosystem destruction if we are even to have a chance at keeping the Earth livable.

Then there are those, including those of us at Green Social Thought, who have long insisted that the two struggles be given joint top priority, because if we succeed in either one but not the other, catastrophe is unavoidable. And importantly, there is no contradiction between the two struggles; in fact, they energize each other.

Capitalism: can’t live with it, might live without it

The dramatic swerve down the road to fascism in the United States, Europe, and Russia has further hobbled our chances of prevailing in today’s struggle for democracy, humanity, and the Earth. I say “further” because the odds were stacked against us long before 2016. The chief threat was then, and still is, capitalism. A well-functioning capitalist economy depends on maintaining large, competing pools of vulnerable labor and on the continuously increasing throughput of energy and resources that feeds the climate emergency.

A few months before America’s political sinkhole opened up, Paul Cox and I put it this way in our book How the World Breaks: “From the point of view of those with vast wealth at stake, the cure for climate catastrophe—deep, ongoing restraint in production and consumption to limit greenhouse gas emissions—would be far more devastating than the worst earthquake, flood, or hurricane.” The same applies to a realignment of economic power in favor of today’s beleaguered majority.

In an article published by Nature Climate Change just fifty days after the US presidential election, two scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research concluded that if America does nothing to cut greenhouse emissions for the next four years, it is still possible that the Earth can avoid runaway warming, but only if we do launch drastic actions immediately after that hiatus, and only if the rest of the world ignores our slacker example and starts meeting its climate obligations immediately. That means our chances of maintaining a livable planet are clearly very slim. But they're not zero.

Also in December, Yale economist William Nordhaus published a paper in which he metamorphoses before our eyes from one of the world’s foremost climate optimists into a deep pessimist. Having updated his world economy/climate model with assumptions reflecting the new climatic reality, Nordhaus found that an “optimized” economy (one that, through cost-benefit analysis, carefully balances greenhouse emissions cuts with the need for economic growth) can now be expected to blow through the much-discussed 1.5-degree rise in world temperatures (a widely accepted threshold for global disaster) by 2030 and hit a cataclysmic 3.5 degrees by 2100. (Mann says we have already hit 1.5 degrees.)

More aggressive climate mitigation scenarios that could eliminate net greenhouse emissions by 2040 and keep the temperature rise down to a still-dangerous 2.5 degrees were characterized as “unrealistic” by Nordhaus. So in an eminent economist’s view, capitalism is incompatible even with climate strategies that would reduce emissions but still usher in runaway warming. (Economists would presumably view as worse than unrealistic a detailed, highly practical plan to keep the rise below 1.5 degrees that was modeled on the U.S. mobilization for World War II and published by The Climate Mobilization.)

Nordhaus’s conclusion is not the kind of thing climate optimists like to hear, especially now that they are under assault from retrograde climate deniers at the very top of the power structure. Back when technocrats were still in power, Paul and I characterized what we saw as optimists’ unrealistic view of climate catastrophe this way: “Disaster could be domesticated, soaked up by the economy, so we the people could all experience the event as something distant and manageable, canceled out on future balance sheets by its silver linings. . . . This type of optimism is, we believe, what we will have to worry about when we don’t have to worry about climate change denial anymore.”

What we didn’t know back then was that from 2017 onward, we’re still going to have to worry about climate denial and many more dangers all at once. For years to come, as seas rise and landscapes shrivel, America could remain immobilized within the iron triangle of climate denial, climate optimism, and economic “realism.”

Democracy: might not live with it, can’t live without it

It has been obvious for more than four decades that we can have either capitalism or a livable planet but not both. We’ve known even longer that we can have either capitalism or economic and social justice but not both. For most of us, there’s no dilemma there; only for capitalists themselves does the need to preserve capitalism warrant ruining the Earth for human habitation or having the majority of our fellow human beings live in misery. But in coming years we will have to face a question that should terrify us all: have we reached the point at which we can we have either effective climate action or representative democracy but not both?

With every updated run of global climate models, it becomes clearer that only an immediate, steep decline in greenhouse emissions can give us even a fighting chance to avoid catastrophic warming. That will require a hard ceiling on fossil-fuel burning and other emission-generating activities, a ceiling that must be ratcheted down year by year. In a further tightening of the belt, a big slice of that declining resource budget will have to be set aside for building renewable energy generation capacity and other emission-reducing infrastructure. These moves will constitute a rationing of production.

Struck by this one-two punch—the ceiling on resource use and the diversion of much of what’s left into green conversion—the economy will see an inevitable decline in production of consumer goods and services.

Most of the past year’s proposals for a World War II-style climate mobilization are based on a comparison involving only the second punch, that is, a parallel between the walling-off of resources and human power for war production in the 1940s and the necessary walling-off of resources for renewable energy development now. The consequences of that wartime mobilization—most prominently, conversion from civilian to military production and rationing of consumer goods—were broadly accepted by an electorate that was facing an existential threat. American democracy rose to the occasion. Presumably, we could handle a green conversion of similar scale today, were it to be attempted.

The parallel between climate and World War II mobilizations breaks down, however, back on the first punch, with the immediate, steep decline in fossil-fuel use that is necessary to prevent climatic calamity. In the 1940s, by contrast, America had enough resources and pent-up industrial capacity to boost total production and achieve full employment and higher wages. For the sake of fairness, civilian consumption had to be limited by rationing, and there were shortages of some imported items, but people knew that those conditions were temporary, and consumption soared once the war ended.

Now imagine an America of the 2020s that is weighing whether, better late than never, to declare a climate emergency that includes the necessary steep decline in emissions, production, and material consumption. If that succeeds, it will mean that (1) a majority of politicians have turned their backs on Big Business and have committed to severe limits on resource use and (2) American voters are willing to support them in that effort.

But in a society designed so that its basic working parts are individuals, each acting to their personal benefit, a candidate doesn’t get into office by telling voters what is essential for the common good. You get in by promising voters that they will be harmed personally if your opponent wins but that each voter will benefit personally if you are elected.

So if you’re a candidate wanting effective climate action, you might declare in a stump speech, “If you folks elect my opponent, the consequences will be terrible. Within a couple of decades, millions of people around the world will have lost their homes to flooding, and others will be going hungry because of crop failures.” So far, so good. Voters may think to themselves, “Oh, we wouldn’t want to see that.”

But then you continue: “On the other hand, if you elect me, there will be a much narrower range of goods available to you, and you will be buying a lot less. You will have a smaller house and will be tightly limited in how much you can drive and fly, and you can forget about that new boat. Don’t worry; the government will ensure that you have access to sufficient food, basic goods, a cleaner, healthier world, and your Constitutional rights, but a large share of the nation’s resources will have to go toward building up our renewable energy capacity and reworking our infrastructure—not into the consumer economy. And we’ll never go back to today’s levels of production and consumption.” At that point, you might as well step from behind the lectern, turn around, bend over, and moon the audience. You’re sunk.     

Given that, given our history, and especially considering our recent experience, getting American voters to approve sweeping climate policies is a hard thing to imagine. That has led some (including me at times) to wonder if saving the climate is even possible in our electoral system. But we simply cannot afford to indulge in that sort of speculation. We have no choice but to reject and condemn any calls to jettison our democratic institutions, however inadequate they are. On the contrary; we must first defend democracy against the current authoritarian onslaught and then set about transfoming it.   

Both our form of government and our economic system are throwing hurdles up between us and climate action, but while we can work to improve and transform politics, there is no possibility that capitalism can be made compatible with global climate mitigation and justice. We have to use what’s left of our democracy (inside and especially outside of electoral politics) to simultaneously fight the fascism that threatens humanity and the capitalism that threatens the Earth as a whole.

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is an editor of Green Social Thought and author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing. Write to him at cox(at)howtheworldbreaks.com.

On December 5, former vice president Al Gore met with Donald and Ivanka Trump in an effort to convince the president-elect that he should not gut federal policies and agreements dealing with climate change. Three days later, actor Leonardo DiCaprio also paid the Trump duo a visit, urging them to help build a green, climate-friendly economy with lots of jobs. The two men could not have done less to prevent climate catastrophe if they had flown up to Alaska together and asked the glaciers to please stop melting.

In a conversation with Gore on December 6, the climate-hawk governor of California, Jerry Brown, urged optimism. He believes that other world leaders can convince Trump that his retrograde climate policy is not a good idea politically. (First, though, those leaders are planning to convince Syrian president Bashar Assad to adopt Scandinavian-style social democracy.)

Meanwhile, Scientific American and a whole slew of scientists want you to sign a change.org petition calling on Trump to make the United States a leader in the climate struggle (and to be sure to use the hashtag #ActOnClimate.) I expect, though, that you’ll be at least as effective if you start your own petition urging Chevrolet to stop building SUVs and make bicycles instead.

Trump of course ignored these entreaties, instead demanding from the Energy Department the names of all personnel who have been involved in efforts to reduce carbon emissions. We can assume that he didn't make the request because he wants to give those employees raises.

It’s time to stop petitioning Trump and take the climate fight elsewhere. If saving civilization from an untimely heat death actually does depend on whether or not the U.S. president can be convinced to take appropriate action, then we were already in deep trouble long before 2016. Policy steps taken by current and past presidents, as well as campaign promises made by Hillary Clinton, all fell far, far short of cutting emissions as much as is needed to avert disaster. They didn’t even get us to the starting line.

Ambitions for federal action on greenhouse emissions have sunk to such depths that, according to a climate-conscious writer for The Hill, “our best hope” is, of all people, Ivanka. Even if she were to convince Donald not to scuttle the Paris Agreement on climate, we’d still be in the realm of futility, talking about worldwide carbon-cutting pledges that would lead to a world-shattering global temperature increase of 2.7 to 3.5 degrees Celsius (and that’s in the unlikely event that all countries live up to their commitments under the agreement; it's likely to be worse.)

Will Donald make it easier to get radical?

Instead of begging our megalomaniac-elect to save the world, we should follow the examples of the Standing Rock Sioux, the #ShutItDown activists, the city of San Francisco, and others who are confronting the ecological crisis where it’s happening.

Arguing for that in an invigorating December 1 Portland Rising Tide essay, Arnold Shroder noted that the opening for building a bigger, more radical, more effective movement may be wider now than it was before November 8. He wrote,

“Federal intransigence on climate is such that most plausible scenarios for significant near-term emissions reductions involve states, counties, and municipalities—who have managed [until now] to convince themselves that meaningful climate action is the job of someone with more power, like the federal government and the United Nations—to find diverse and creative ways to dismantle their fair share of the fossil fuel economy.”

However, Shroder continued, most local and state officials are still going to act only when pushed to act, so intense public pressure and bold actions will be needed: “Direct action can influence the behavior of political entities which are capable of significantly impeding Trump’s agenda. This is true in many respects. The fact that so much of the political establishment, even on the right, is averse to Trump likely creates unique opportunities. . . . [I]nstitutional collaboration at all levels is necessary for any of this madman’s visions to become reality, and in a way that has perhaps never been true of a US president, it isn’t at all clear where he will and will not receive that collaboration.”

He points to the defiant resolution passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a month after the election (and the huge street demonstrations that followed), in which they declared that the city will “never back down” in its support of climate action, immigrant protection, Black Lives Matter, women’s rights, LBGTQ rights, workers’ rights, and universal health care, adding, “We will not be bullied by threats to revoke our federal funding.” Cities large and small across the country have declared similar intentions.

Shroder too urges that activists who are focused primarily on climate and the fossil-fuel menace join forces with those fighting back against racism, mass incarceration, and deportation; those resisting the growing impunity of police with their right to harass and shoot at will; those fighting for workers’ rights, and people carrying out many other struggles. We’re going to need demonstrations more frequent and even larger than those that helped stop Washington’s war on Vietnam.

Getting over Paris

This better path now open to the climate movement—that is, instead of asking Washington or corporations or the investor class, “Please do this,” to tell them, “We’re gonna do this and this and this, no matter what you say or do”—can energize people at a time when prospects are seeming grimmest. But most people or groups, even climate-aware ones, won’t be roused to action unless prominent figures—not just celebrities like Gore and DiCaprio, but all national and local climate leaders—make clear the scale of the emergency and stress that incremental emissions reductions are doomed to fail.

The need for quick, urgent action is not a hard case to make. Despite allowing the global temperature to rise by two and a half to three and a half degrees, the Paris agreement declares that its eventual goal is to hold the rise to a degree and a half. That’s because all of the realistic projections now show that even the old goal, a two-degree rise, will mean catastrophe. Achieving the 1.5-degree goal will require eliminating all greenhouse emissions within the next 15 years, and sooner in the case of heavy emitters like the United States.  

That’s a very tall order. But one benefit of 2017’s horrific alt-reality will be that activists and organizations won’t be bound by the political horse-trading that under a Clinton or Sanders administration would have meant settling for incremental, far-too-slow emissions reductions. Now they will be free to push hard, out there in America, for the immediate, steep drop in the use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse-gas sources that is so essential.

But they will also have to be publicly candid about a hard consequence of such deep cuts: that they will require America and other high-emissions nations get by on far less energy from all sources.

Why’s that? Well, suppose we overthrow this regime soon and get serious. Building wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal infrastructure will be essential to sustaining civilization, but a rapid buildup will require huge energy inputs. And we will have to be abandoning fossil fuels at the same time we are constructing renewable energy infrastructure. The concurrence of those two crash campaigns will leave far less net energy to be consumed for doing everything else we need to do.

So the transition will be tough, but what about the long run? Can renewable sources eventually supply as much energy as we now consume, so that America can eventually return to today’s profligate lifestyle? Some research reaches optimistic conclusions, but more hard-nosed studies that take all limits and pitfalls into account find that once we start dealing with on-the-ground realities, we will have to accept that the energy abundance we’ve enjoyed in this short-lived fossil-fuel era won't be repeated in a renewable-energy future.

The primary limitation we will face in building renewable energy capacity is its higher requirement for energy input per unit of energy generated. That can be ten to twenty times larger than was required for mining and pumping the coal, oil, and gas with which today's world was built. That leaves much less net energy to be used by society at large.

Second, we will obtain less and less energy per unit of energy invested as time goes on. That's because we are already exploiting the best locations for wind, solar, and biomass power; we’ll be moving on to successively less windy, sunny, productive places.

Furthermore, some of the wind and solar energy generated, maybe much of it, will have to be stored using batteries, hydrogen, compressed air, or other means. It will then have to be reconverted either to electricity or liquid fuels and transmitted from often remote regions to places where people and businesses are concentrated. All of those processes will severely shrink the net energy available to society, because much energy is expended during both conversion and transmission.

Finally, all production of wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass energy has an ecological impact on the landscapes where it occurs. So if we are to halt our degradation and destruction of the Earth's natural ecosystems, it will be necessary to declare some large areas off-limits to the energy sector.

Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery of Monash University in Australia have been examining scientists' projections of global potential for renewable energy generation, and pointing out all of these limitations. They have concluded that future renewable output “could be far below present energy use.”

The bottom line: we will have to redesign our economy and society to get by with a permanently lower input of energy and other resources. This will require a World War II-scale mobilization, something that obviously isn’t going to happen in a Trump administration; however, if we mount emergency mobilizations in communities, counties, and states around the country, along with open political rebellion in defense of the Earth, we could start cutting emissions and blazing a trail for nationwide climate mobilization at the same time we are striving for rapid regime change.

A new nation conceived . . .

Slashing energy consumption will be a hard sell in America unless a majority of the country understands clearly the dreadful consequences of not doing it. So in reassuring people that lower energy consumption won’t mean the end of the world, some international comparisons might be useful. It's just as important to emphasize that lower energy consumption won't be the end of the world. On this point, so international comparisons might be useful.

For example, consider scenarios in which we reduce the net energy available to run American society (total energy, from all sources) by 50, 75, or 85 percent. Next we could ask which countries today have similar per-capita consumption of energy. (Since no one can really be sure how much we’ll have to reduce, I chose those percentages arbitrarily before looking at the data, in order to avoid any charges that I was cherry-picking percentages or countries.)

There are four countries that consume about half (45 to 55 percent) as much energy per capita as Americans do: France, Japan, Slovakia, and Slovenia. So clearly, a well-functioning society with good quality of life can easily run on that kind of energy input. (By the way, all four of those countries have much lower income inequality scores and higher human development indices than we do.)

But unfortunately, any realistic examination of our predicament tells us that we are going to have to cut energy use by a lot more than half.

The group of countries that consume about a quarter (22 to 28 percent) as much energy per capita as the United States is more of a mixed bag: Bosnia, Croatia, Cyprus, Mexico, Montenegro, and Thailand. (Hong Kong is within this range as well, but it’s not a country.) All but Mexico have better scores for income inequality than the United States. Among 150 nations, the ranks of these six “25 percenters” on the human development scale run from around 30^th best (Croatia and Cyprus; compare with USA at no. 28) to near 70^th (Mexico and Thailand.)

Some of these countries would clearly be better places to live than others (based on my experience, I’d go for Croatia any day!), but the larger point is that consuming 75 percent less energy than Americans do doesn’t require adopting the lifestyle of the Neolithic.

If it turns out that we will have to go further and get by on about 85 percent less energy per capita, our present-day examples are Armenia, Botswana, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Georgia, Jamaica, Jordan, and Panama. Lower living standards for sure, but wide variation in quality of life. The main problem making some of these countries, and some of those listed above, less-than-desirable places to live is not that they are energy deprived. It’s that a large share of their populations endure material deprivation while a privileged few hoard much of the wealth and power. (Note that such conditions clearly exist in today’s United States.)

This is not to say that by going on a strict energy diet, the United States would come to resemble present-day France or Bosnia or Ecuador or any other country. We’d still be America, but a thoroughly transformed America—maybe better, maybe worse. Done right, the scaleback would force us to stop expending energy on all kinds of wasteful, socially harmful, or ecologically destructive activities. We would ensure that everyone has sufficient access to the shrinking energy pie, along with a good livelihood and good quality of life.

To achieve that transformation it will be necessary, in Marx and Engels’ terms, to expropriate the expropriators. The 99 percent will have to seize wealth and political/economic power from the 1 percent. But in a world with a ceiling on available energy, there will also need to be a shift of resources from the top half to the bottom half of the population if there’s to be sufficiency for all.     

No more soft pedaling

Up to this point, the mainstream climate movement has been highly allergic to talking about energy reductions of 75 percent or more, let alone the economic transformation that would entail. Some have refused to let go of the idea that the “American way of life” can be sustained; others have known all too well what was required, but soft pedaled their message for fear of scaring the wider public away from climate action—a maneuver writer Chris Shaw has decried as the “not in front of the children” strategy.

I have heard that argument made ad nauseum in another, no less condescending form: “We have to let people have hope!” OK, fine. In the perilous years ahead, I’m going to respond to that nostrum this way: “I agree. So start asking your readers or audiences or neighbors this: “What gives you more hope: broiling ourselves on the High setting under Trump, cutting emissions gradually so as to broil ourselves on Medium under the Paris Agreement, or turning off the broiler and living with a lot less material abundance but in a more just, more fair world?”

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing and, with Paul Cox, of How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia. Write him at t.stan {at} cox.net

by Stan Cox

A Review of Brian Tokar's book Toward Climate Justice: Perspectives on the Climate Crisis and Social Justice (Porsgrunn, Norway: New Compass Press, 2014).

This expanded edition of Brian Tokar's book is a concise, valuable summing-up of the most important issue facing humanity today: how to stop runaway climate chaos while at the same time achieving justice in the distribution of economic power, resources, and the hard work of ecological renewal, both within and among countries.

The first edition of this book was published in 2010, and, Tokar notes, a lot has changed since then. Like the original, the 2014 edition starts with a description of the predicament facing the people of Earth and a short history of the hapless, doomed-from-the-start international climate negotiations that have dragged on now for more than a quarter-century. There follows the heart of the book, starting with a recap of the evolution of the climate justice movement since the term "climate justice" was coined in 1999.

The movement, writes Tokar, has been led by three prominent currents: "diverse indigenous and other land-based movements"; an existing movement for environmental justice in the United States, led by African-American, Latino, and Native American communities who have long been disproportionately assaulted by ecological degradation of all kinds; and, in Europe, the global justice and anti-globalization movements. He cites a host of organizations and movements, including the Climate Justice Alliance, the Grassroots Global Justice Alliance, La Via Campesina, the Labor Network for Sustainability, and Rising Tide. These and other groups have challenged the ossified, corporate-friendly system of intergovernmental climate negotiations. Tokar describes how in Durban in 2011 and Warsaw in 2013, Occupy- and Arab-Spring-style protests outside the climate talks challenged the traditionally docile approach of "civil society" groups that had joined the discussions going on inside. He mentions the huge, historic People's Climate March of September 2014, which happened soon after he completed his book.

Tokar takes note of an unmistakable trend: "Today, the leading edge of climate justice organizing is often with those who are challenging the expansion of extreme forms of fossil fuel extraction around the world." He cites the struggles against mountaintop removal by coal companies, tar-sand mining, extension of the Keystone XL pipeline, fracking for natural gas, and export terminals for liquefied natural gas, adding, "It remains to be seen whether these efforts contain the seeds of a fully unified opposition to extreme energy projects throughout North America." Nevertheless, they are having, he believes, "an essential catalytic effect on the broader climate movement."

He sums up the climate justice movement's current situation this way: "We need to envision a lower-consumption world of decentralized, clean energy and politically powered communities. Like the antinuclear activists of 30 years ago, who halted the first wave of nuclear power in the U.S., while articulating an inspiring vision of directly democratic, solar-powered towns and neighborhoods, we need to again dramatize the positive, even utopian, possibilities for a post-petroleum, post-mega-mall world," fulfilling "the promise that reorienting societies toward a renewed harmony with nature can help spur a revolutionary transformation of our world."

But in the process of working for such a world, it will be necessary to beat down, hard and often, what Tokar calls "false solutions," most prominently nuclear power, shamelessly being pushed by lapsed ecological thinkers Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame and Gaia theory's James Lovelock; "clean" coal; biofuels, which Tokar rightly renames "agrofuels"; geoengineering; and the most sinister scheme of all, markets in emissions. He puts to rest any idea that trading of carbon emissions and offsets can accomplish anything but the preservation of business-as-usual.

Tokar gives a thorough, and thoroughly depressing, tour of the Congressional circus that surrounded the ill-fated 2009-10 climate bill. The centerpiece of the bill was a carbon trading scheme that, Tokar writes, would allow companies "to postpone their own greenhouse gas reductions by buying offsets," a "Trojan Horse provision of the climate bill that threatened future climate progress." The bill also would have barred EPA from regulating emissions of greenhouse gases. Advised by the notorious Environmental Defense Fund, lawmakers designed the climate bill to be as capitalism-friendly as they could, in the hope that would be acceptable to the economic powers that be and their servants in Congress. But despite that, Tokar notes, Capitol Hill was swarmed by more than 2300 lobbyists, and the bill was festooned with numerous "blatant giveaways" to the fossil-fuel and nuclear industries. Even with all that, the bill was too radical for majority in Congress, and it sank.

Tokar writes,

"Today, it is clearer than ever that a much more forward-looking, even revolutionary approach is necessary to reduce climate-destabilizing pollution and achieve meaningful steps toward a fossil-fuel-free economy. Such a transition threatens the global economy's most powerful corporate empires; indeed the very shape of modern capitalism is a product of fossil-fuel expansion and is sustained by the myth of 'cheap' energy. Not only is the evolution of the economic system historically inseparable from the exploitation of fossil fuels, but, as a recent report from the UK's Corner House research group explains, 'the entire contemporary system of making profits out of labor depended absolutely on cheap fossil carbon.' To meaningfully challenge this system requires not only a resolute opposition to the expansion of fossil-fuel infrastructure, but a rethinking of the underlying assumptions and beliefs of our society . . ."

(A year and a half after publication of Tokar's book, the global climate talks in Paris lived up to the very low expectations that climate-justice activists had had. The 2015 Paris Agreement encourages but does not require the rich nations to collectively provide $100 billion annually by 2020 for climate mitigation and adaptation in less developed countries. Prospects are dim that any such amount will be forthcoming. Meanwhile, the agreement quashed more explicitly the notion of compensation for past and future climatic disasters, stating that its language on loss and damage “does not involve or provide a basis for any liability or compensation.”)

In the final two chapters, on social ecology and utopian aspirations, Tokar lays out his vision of how the revolutionary transformation can happen. As the leading figure in the social ecology discipline/movement—which was conceived and championed for decades by the late Murray Bookchin—Tokar is the person to listen to on this subject. He writes, "Bookchin's reconstructive outlook is rooted in direct democracy, in confederations of empowered communities challenging the hegemony of capital and the state, and in restoring a sense of reciprocity to economic relationships, which are ultimately subordinated to the needs of the community."

Tokar is by no means naïve about the prospects for building such a world. He presents a long list of questions that remain to be answered: Can this transformation be realized in the face of terrible obstacles? Can local efforts coalesce into a "movement of movements? Can we challenge entrenched power without suffering burnout on one hand or co-optation on the other? Can a movement for social-ecological renewal emerge to create a genuinely transformed political order? This is where he thinks ecological breakdown could actually offer help: "Perhaps the climate crisis, along with the continuing meltdown of the neoliberal economic order of recent decades, can indeed help us envision a transition toward a more harmonious, more humane, and more ecological way of life."

That hope was echoed in Naomi Klein's This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs the Climate, published around the same time as Tokar's book. Klein wrote, “Rather than the ultimate expression of the shock doctrine—a frenzy of new resource grabs and repression—climate change can be a People’s Shock, a blow from below. It can disperse power into the hands of the many rather than consolidating it in the hands of the few, and radically expand the commons rather than auctioning it off in pieces.” In short, Klein believes, climate change can deliver “a civilizational wakeup call.”

Even as we recall that, historically, ecological disasters have rarely prompted movements for total transformation of societies, we must hope that Tokar and Klein are right in their predictions—that there's something different about global climate chaos. But as both authors urge, the climate can't make a revolution for us; we must do that ourselves. In that spirit, Tokar concludes his book with Bookchin's observation that "If we don't do the impossible, we shall be faced with the unthinkable."