In dialogue: Rethinking climate change and catastrophe

How Should We Think About the Future in the Face of Climate Change?

For many of us, imagining the next hundred years may conjure cataclysmic images of manmade climate change and its consequences: widespread natural disasters, food insecurity, and mass migrations, to name a few. Unable to parse through conflicting messages of how one should think, react, and behave in the face of imminent doom, we may often surrender to feelings of avoidance or apathy. This month, in pursuit of clarity and advice, we gathered some of our authors and asked the following question: How should we think about the future in the face of climate change? Their perspectives offer us the tools to collectively rethink catastrophe in order to generate alternative possibilities of hope, action, or simple awareness regarding the planet and its beings.

Emily Huddart Kennedy | Eco-Types: Five Ways of Caring about the Environment

Contemplating the question brings tears to my eyes. It is a challenge for me to think much at all, because I am overwhelmed with feeling. And so, I answer, we should create quiet spaces to feel the future in the face of climate change.

In the present, climate change manifests in a curious sort of accounting in my life: what are the emissions from this or that meal? How can I use less gas to go about the tasks of the week? Have I taken more flights this year than I should have? Of course, when the air fills with smoke from wildfires hundreds of kilometers from my home, I am jolted from this rational calculus. But in the present, I think about climate change often. I think about how to lessen my own contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions, and I think about what elected representatives are doing to lessen my country’s emissions. On reflection, I’m surprised by how seldom I feel climate change in the present.

“Why should we encourage ourselves to feel this loss so profoundly? Because it feels honest and important.”

There is so much around me that I love and am deeply invested in: my children, my niece and nephew, the forest around my home and its denizens, the air I breathe, the water I drink and swim in—and the creatures in that water. This is only a partial list of what comes quickly and immediately to mind when I consider how much loss climate change will exact. Climate change casts the future as a morass of loss.

Instead of distracting ourselves from the pain of this question, we should find moments to confront it. We should imagine a future with more frequent and severe storms and fires, with warming oceans, with flora and fauna struggling at the brink of their tolerance for safe conditions to live. We should contemplate the many species that we love having to witness and endure this intensity and scope of loss. We should feel, deeply feel, our own responses to that future.

Why should we encourage ourselves to feel this loss so profoundly? Because it feels honest and important. Confronting the pain of a future of loss reminded me of how much I love the world. It prompted me to remember the statistical miracle of our blue earth and its glorious diversity of ecosystems. It reminded me to be grateful that I see the stars at night, hear birdsong, see swordferns and cedar trees, swim in the Pacific Ocean, and simply live in a world that enables me to breathe and eat and drink. There are more theoretically sophisticated answers I could provide about the ways in which our emotions can connect us to others and motivate deeper engagement in climate-friendly practices. But that’s not what I want to emphasize here.

Aside from the odd volcanic eruption or a slight shift in the Earth’s orbit, humans cause climate change. By burning fossil fuels to generate power and produce food, clothing, and other consumables, and doing so at a profligate rate, we have likely irreversibly altered the climate. Trees convert carbon dioxide into oxygen, and maybe the fossil fuel industry will develop carbon capture and storage to store some of its own emissions, but there is not enough sequestration of carbon happening today to safeguard the future. We are dooming ourselves and future generations to loss and suffering every day that we continue to burn fossil fuels. We should feel the pain of a future that is shaped by our present.

Henry Shue | The Pivotal Generation: Why We Have a Moral Responsibility to Slow Climate Change Right Now

Delay is the new denial. Fossil fuel interests—owners of coal, oil, gas, pipelines, refineries, and their massive supporting infrastructure, including their enablers among banks and asset managers—are attempting to divert the attention of concerned citizens by announcing vague distant goals like “net zero 2050” while planning to continue business as usual for as many decades as possible. [1] Increases in renewable energy and its infrastructure, including most importantly an enlarged and restructured electricity grid, are essential. But because it is the carbon emissions from fossil fuels that keep making climate change worse, simply piling renewable energy on top of carbon energy does nothing in itself to slow climate change. Renewable energy must substitute—not be added to—carbon energy, which means that the production of carbon energy must be cut back immediately and sharply. This is what fossil fuel interests are adamantly refusing to do, all while pretending that they are acting in the public interest so that decisive action against them will be delayed as long as possible.

“This is the critical decade in human history for the protection of our planet’s climate. We must be vigilantly alert for false pretexts for delay.”

Rapidly worsening climate change requires disciplined thinking that is not distracted by the elaborate deceptions and trickery of entrenched fossil fuel interests. Above all, we must face the fact that, contrary to what they seem to promise, oil and gas companies are devoting more than 95% of their capital investment to increased production through continuing exploration for new sources and the drilling of new wells.[2] The business model to which they cling makes climate change worse. In order to cover up this fact, the carbon industries engage in multiple diversions.

SDGs, Targets, and Indicators

1. SDGs addressed or connected to the issues highlighted in the article:

   • SDG 13: Climate Action
   • SDG 15: Life on Land

2. Specific targets under those SDGs based on the article’s content:

   • SDG 13.1: Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards and natural disasters
   • SDG 15.1: Ensure the conservation, restoration, and sustainable use of terrestrial and inland freshwater ecosystems and their services

3. Indicators mentioned or implied in the article:

   • Emissions from meals
   • Gas usage
   • Flights taken
   • Elected representatives’ actions on emissions reduction
   • Frequency and severity of storms and fires
   • Warming oceans
   • Loss of flora and fauna
   • Responses to loss and pain of future loss
   • Carbon capture and storage (CCS)
   • Carbon dioxide removal (CDR)
   • Emissions reduction
   • Offset projects
   • Renewable energy substitution for carbon energy

Behold! This splendid article springs forth from the wellspring of knowledge, shaped by a wondrous proprietary AI technology that delved into a vast ocean of data, illuminating the path towards the Sustainable Development Goals. Remember that all rights are reserved by SDG Investors LLC, empowering us to champion progress together.

Source: press.princeton.edu

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